Phantasie games are early RPGs that should be credited as among the first to feature excellent combat options (e.g. different styles of attack), "bank" concept where you deposit the loot, and excellent variety of spells and monsters.
These games were a big hit on Commodore 64, but their 4-color IBM port, predictably, didn't do as well. Too bad Phantasie 2 was never ported to the PC.
Review By HOTUD
Comments and reviews
https://playclassic.games/games/role-playing-dos-games-online/play-phantasie-iii-the-wrath-of-nikademus-online/play/ Best one I have found
I got it running on Winfellow Amiga emulator. The only problem is in combat, if there are 2 monster ranks, the rank preference cannot be selected. This is a deal breaker.
I and my Atari ST buddies lived and breathed this series back in the 80s. Didn't play much of Phantasie 1, but 2 and 3 saw many replays. And yeah, they were not for the faint of heart in terms of difficulty and team-building. I remember spending a long time rerolling my Sprites, Trolls and Gnolls for that perfect roll.
I have this kicking around on my ST emulator somewhere. Fired it up a few months ago, but time passes and it's hard to recapture the magic. Still, I can't imagine playing this on anything other then an ST or the Amiga. Honestly, I didn't think 'PC gaming' existed prior to Wolfenstein 3D.
Also, the DOS-Version uploaded here has a rather annoying bug. The game tries to find the necessary data on a: no matter how you mount it. It reports an error "savegame saved on a protected drive" and starts without the graphical representations of the towns. The rest works as intended.
i tried to run the game in 2 Amiga emulators, 1 Atari St emulator and 1 C64 Emulator.
In the first three, I get the sound and a grey picture, nothing more. In the last, the game starts (kind of). Then I am asked to insert disc two (the dungeon disc) and a menu with chars pops up, including the question "in which starting town do you wanna start?" Problem 1: none of the "starting towns" bound to those chars in the list are actually starting towns Problem 2: no matter which of them I choose, the game does not start afterwards.
Anybody did a testrun with the provided files?
I had this game as a kid for the Apple ][c, so I remember it with monochrome green graphics. Playing it in CGA is... not as pleasant, but still plenty nostalgic.
I always like the vibe of the Phantasie series, there was a subtle humor in everything that didn't take fantasy too seriously. Unfortunately, as a game, this one kind of stinks.
Notice the screenshots posted on this site: 4 screens of setting up your party, one of you traveling, and two of the cutscenes that happen when your party dies. That pretty much sums up this game. You will spend 20 minutes building the perfect party, and the second you step out into the wild you'll get attacked by a party of 15 monsters way too hard to handle and the whole crew gets slaughtered. Takes forever to build up a party capable of surviving travel to the next town, never mind the dungeons. I had time for that as a kid, not anymore.
Jamos, first of all, are you using DOSBOX? You shouldn't try to run the game directly under modern Windows. Second, it's bloody ugly! Get the ST or Amiga version instead, proper colour graphics that don't make your eyes bleed. Run it under an appropriate emulator. Most 1980s PC games were awful. The ones that supported 16-colour EGA weren't so bad, or the very late ones using VGA were good. But CGA, bleecccch!
There were 3 graphics modes for CGA. The first was 640x200 in black and white only. The second was 4-colour 320x200, in 2 palette options. Either red, green, yellow, and blue; or black, white, cyan, and magenta! What sort of sicko decided cyan and magenta were a good choice for 2 of your 4 colours, but no, say, red or green?
Of course the nicer palette option was missing black, and white. But so what? Still much nicer. But so many games went with the ugly option. Really don't know why.
There was also fourth pseudo-graphics mode, 160x100 in 16 colours, caused by using the block graphic characters in text mode, and telling the video chip to stick 100 lines of text instead of 25 on screen. A few games used that but not enough, really, it's a shame. The "8088mph" PC demo, released only a couple of years ago, used a twist on that to allow around a thousand (!!!) colours on 1981-era CGA hardware! Runs only on original the IBM PC model, so if you want to see it you'll probably ned to go by Youtube.
Anyway... get the ST / Amiga version. That's a tip for all late-1980s games. They were the main games machines anyway so are more likely than the PC to have a particular game available. They also came with sound chips included in the machine!
Oh, the nostalgia. Also, try dosbox.
Review of Phantasie III for DOS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCgdCq8V8OA
How do you get this to work always says cant start program from menu??
No comment nor review for this game at the moment.