SEGA AGES: Phantasy Star dev team explains the struggles during development, why the game was delayed, and much more

As we posted yesterday, SEGA AGES: Phantasy Star is hitting the Switch in NA/EU on Nov. 15th, 2018. This info came from a Game Watch interview with M2’s CEO Naoki Horii, Sega producer Kagasei Shimomura and director Rieko Kodama. That info has an absolutely wealth of details on the game's development and much more. Check out the highlights below.

- the team wanted to release SEGA AGES: Phantasy Star worldwide on September 20th, but they encountered issues
- Kodama and Matsuoka wanted to include Phantasy Star in the first SEGA AGES wave due to their fondness for the title
- work started in Winter 2017
- most of the M2 staff who worked on the Sega Ages PS2 versions of the games worked on the Switch versions
- Kodama is embarrassed about her original artwork for the game and considered removing it, but it was left intact
- new features like auto-mapping and the Monster Guide were ideas from Director Matsuoka
- the game also includes all features from Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 32: Phantasy Star Complete Collection on PS2
- a new mode called “Ages Mode” enables all of those PS2 versions at once
- saves are shared between Original mode and Ages Mode
- walking speed can be set to normal speed even in Ages mode
- in both modes, you can turn on or off the auto-mapping at any time
- Ages mode was created for newcomers, and to speed things up for players revisiting the game
- there are things in this Switch version the dev team didn’t fix on purpose, to make it as close as possible to the original version
- the English translation still uses abbreviations
- the Japanese version lets you display text with hiragana and katakana together or full katakana
- everything is mapped and displayed, including traps, chests, doors and more
- this auto-mapping feature took a lot of time, and they had to do a lot of debugging, which partially lead to the delay
- the game’s English/Master System version has the sounds produced by the Sega Mark III’s Frequency Modulation chip
- Horii wanted to do the Monster Guide
- they also included a list of all items and magic with their prices, effects, descriptions and which character can equip them
- making the Monster Guide was extremely difficult and involved a lot of decompression of original files
- the Mad Doctor data had to be redone for this game, as the devs couldn't extract the data from the original
- the Switch version's dev team says original dev Yuji Naka pushed the limits of the hardware for the game's original release
- Yuji Naka’s source code for the game being quite complicated and the addition of new features lead to the game's delay
- the team underestimated how much time they’d need for Phantasy Star, and they apologize