In an age when dozens of massively-multiplayer games battle for mindshare and expectations for perpetual online communities raise by the day, while millions upon millions follow each other lemming-like to World of Warcraft, it's nice to see a modest online adventure like Phantasy Star Universe stand up to be counted. A throwback to the good ol' days of Diablo 2-style dungeon exploring, PSU is a value-packed, worthwhile action-RPG that finds its biggest challenge not in its modern-day peers, but in escaping the shadow of its predecessor: Phantasy Star Online (PSO).
While PSO was hardly a perfect game (combat is slow and clunky, and enemy A.I. is non-existent, and so on), it borrowed liberally from the right source: Diablo 2, that paradigm of old-school game design. By swiping the most addictive elements of Blizzard's dungeon crawler and refitting the concept with a compelling, futuristic setting, PSO was (and to some extent still is) a great little collect-a-thon filled with unique weapons and fun, party-based adventuring. Sonic Team enhanced its take on online role-playing with simple macro'ed controls that made shifting between various attacks and spells a snap, while bold, colorful, comic book-style word balloons introduced chatting and emoting to a new legion of console gamers. For years this concept perpetuated on Dreamcast, GameCube, and eventually Xbox, finding it's own select niche, while the EverQuests, Final Fantasys, and WOWs moved on ahead. As PSO's lifespan wound down, it got a second wind on PC with Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst, keeping the community buzzing until Phantasy Star Universe was ready for prime time.
Despite being struck by the occasional setback or two during years of development, PSU isn't the powerhouse sequel to PSO that veterans probably were hoping to get. The voice acting in the story mode -- with the exception of one main character, Karen -- is almost uniformly bad, the enemy A.I. is still quite dense (although the enemies are much harder now), the collision-detection during battles is pretty cheap, and the graphics -- while fine on PS2 and PC -- are hardly up to Xbox 360 specs (or even comparable to Final Fantasy XII, for that matter). Perhaps the games's biggest knock, though, is that Sonic Team can't seem to script its way out of a paper bag in terms of storytelling, as evidenced by PSU's paltry plot. Despite this, PSU is still a greater experience than the sum of its parts would suggest, and the reasons for it are plenty.
First off, the fact that a sizeable story mode, flawed as it is, actually exists means that this game is good to go even if you have no intentions of going online. Some critics belabor the fact that you can't take the skills, weapons, and levels accumulated offline playing as the game's main character, Ethan Waber, over to the online game. That's actually a good thing, since playing PSU with a 100,000 other Ethan Wabers on the battlefield would probably look pretty stupid. Joking aside, the obvious reason for this is that Sega wants to create a stronger narrative with a focal character (unlike in PSO, where your custom character waded through the quests). But it also has to do with the lesson learned bringing PSO to DC, GC, and Xbox: people cheat.
The story mode is more than the throwaway time-killer of PSO, too. While the game progression is basically just an increasingly difficult series of indoor and outdoor dungeons, the variety of enemies is significant, added missions are unlocked for use in "free mode" (which functions as a great way to level up and earn money and items), and it's a great training ground for eventual online play. While PSU's connection to previous Phantasy Star games is tenuous, it's still a worthwhile romp, and getting past the fourth stage opens up what's possibly the game's best option: Extra Mode.
Extra Mode essentially recreates the online experience offline, supplanting real-life players with able-bodied NPC allies. While this mode might seem like a redundancy, consider that MMO players usually have no such option, such as with Final Fantasy XI. When those MMOs shutdown -- one day in the future -- gamers will have nothing to show for it, with no true ownership of their characters. They won't be able to take their hard-earned characters offline and keep playing in the areas where they spent so much time and money. Extra Mode puts that fear to rest, and while it's not the same as playing with real friends online, it's still notable that Sega took the time to add it.
Key to PSU's depth -- and one of the most engaging new elements -- is the synthesis mode, which lets you use items discovered in the field along with your Partner Machinery (more on that later) to craft items that simply would have been dropped by enemies in PSO. While items are still found in treasure boxes and dropped from enemies, other rare and exotic weapons and medicine can be crafted if you find the right materials. By using various "boards" (read: recipes) along with the prescribed items, players can create items not only for use, but for profit as well. Each character gets an "apartment" which can be decorated with different motifs, furnishings, and more. One of the most expensive options (15,000 meseta) early on is the license which lets you open a shop in your apartment, enabling other players to visit your pad, examine, and (hopefully) purchase your goods. With the money you earn, players can buy more spells, better armor, more powerful weapons, or -- in a distinct departure from the "one look for life" limitations of the first game -- change your skin color, hairstyle, and eye color, all while storing a closet full of multiple sets of clothes.
The pleasure goes beyond mere customization, though. Now each racial type (humans, CASTs, Newmans, and Beasts) can function outside of its realm of expertise and dabble in jobs it wouldn't have been able to access in PSO. This enables players to get more out of one character than they could in any previous Phantasy Star. Of course, with any new online game, the interface and HUD takes some getting used to, and PSU now utilizes a weapon-swapping system not unlike Snake's item selection process in Metal Gear Solid. By pressing Circle (or the appropriate button, depending on what system you're playing on) and pushing up or down on the D-pad, players can cycle through weapons. Each weapon has a "technic," aka special move, which uses PP points. While PP slowly recharges, the most effective way to refill your weapons is to use a rare PP recharge item, or to visit a recharging point, where you can fill some or all of your weapons for a small fee. Adding ammo limitations is sort of annoying at first, but it's a minor blemish since, generally speaking, you can carry so many weapons. Most missions are capable of being played solo using a single charge on the average arsenal of weapons, and in party-play, it's never a problem.
Combat is vastly improved over PSO, thanks to the lock on function that, while not quite perfect, still helps keep a bead on enemies. Fast-moving enemies will still vex the lock on, though, and airborne enemies are a particular pain to keep track of despite the first-person shooting mode. It keeps you grounded in place, which isn't particularly effective when sky-borne wyverns are strafing you with fire breath. Character movement is faster as well. Players don't run away from monsters by walking and then trotting casually away as they did in PSO. Now a run is a run, and enemies are also much faster (but with discernible combat patterns). Enemy A.I. is very basic, though, as each zone simply sends enemies at you, all of which must usually be killed before the key to the next area materializes. Surprisingly, you can't take advantage of the zones in PSU like you could in PSO. Now if you run past a fence that separates a zone, monsters will often follow you outside, continuing the fight. The dim enemy A.I. is easy to trick, though, and if you're savvy, you can usually get a bunch of them to cluster up on the opposite side of a fence while you pick them off.
Another key difference from PSO, and one of PSU's more engaging distractions, is the Partner Machinery, which is PSU's equivalent of the former Mag system. While you still feed your PM items to help it grow and evolve, you're no longer limited to feeding it three items at a time. Since, for example, Sol Atomizers are much harder to come by en masse in PSU, you'll want to synthesize them yourself once you have the right materials. As with Mags, PMs evolve in a series of stages. It's much more challenging to bring your PM to it's final stage of development now, although the reward is that once it completes its evolution, it will then accompany you into battle in humanoid form, giving you one more reliable partner to party in online play. In a nice touch, not only can you name your PM, but if you get bored of that name, you can change that too.
Online play, built on the groundwork laid by PSO, is the real draw here. While some will argue that what's available in PSU is already on the disc and paying for the privilege of unlocking it online is unfair, whether you pay to access content updates in PSO or download a 200 MB patch for another online game, the end result is the same: New content costs money, servers must be maintained, and so on. If anything, PSU's game structure and population mirrors Guild Wars more than anything, but Guild Wars' business model survives on selling you a new expansion every eight months. So, is the online portion of PSU worth the time and cost? Yes.
Provided you don't mind being dealt the cards Sega has in store for you on its terms, everything here is fine. PSU has plenty of servers (called "universes") that you can jump between at any time, ensuring a smooth, latency-free experience and no commitment to one specific world (enabling friends to meet up anywhere). While everything is a degree or two more complex in PSU than in PSO, navigating the game's interface is still a relatively clean affair, whether you're exchanging ID cards with friends, switching lobbies, creating characters, forming parties, or simply chatting it up. Chat bubbles return, although with the separate North American and Japanese servers, the simple chat of PSO gives way to the more colorful and expressive chat options of PSU. Word balloons that jiggle with excitement are easily created with a few keyboard combinations, while explosive chat balloons showcasing your character's level of excitement are also available, as well as the option to change font colors on the fly.
Naturally, the whole point of any game like this is to collect the coolest gear, to look as badass as possible, and to cooperatively kill bigger and badder monsters. With each content update new areas, missions, and challenges are offered, spruced up with the occasional holiday event or quest. Level caps are raised every so often (PSO's level cap was 200, while PSU's limit is currently level 50), which should help encourage players to keep grinding.
The game's multiplatform status ensures multiple things. Since PSU runs just great on PS2, only requires a memory card, and all online characters are server-stored, there's a huge potential community built in. The PC is where online games continue to thrive, especially after the console versions have either broken down or dried up, so this is also a fine option. Xbox 360 owners, while possessed of a sharp-looking port of PSU, have a smaller installed base than the other two formats and exist on their own Xbox Live-specific servers (for a variety of technical reasons). This limits them to their own niche community, where population is likely to be lower.
Graphically, PSU looks pretty nice on the PS2, with decent-looking character models and environments. If you prefer the Dungeons & Dragons milieu of Western-style RPGs, you may not cotton to PSU's futuristic, Japanese manga look, but the costume and weapon design are really nice here, and much more bearable than some of PSO's wretched character styles. The PC version, obviously, is much sharper and boasts higher resolutions than the PS2 version, and while hardly in the same league as other MMOs like EverQuest 2, still looks quite attractive. The Xbox 360 version falls in line with the crisp visuals of the PC game, but, when compared to games like Gears of War or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, it looks distinctly last gen.
But graphics aren't everything, and PSU accomplishes enough, visually, to keep people interested for as long as they keep playing, and with so many offline and online things to learn and master, Phantasy Star Universe is that rare role-playing game that keeps on giving. While it may arrive a little too late for the last gen and look a little too old for the next gen, as PSO proved before it, a good game will keep them coming back. It's too early to say whether PSU will have the same level of staying power in an age inundated with online games, but its pedigree makes this one worth watching -- and playing.
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