Gently Streaming

Earlier today I decided to start streaming a casual playthrough of Phantasy Star II. I figure this is something different from what either of the two primary stream fora that I go to. It’s a casual playthrough, so it doesn’t come with endless resetting after five minutes of attempts like a lot of the SDA streams do when the runners are making serious attempts at runs, and Phantasy Star II is a little more “classic”, in terms of RPGs, than a lot of the Speed Gamers community leans to (Heck, having come out in 1989, the game is older than a lot of the members of said community), so playing that is a nice history lesson for them in what “JRPGs” used to be like (Although in 1989 the more accurate distinction in play styles was probably “Computer versus Console RPGs” rather than “Japanese versus Western”. Outside of the Ultima series, dungeon-crawlers like Wizardry and Might & Magic were more typical of the Computer RPG.).

Where this differs from a lot of other playthroughs of the game is in the fact that, once I have more than 4 members in my party, I’ll be letting the TSG community decide what characters I should use. This also serves as a Self-Imposed Challenge of sorts. Without spoiling too much about the game for those who haven’t played it, the game can basically be divided into 3 “Acts” (If you’ve beaten the game before, you can probably figure out where the dividing points are in my mind). There’s basically one optimum party for Act I, and one of two optimal setups for Acts II and III; deviating from these setups will make things a lot harder for you (Especially in Act I, before you get items that make the endgame bearable). To make it so that this doesn’t drive me completely insane, I figure what I’ll do is close any character polls 24 hours or so before I go to stream, and take that day to do any level-grinding, equipment purchasing, etc. “off-stream”.

It should be fun, whenever I decide to actually do it.

-EE