Cosmic Fantasy was the flagship Role-Playing Game franchise from Telenet Japan's Laser Soft division, created exclusively for the PC Engine's CD attachment, with one Compilation Re-release for the Sega CD and masterminded by manga artist Kazuhiro Ochi.
Like Sega's own RPG franchise Phantasy Star, Cosmic Fantasy combined anime presentation with a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi. However, by utilizing the CD format, CF was among the first such games to rely on fully animated and voice-acted cutscenes not unlike Nihon Falcom's popular Ys games or Game Arts' Lunar games.
It's also fairly notorious for being one strong case of No Export for You — only the second game ever saw a release outside Japan, thanks to Working Designs. In 2024, publisher Edia, who have also been porting other items from Telenet's catalog, released a localized port of the first Switch collection in the west.
Games in this series include:
- Cosmic Fantasy: Bōken Shōnen Yū (1990)
- Cosmic Fantasy 2 (1991)
- Cosmic Fantasy 3: Bōken Shōnen Rei (1992)
- Cosmic Fantasy Stories (1992) (The only non-Turbo release; remake of the first two games for the Sega CD)
- Cosmic Fantasy 4: Ginga Shōnen Densetsu - Totsunyū-hen (1994)
- Cosmic Fantasy 4: Ginga Shōnen Densetsu - Gekitō-hen (1994)
- Cosmic Fantasy Collection (2022) (An Updated Re-release of the first two games for the Nintendo Switch)
- Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2 (2023) (An Updated Re-release of the last five games, also for Switch)
This series provides examples of:
- All in a Row: Your party dutifully follows behind you in the overworld.
- Animal Mecha: Marley, a robotic cat.
- The Anime of the Game
- Cat Folk: Very common through the franchise
- Cool Mask: Galam.
- One Game for the Price of Two: The fourth game splits the adventure between the protagonists of 1 and 2.
- Rescue The Princess: Van for Laura.
- Science Fantasy
- Space Pirates: Or Cosmic Pirates, rather.
- Take Over the World: Galam's plan.
- Updated Re-release: Stories is such for the first two games. The first two games were later rereleased for the Nintendo Switch in 2022, but only in Japan.
