You Can't Trust the Internet Anymore

I like things that are strange and a bit obscure. It’s a habit of mine, and a lot of this blog is to document things I haven’t heard of before, because I wanted to learn about them. I mean, jeez, I’m certainly not writing blog posts about strip mahjong because the people demand it. But I can’t stop seeing misinformation everywhere, and I have to say something. This post is just a rant.

Phantasy Star Fukkokuban

This is Phantasy Star Fukkokuban, a Japanese Sega Genesis game released in 1994 to commemorate the release of Phantasy Star IV by re-releasing the original. It has an interesting component: it is the Master System game, just packaged into a Genesis cart. The PCB wires the Genesis lines the same way your Power Base Converter would. My guess is the reason for this is because the Master System wasn’t very popular in Japan, and Phantasy Star IV tied together the whole series with a lot of tiebacks to the first one in particular.

As a Master System game disguised as a Genesis one, this game is technically interesting. Some Genesis consoles can’t play Master System games, and those ones can’t play this game either. Also, I love the Phantasy Star series; even if 2 is my favorite. This makes this cartridge a perfect subject for my interest, so I’ve talked about it before and will talk about it again. In fact, I have a post I’m working on where I mention it.

So there I was, writing a blog post, and wanted to look up the release date. The first result I found in DuckDuckGo, my search engine?

GameFAQs is at the top; a titan since the 1990’s. The second result is The Cutting Room Floor, a wiki much beloved by myself. And then the third result is “Press Start Gaming”.

And here’s a thing about me. I want to trust new websites. I have a bias towards clicking on articles from sites I don’t know, because to be quite honest, I’ve read the TCRF page on Phantasy Star a thousand times. How else do you learn something new?

Also, I clicked it because the headline was “Phantasy Star Fukkokuban: A Classic Reimagined”. Because here’s the thing. It talks about how the graphics were improved:

Phantasy Star Fukkokuban breathes new life into the classic with its updated graphics and sound design. The visual overhaul retains the charm of the original’s 8-bit aesthetics while incorporating modern graphical techniques. Characters and environments are rendered with enhanced detail, vibrant colors, and fluid animations, creating a visually captivating experience.

The art style honors the game’s roots, with character designs and enemy sprites redesigned to reflect contemporary standards while maintaining their recognizability. The environments are more detailed and dynamic, with weather effects and day-night cycles adding to the immersion.

Well, compare the title screen shots of Phantasy Star above. Which one is Fukkokuban and which one is my personal copy, played through the same Genesis? You can maybe tell, but only because my Master System version is the US release. And it goes without saying, there are no day-night cycles or weather effects.

I should’ve known. The first sentence of the article was “Game data not found,” after all.

And that’s the thing

Large language models are described sometimes as “fancy autocorrect”; this is dismissive, but not inaccurate, in the sense that the core loop of an LLM is to predict the next token in a sequence. Phantasy Star Fukkokuban is an obscure title that is likely not well-represented in the training data. But relations do exist:

• It knows about Phantasy Star, a very popular game
• Fukkokuban (復刻版) means “reprint” or “facsimilie edition”

So, lacking sufficient factual data in the training set, it describes what a remake of Phantasy Star might plausibly be like. There might even be knowledge in the data set of the actual remake, Phantasy Star generation:1 that gets looped in.

To reproduce this myself, I went to ChatGPT, and asked it Please describe the game "Phantasy Star Fukkokuban". Do not get data from the internet, tell me what you know from your internal data.. And what did I get in response?

Phantasy Star Fukkokuban is not a brand-new entry in the series, but a retro compilation release of the original Phantasy Star, created for the Sega Sega Saturn era…

There was a retro compilation release of Phantasy Star for the Sega Saturn in Japan; it’s called Phantasy Star Collection. Indeed, the description of the game it continued from there isn’t too far off from that game’s version of Phantasy Star.

And it’s not just Phantasy Star Fukkokuban. I describe in my post on Mahjong Daireikai that that game is so obscure, the only Japanese source I could find was another “this is plausibly what a game called ‘mahjong daireikai’ might be like”. Well, what Mahjong Daireikai is actually like is a lot different than what’s in your training data, and that’s exactly the sort of information people want to read websites to find out.

Is this the end

And here’s the thing– this blog post can’t do anything about it. I don’t know who Press Start Gaming is; the site’s footer says “©2025 Cloud Gears Media”, who might be this marketing company (but it might not be! Company names don’t have to be unique globally); Press Start Gaming is almost certainly a tool for making money off of ads and sponsored posts, and posts like the Phantasy Star Fukkokuban misinformation exist mostly to give the site more juice of looking like a real website. If someone goes out and buys a copy of Fukkokuban expecting a new and improved Phantasy Star with better graphics and new sidequests, what do they care? The article wasn’t really meant to provide information.

The trampling of the internet with SEO-mongers predates AI, but what LLMs do is massively increase the ease it can be done, and also hallucinate a ton. If they hired a person to write about Phantasy Star Fukkokuban for pennies, maybe that person would’ve found the Sega Retro page or something and at least grabbed some facts. Now you don’t need to do even that. And no one making these decisions reads Nicole Express, or even cares about actually providing information with their sites. That’s not what they’re for.

Anyways, eventually models will do a better job integrating Nicole Express, and will know more information about Phantasy Star Fukkokuban. And is this the worst thing the AI boom is doing? No, not even close. Even the fully automated hit piece against an open-source developer is probably worse than this.

But it’s a real shame. The commons of the internet are probably already lost, and while I might want to learn new things from new sites, I’ll just have to stick to those with pre-LLM reptuations that I trust. Well, until those sites burn their reputations to make a few extra pennies with AI, like Ars Technica seems to just have. (link goes to a Mastodon thread in lieu of a better source for now)

This post is just a rant. Thanks for listening, at least.