Phantasy Star Universe

"Good looking game that is severely lacking in content (review of online portion of game)"

Sound: 7.5/10. Pleasant sound and music as a background for your adventures.

Graphics: 8.5/10. Graphics are good. The characters look appealing for the most part, and environments are done well. Also, the game engine appears to be well written, as everything flows very smoothly and it seems to use little CPU power.

Control: 8/10. Control is not bad. Just make sure you buy a gamepad and hook it up to your PC, as that is the way the game is meant to be played. With the gamepad, you can strafe and move about easily, as well as switching weapons and using the arts that you currently have equipped on your weapons.

Content/Gameplay: 1/10. Very, very disappointing. Because the game is also on the PS2 and they have decided to store all updates on its memory card, it can't really have any majors updates like a real MMORPG would. Sonic Team's solution to this is to put a certain amount of content already on the disk, and only unlock it later. The content currently in the game is very lacking. There are only a few missions. An exhaustive list is: (1) unsafe passage; (2) fight for food; (3) mad creatures; (4) plains overlord; (5) sleeping warriors; (6) mizurahi defense; (7) demons above; (8) forested islands; (9) rainbow beast; (10) grove of fanatics. Thats it. Missions take around a half hour or less to do. What does this mean? It means you will be bored silly very, very quickly.

Although they plan on unlocking the existing content later, I believe it will give you only another week or two's excitement at most. Also, I am reviewing the game as it currently is (since that is all we have to work with) not as what it "might be". I couldn't reasonably to anything else, since I only have access to the game as it currently is.

To put things in perspective, the current online content of this game is about 3% of the content that was in the original Guild Wars. And you didn't have to pay a monthly subscription fee to keep playing Guild Wars. I could also make comparisons to how small it is relative to other online games that I have played (and I have played most of them) but since Guild Wars is the closest model to PSU (instance based mission gameplay with virtual chatroom lobbies) that is what I compared it to above. Even assuming that you keep paying your subscription and eventually they release enough content that it has about as much as 10% of the original GW, so what? It is obviously not value for your money.

The other possible game to compare it to would be D&D online, which also had instance based gameplay with a small virtual chatroom city. It also has much less content than DDO did at launch, and DDO was blasted for having far too little content at launch. Please, unless you take pleasure in going through the same mission over and over hundreds of times, do not buy this game.

Overall score (not an average): 4/10. It would have been possible to use their engine to create a fairly fun arcade-style online game. The graphics and sound are good. It is only the mindless repetitive gameplay (much worse than average, because granted all online games get repetitive) that makes this game not worth buying.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 11/10/06