urgency to complete this game because of its market position competing against Nintendo, Sega also learned from the mistakes it made with Phantasy Star III.

Phantasy Star Online‘s creation resembles that of Phantasy Star II most. Poised in the short term as the only system of its kind, the Dreamcast before the release of the Playstation 2 resembled the Genesis before the release of the Super NES/Super Famicom. Similarly to the second game, Phantasy Star Online does an amazing job of taking advantage of its new, available resources on the Dreamcast. From a business perspective, this was quite necessary. The Dreamcast at the time was vying for acceptability in the console market. An amazing game was necessary to woo more consumers over to the Dreamcast. While it may nothave saved the Dreamcast, Phantasy Star Online did succeed in selling a lot of consoles. It, like Sega needed, caused many people to invest in a Dreamcast.

Sega’s Phantasy Star Marketing

While some of this analysis may be speculative, examining the marketing employed by Sega enforces many of ideas presented. Sega released a single commercial for each of the first four Phantasy Star games in Japan. While the dialogue may be in Japanese, the message of each commercial is not difficult to discern. In the commercial for the first Phantasy Star, there is a mixture of real acting and screenshots from the actual game. The music in the commercial and quickness of the shots emphasize the action in the game. The opening shot of a wicked beast sneaking up on