Phantasy Star 2 - the lost data

In my last post I talked about my failed attempt to replace the battery in my Phantasy Star 2 cartridge without losing saved games. But since I did lose my saved games, I wanted to reminisce about what I lost.

First off, let me just admit I played this game way too much. I played it as much as I did because of my obsession with perfection. I was attempting to max out everything in the game. So that said, this is how far I had taken PS2.

In an RPG game, you fight enemies to gain experience and money. As you gain experience your characters level up. As you level up, your characters become stronger. In PS2 your characters are strong enough to beat the final bosses at about level 25. But I took all of my character up to the maximum level which was 35. But I didn't stop there. At level 35 your characters have abour 3 million experience points. But I wanted to max that out as well. So I took all 7 of my characters up to 9,999,999 experience points. That was 7 million experience points of gain for no reason.

Leveling up wasn't the only thing I did, I also wanted to maximize my possessions. In PS2 Star Mist and Moon Dew are valuable items to have, yet you cannot buy them in any store. You can only find them in a few scattered chests, or use Shir (the thief) to steal them. If you've played the game then you know Shir only steals at random, and even then she steals random items. I used Shir to steal so many times that I have enough Star Mists and Moon Dews to fill everyone's possession list completely.

Even with all this, there was one area of the game I was far from maxing out. My money was only up to $3 million and presumably you can have up to $9,999,999. Considering the most expensive item in the game costs $50,000 having a bank account with $3 million is pretty impressive. Still, I would have expected my money to be higher given all the fighting I had to do to max out my characters.

Given how strong my characters were, I could defect the final two bosses (Dark Force and Mother Brain) using ANY characters. I could go into battle with the "weakest" characters such as the Amy and Shir and still defeat them.