YMMV / Phantasy Star II

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Were the Earthmen truly evil, or were they brainwashed by Dark Force to destroy Algo?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The fight with Dark Force is this in the localization. You open a chest in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, and you told you opened a box that contained Dark Force. After you defeat it, it's never mentioned again. In the original Japanese version, however, Dark Force is brought up by the Earthmen, who reveal that this one had settled within their hearts, explaining its presence in their ship and revealing its relation to the main plot.
  • The Earthmen themselves. They're never forshadowed or alluded to, and the game just springs the fact that they're responsible for everything at the very last moment, right before rolling the credits.
  • The old men in the town of Zema. They all say either "What?" or "What the...?". This is never commented on or explained within the game.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: There are a total of 7 party members who can join Rolf on his journey, although only 3 can accompany him at a time. First third of the game? The best team is Nei, Rudo, and Amy, who are also the first 3 characters that join up. Second third? Keep Rudo and Amy, replace Nei with Kain, whose skills are strong against the new robotic enemies that are literally everywhere. Final third? Keep Rudo and Amy, and take your pick for the last slot.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Special mention goes to the Blasters in the early dungeons of the game. In Nido Tower, they're only found on the top floor in groups of two. They can kill a character at full-health in only 2-3 hits, while it takes a couple rounds of all 3 of your characters attacking just to kill one of them. Your best option is to run, but if that fails, it's Game Over and doing the whole dungeon all over again. They show up again in the Biosystems Lab, but by that point you've gained several levels, bought better equipment, and had a fourth character join up, so they're difficult but not an immediate death-sentence.
  • Slugmesses hit rather hard, have high HP, and are typically encountered in big groups, often alongside sleep-inducing Spitkills. What truly makes them Demonic Spiders is that they can make copies of themselves that can immediately act in the same turn, even making another copy. Their tendency to repeatedly replicate themselves usually makes fights against them take much longer than most battles, and a longer fight means your party's going to get beat up even more. They're threatening enough that one might consider using Hugh just to keep them under control.
  • Generally speaking, the robotic enemies that replace Biomonsters on Mota after the events at Climatrol. Some like the ones that patrol the overworld aren't too bad, but the dams are home to some very nasty robots that boast heavy damage, high durability, party-wide attacks, or any combination of the three, and each successive dam features even stronger robots. Oh, and they show up right after you lose your Crutch Character.
  • Late in the game during the Nei equipment arc, you'll start facing magical enemies in the penultimate dungeons, several of whom hit harder than anything you've faced thus far. Thankfully, their defenses aren't as bad as that of the robots, so no one should have trouble damaging them, but the fact that some can hit Rudo with full laconian armor for upwards of 50 HP in a single strike is a serious problem. Plus, their HP is still high, so expect to eat quite a few of these attacks before they go down. Don't forget your sole user of Nares is also one of your slowest party members, so good luck saving an injured ally in an emergency. Also, unlike the robots, you don't get any party members who specialize against them.
• Difficulty Spike: While the game is already hard enough, things suddenly become much more difficult once you start facing robots in battle after completing roughly one-third of the game. Most of them hit harder and are much more resistant to damage than the biomonsters you were (finally) destroying with ease due to being sufficiently geared / leveled. The shops don't sell anything new, and you won't be coming across any new ones for quite a while, which means that your only resort is to find better upgrades in the dams. If this wasn't bad enough, it comes right after you've lost your heaviest-hitting character. Good luck. Levelling up Kain helps, as he has machine specific techniques.
  • And it further spikes once more when you first reach Dezoris about two-thirds through the game. The spaceport isn't too difficult, though rarely you may face a few powerful robot types there that you haven't previously. Once you step foot on the surface, you'll inevitably be confronted by biomonsters far higher in power than anything that was on Motavia. If you had swapped out Hugh because he was useless against the robots, he's now very underlevelled, and can't help you the way he did before. They are the easy ones... the dungeons have even more powerful biomonsters that are capable of decimating your party and often attack in groups, much like the Blaster example from very early in the game. Also, depending on where you are, robots may show up from time to time which have absurdly high HP and defense and can take a very long time to kill, but usually aren't as threatening as the biomonsters.
• Fanon: Rolf's often given the surname "Landale", but it's not explicitly canon.
• Game-Breaker: Hugh, who was a Low-Tier Letdown in the original due to his focus on status attacks and his sucky equipment options, was given a special attack in Phantasy Star Generation 2 that can paralyze everything for multiple rounds. Yes, everything really means EVERYTHING... including the final bosses.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Whistles during the dam arc. They are one of the few robotic enemies that aren't Demonic Spiders, but they have a very high encounter rate in water tiles (including the empty canals leading to the dams) and show up in big groups that are hard to quickly kill. They only serve to wear away your resources with constant Scratch Damage before you can face the proper threats lurking in the dams.
  • Robots may turn into this once you reach Dezo. By this point, your party can start standing up to them decently even without Kain, but their defenses are so high that killing them still takes a long time. This is also the point where Kain starts to fall off a bit due to his anti-robot specialization, as more threatening biological enemies start showing up; swapping someone else in might make fights against them easier at the cost of making robots even more annoying.
• Good Bad Bugs: There is an incredibly powerful and incredibly useful glitch known as the "inventory glitch". By emptying out a character's inventory and then going to storage, opening the storage inventory on a party member with items, then immediately going back one menu and checking the storage of the character with no items, you can access a glitched storage menu with blank items. This glitched storage menu lets you move the cursor below the boundaries of the item menu and retrieve items based on the hex value of the slot associated with the cursor's position, allowing you to essentially conjure up any item in the game out of thin air while modifying the stats of your party members to give them hundreds of thousands of EXP and stats well into the tens of thousands.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Before Generation 2, Hugh was disliked for being completely useless, due to a focus on Useless Useful Status Effects, poor equipment and nothing useful against robots.
  • Shir boasts some of the worst combat capabilities of anyone in your party, and her only truly useful ability is her stealing gimmick. However, even this is not that great; while she's capable of stealing some very useful items, when she decides to steal is completely random and rather rare, and what she steals is, again, random and dependent on her level. Once she does steal something, you're forced to trek all the way back to Rolf's house to find her and pick up the goods. All this makes it hard to justify the tedious process of going home and swapping her into your party whenever you want to go shopping and hope to steal something. It's made even worse when you get to Dezo's towns as the trip between them and Rolf's house is more complicated. She does learn some pretty impressive offensive spells at high levels, pushing her into Lethal Joke Character territory, but even then, she's not worth using compared to other party members who require less investment and are less dependent on TP.
• Narm: The remake's version of the ending scene is as epic as the original version, except for Rolf's face at the end... fans have joked that he looks constipated rather than ready to fight.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The dungeon designs, which are ridiculously labyrinthine, and exacerbated by the foreground constantly obscuring your view. Coupled with the high encounter rate and slow walking speed, they'll drive you insane unless you've got some maps showing you where to go. Evidently, Sega agreed, as the English Genesis version came packaged with its own strategy guide.
  • The dungeon layouts are exarcerbated by the game's camera which, unlike almost every other top-down JRPG ever made, does not track to keep the party in the center of the screen, only starting to scroll when you're less than a quarter of the screen's width from the edge. This makes it almost impossible to see where you're actually going in the labyrinthine mazes, leading to you wasting a lot of time blundering down meaningless dead-ends you couldn't see until you were practically smacking into the wall.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • "A Prologue" is a soundalike of Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part IX)".
  • "Pleasure Stream" is pretty much an instrumental version of the opening theme of Gunbuster.
  • "My Home" is the chorus from The Vapors' "Turning Japanese".
  • "Secret Ways" resembles the opening to Deep Purple's "Child in Time".
• That One Achievement: Reviving Nei in the remake. Even before starting it, it requires a completed saved game of Generation 1 and beating the game once, then making a clear save file to use for a second playthrough. Then when the process starts, it requires unlocking every line of dialogue up until the point in Climatrol where she dies. The process includes speaking to every NPC multiple times, speaking to certain ones in a certain order, having and not having certain party members at the right time. There's no way the game will tell you if you're on the right track, if anything is missed, or if you even succeeded until the scene in the clone lab.
• That One Boss: Dark Force. It has an unblockable mind control attack that can make whoever it hits unable to do anything but stand there in despair and let himself be slaughtered. Rolf's Infinity +1 Sword has the power to dispell the effect, but it kicks in at random and it's possible for half your party to get killed before the sword clears your party's minds. Fans almost unanimously regard it as a harder than the game's Final Boss.
• That One Level: Ikuto, the dungeon containing the Neishot and Neislasher. In order to proceed, you must fall into pits that lead to lower levels containing more pits leading to lower levels containing even more pits. You cannot see what's at a pit's bottom and most of the time, it'll be another pit dropping you all the way to the bottom (past the treasure chests) requiring you to start all over again.
  • Honestly, any dungeon once you reach Climatrol, but especially from the dams onward, can turn into this, especially if you somehow lack access to a map/walkthrough.
• The Woobie: If you take her backstory in her prequel text adventure to heart, Nei is the biggest Woobie in the series. She's been threatened, discriminated against and nearly lynched due to her being part human, part biomonster. She has a very short lifespan compared to a human. And when she finds a new home with Rolf, he's sent on a mission that will ultimately cost her her life.