Phantasy Star was one of the pioneers of the traditional console RPG format, featuring fully traversable overworld maps, complete with interactive towns, and sprawling dungeons. The player engages in random enemy encounters, both on the overworld map and in dungeons, which saw a change from the top-down perspective to a first-person view. Unique amongst all games of the time was the faux 3-D graphics of Phantasy Star's dungeons, a widely praised technological feature. Also notable were the animations of the enemy sprites, which featured considerably more frames than were common at the time. Battles featured the now standard turn-based format, with each player using a combination of weapons and magic to destroy enemies. As the game progresses, the weapons and magic get increasingly more impressive. The option to talk, which would be scrapped in later games in the series, was sometimes a useful alternative, but only for the few enemies that were able to communicate with Alis.
