Old School Role Playing: Phantasie

One of the "holy grails" of early computer gaming was to bring convincing (albeit unlicensed) renditions of Dungeons & Dragons-style role playing games to the personal computer.  The role of dungeon master was often fun but stressful, requiring meticulous planning before each session and convincing improvisation during it, and using the computer to handle the campaign as well as the dice rolls and other tedious calculations held tremendous appeal.  Early attempts like Temple of Apshai were often ambitious but flawed, but Richard Garriott's Ultima found the right balance of automation and complexity, and the genre was doing great business by the mid-1980's.  Wargame publisher Strategic Simulations, Inc. soon entered the market with its own Phantasie line of RPG games, created by Douglas Winston Wood.  I first encountered the game in its later Atari ST incarnation, and will use it as the reference version for this discussion.

The Phantasie series was successful, but did not last beyond the 1980's, as SSI began publishing the official Dungeons & Dragons line of computer games and had no further need for reasonable facsimiles.  As Asian publishers began deriving their own style of RPG from Western forerunners, the franchise saw adaptations of the first three games for Japanese platforms, along with one final Phantasie IV entry that was never published in the US.  And then the Phantasie series vanished from the scene, without so much as a fan-fiction to its name today.

But the game is worth looking at to see where the state of the RPG art was at the time.  Debuting in 1985 on the Apple II, it reached later systems in an updated, audiovisually enhanced, mouse-driven 2.0 form that was much easier to play efficiently (except for the IBM PC version, which remained a keyboard-driven, 4-color CGA experience right through Phantasie III: The Wrath of Nikademus.)

The game interface is still menu-based in the 2.0 version, but navigation is simplified by the mouse -- the town screen serves as a functional hub, allowing players to manage their party members, spells, equipment, and finances.  Unlike many later RPGs, the player is not directly represented as a member of the party -- while it's common to name a lead character after oneself, any character or even the entire party can be wiped out.  The player's intelligence always survives to build up a new party.

Once equipped, the party leaves town to explore the world map, and soon encounters simply animated monsters.  Inspired by pencil-and-paper RPGs, the party has quite a number of options, though it's usually most fun to just Fight:

No D&D-like RPG would be complete without dungeons, of course.  Phantasie provides schematic overhead views that are auto-mapped as the party explores, very much like the grid-paper maps of yore.  There's no graphical variety in the dungeons, and nothing fancy like the Apshai series' line-of-sight rendering, but there are points of interest with text descriptions and push-button options to provide atmosphere and challenge.  It's a simple approach, but it's enough to implement puzzles, treasures and scripted encounters to keep the action lively.  And when the party leaves the dungeon, the map can be saved so return visits will be more straightforward.

When the party has been wiped out, its members are transported to the astral plane, where a demon (his head, anyway) decrees each member's fate.  A character may be destroyed, or raised from the dead as a creepy but capable zombie warrior.

Control returns to the player, who can continue with new recruits to the party, or revert to the (single) saved game.  And so it goes.  Eventually the party faces down the Big Bad at the end of the journey, and much clanging and whooshing ensues as the final battle plays out.

Phantasie remains very playable today, though it has lots of annoying habits like resetting every party member's battle default to PARRY mode, losing track of "extra" gold pieces when the spoils are divided among party members, and randomly throwing deadly Black Knights at novice adventurers, wiping the party out in a round or two.  The graphics are simple and the story is standard RPG fare, with no modern-style character development or cutscenes at all, but SSI's pre-D&D series is still worth a look for historical purposes.