Phantasy Star II (SEGA Genesis)

You don't regain all your HP when you level up.

In the city there is a building with a green cross where all party members get healed for 17 'mesetas'. Going to a city or entering your home doesn't regenerate HP.

You can press C during combat at any time to pause and enter the ORDERS menu.

If your party members die, it's a hard game over with no continues. Remember to save in the city.

Resurrecting a dead team member in the city costs 40 meseta.

Nei can only use Bars as weapons.

Finally I got around to this famous JRPG. You control characters on the map in cardinal directions. I didn't find a map function. Combat works by assigning orders to your party members, and then letting them execute the orders automatically. In the beginning, the game feels a bit like an idle game. The combat seems to take place in cyberspace, I'm not sure what's going on there.

Running away seems quite easy in the beginning.

After going to the half destroyed town outside the starting area, I went back to my house and the new character Rudolf Steiner showed up.

I transferred by save game from RetroArch to the MiSTer, and continued playing. I was feeling confident after grinding a lot of levels, and entered SHURE, a dungeon to the north. It has four floors with layouts that are similar enough to make it very confusing, but different enough to get completely lost. So I was wandering around, getting loot and leveling up my characters while trying to get an overview of the place. Focusing on understanding a map layout while constantly being interrupted by random encounters gets extremely frustrating after a while. After doing that for a long time, I slowly started running out of TP to heal characters. I started to feel a sense of dread that I would just die in this dungeon, losing all the progress I had. When both SYL and Rudolf Steiner were dead, I decided to find a map online. I figured out where I was, and managed to return NEI to the nearest town with a sliver of health left.

I'm currently not producing enough videos to keep up the insane pace of releasing one video per day on YouTube, which I've been doing for years, resulting in almost 3000 videos on my channel. I've decided to start releasing fewer videos, and try to improve the presentation instead. My first step towards this is to add little bumpers with text with some basic info about each game. Getting this to work was quite a journey, where I had to learn how to generate text and concatenate clips using ffmpegs filter_complex option (which is quite tricky). I now have a script where I can run a few scripts to generate clips with info text, and concatenate clips, as well as crop and scale them correctly based on game platform. For reference, here is the ffmpeg command-line I had to generate for my first Phantasy Star II video:

ffmpeg -y
 -ss 00:00:00.000 -t 00:00:06.000 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/text-intro.mkv
 -ss 00:00:01.516 -t 00:00:39.328 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_001.mkv
 -ss 00:02:50.783 -t 00:14:31.533 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_001.mkv
 -ss 00:00:00.000 -t 00:00:06.000 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/text-grinding.mkv
 -ss 00:00:23.916 -t 00:08:20.298 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_002.mkv
 -ss 00:00:05.996 -t 00:34:19.664 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_003.mkv
 -ss 00:00:00.000 -t 00:06:15.331 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_004.mkv
 -filter_complex "
  [0:v:0][0:a:0][1:v:0][1:a:0][2:v:0][2:a:0][3:v:0][3:a:0][4:v:0][4:a:0]
  [5:v:0][5:a:0][6:v:0][6:a:0]concat=n=7:v=1:a=1[outv_unscaled][outa];
  [outv_unscaled]crop=1216:920:(iw-ow)/2:(ih-oh)/2,scale=iw*2:ih*2[outv]"
 -map "[outv]" -map "[outa]"
 -filter_complex highpass=f=20
 -acodec flac -c:v libx265 -crf 20 -preset ultrafast
 upload/mister-gen-phantasy_star_2-1-2024-03-10.mkv