Phantasy Star was an incredibly impressive game. Given it's on a handheld some limitations were to expected, but almost all of the problems have nothing to do with it.
1. The encounter rate is insane. Phantasy Star would trigger fairly fast, sometimes 10-30 seconds, lowered by acquiring a vehicle.
Here, literally every 2 feet, sometimes less than a second, enemies will spawn over and over, it's a pretty awful attempt at artificially extending playtime. The option to run away exists, but it is so frequent almost 50-60% of dungeon time is jumping into fights you don't want to engage in, like a buzzing fly annoying the player. It reaches a point that the dungeon music can only get out two beats over and over.
It's terrible.
2. Sci-fi elements
Phantasy Star mixed sci-fi with fantasy elements, akin to something like Starwars. Sure, you had swords and shields and ancient Greek lore where you fight Medusa, but you also had space ports, interplanetary travel, drilling through mountains and flying a hover jet.
Almost all of this is stripped to make it feel like a generic JRPG, basically dragons quest. Almost nothing here is futuristic and bringing the character (Alis) into the story, redesigning her, really only serves to take a dump on the original, immeasurably superior game.
3. Boring enviroments
Phantasy Star had 3 widely different environments with widely different methods of exploration, both conditional and optional.
What we have in this game, is a flat, green level interchangeable with Zelda, with a token vehicle hodgepodge in because Phantasy Star, rather than any significant purpose. Every town, dungeon and area feel interchangeable.
4. Boring story
Phantasy Star had a basic revenge story, with almost no characterization, it's an old game. But it used mythology in it's story and vague story-telling through NPC's to piece the world together.
None of that here. NPC's in this game in comparison to Phantasy Star have nothing interesting to say 90% of the time.
5. Grind
You win this game by grinding, saving up and buying weapons. This was also the case with the original game, and most games of the era, but here is it very transparent. The game has obviose patches were it expected you to mindlessly spam through menus to get to the next mindless grind patch.
6. No talking
One of the interesting things about Phantasy Star was the ability to talk to enemies instead of attacking. None of that here.
7. Terrible dungeon system
So basically, light has a timer, and it expects you to spam buy torches.
In practice this wouldn't be so bad if you were reasonably solving a maze against the clock.
But it devolves into seeing the map for 5 seconds (which is simplistic and obvious compared to PS1 3D dungeons) while being spammed relentlessly.
What was logical in Phantasy Star because anti-fun in Gaiden. The game puts up barriers, almost MMO like to extent 5 hour game-time.
Coming off the excellence of Phantasy Star to this, it's easy to see why it's forgotten, it wasn't just that it originally wasn't released in the West, it's not a Phantasy Star game to begin with. It deserves to be obscure.
