I ask for a few reasons:
1. The first game is the forgotten other founding father of console RPGs, which came out 7 months after the first Dragon Quest, and a year before the first Final Fantasy.
2. The settings blend sci-fi and fantasy really well, at least in my opinion. And they do it a lot better than the haphazard ways the Final Fantasy series did from VII onward.
3. The difficulty is strong, with II being the most outright brutal, but the other games have plenty of hard moments.
4. These are just flat-out awesome games. I finally got a chance to play them on emulators, and when I later had the chance to get legal copies of them (on the Virtual Console and some Genesis collections), I bought them. Phantasy Star I was the first VC game I bought.
Basically, I highly recommend these old school gems, if you haven’t played them. I just would like Sega to make more in this style instead of nothing but “Console Diablo” games. I’m not claiming that the games since Phantasy Star Online are bad, just that the old style shouldn’t be neglected.
Also, much the development team later worked on Skies of Arcadia, which is so far the closest to a return to the style of the first four games.
I have not. I probably should. Let me go and buy it for the Wii U Virtual Console. If I don’t get around to playing it, I could play it on future Nintendo consoles since I can always take my collection with me.
Oh wait. I can’t. Thanks Nintendo. You are forcing me to go the emulation route because why would I buy a digital copy of a game and be unable to play it on different systems as if you are denying us the mobility?