Phantasy Star Online

"Phantasy Star Online: not called Phantasy Star Offline. This is important."

There’s a group of people out there, somewhere, called Sonic Team.

You may have heard of them.

If you have not, there is little I can suggest but to leave your computer and immediately proceed to your nearest game retailer, taking this small shopping list with you:

- A Sega Dreamcast video game console (should you not already have one of these fine pieces of equipment);

- A copy of Sonic Adventure and its sequel, Sonic Adventure 2;

- A copy of ChuChu Rocket!;

- A copy of Samba De Amigo (yes, you need the maracas too, you cheap scumbag— no, don’t try and get out of it);

- Lots of money (it is no object in the face of ultimate genius).

Purchase all of the above items, except for the money, which is in fact very difficult to purchase, and should instead be employed in the actual purchasing of the other stuff. Then set up your Dreamcast; it’s not too hard, and comes with an instruction manual and everything. Play all these games from beginning to end and in socially-threatening quantities. When you’re finished, scan Ebay for a Saturn, as well as copies of the following games: Sonic Jam, NiGHTS Into Dreams…, and Burning Rangers. You’ll need some more of that money stuff, too.

After obtaining all these things, your life will be complete. Nothing else will seem necessary. Except for this thing.

And this thing is Phantasy Star Online. It’s good. I don’t really need to tell you, as a newly-enlightened Sonic Team worshipper, that; but it’s good. Oh yes. It’s damn good.

It’s an online RPG, the most basic sense of the term: you make a character, grab a weapon, and kill endless hordes of baddies with your friends. There’s not really an awful lot more to it than that overly simplified estimation, but PSO’s simplicity serves only to streamline and enhance the social aspects of its gameplay.

The first thing PSO will ask you to do is create a player; this, oddly enough, is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game. Nine player types are available, falling into three differing ‘classes’: Hunter, Ranger and Force, with each one specialising in melee, ranged or magic-based combat. Classes also vary in species, with humans, androids and the genetically-engineered newmans all competing for your decision. Once you’ve decided on a class, you’re able to tweak its appearance in terms of costume, headwear, and skin colour before giving it a name and beaming down to Ragol, a planet which, for various reasons— mostly detailing the exploits of big spaceships and vastly unhappy demons— is teeming with hostile wildlife. (These, incidentally, end up getting killed: lots.)

The structure of PSO relies on two main ‘districts’: Pioneer 2— the standard ‘safe area’ in which you may converse with non-playable characters, purchase items, receive missions and the like— and actual game stages, whose primary features include lushly detailed environments, improbably large boss characters and, yes, hordes of disgruntled monsters armed with large, pain-inflicting appendages and a tendency to grunt a lot, who get killed. The entire game revolves around switching between the stages and Pioneer 2, getting stronger, finding items, and making sure the monsters get killed.

And this is the core of PSO’s gameplay: perfectly-balanced, utterly compulsive, slightly hypnotic killing; fighting endlessly through mazes of bears, beasts and bots, forever upping your experience count to that next elusive level… whereupon, upon reaching it, you’re able to use bigger swords, fire bigger guns, or cast bigger spells on the mindless minions of menace. There’s always another way to make your character better, stronger, faster: be it another spell to master, a better shield to find or another level to rise.

But first, you have to kill the monsters.

This, as mentioned previously, is acted it out in a marvellously simplified manner. While movement is predictably controlled through use of the analogue stick, the A, B and X buttons are free to be attributed to whatever commands you desire, be it to swing your sword or use a healing item (the Y button is invariably bound to the ‘talk’ function). Holding the R-trigger brings up a secondary menu to which another set of commands can be issued, making for six different functions available at any time. This allows you to create your own control set-up in accordance to your character’s particular needs.

Combat, which you’ll be engaging in a lot of (what with all that killing to do), is a similarly streamlined procedure: each weapon has up to three different functions, consisting of normal, heavy and— on occasion— special attacks. While a normal attack will constitute a basic club swing or handgun shot, heavy attacks will deal more damage, but at the cost of speed and accuracy; special attacks, however, generally produce an ‘alternative’ effect, such as lightning strikes or a confusion-inducing shot. Meanwhile, techniques— or magic — offer an alternative means of offence as well as support-type actions for those who chose the corresponding class, allowing fireballs, lightning bolts and healing spells to be hurled around with glee. Again, these can all be bound to a button of your choosing.

When a monster comes into range, it’ll be highlighted with a small coloured crosshair; then it’s simply a matter of executing one of the aforementioned attacks and watching its hit points fall. Differing weapons have differing aspects in this area: the Ranger’s shotgun, for example, is capable of targeting multiple enemies, but a rifle will allow for greater range. Brilliantly, it’s possible to string attacks together in the form of ‘combos’; not only does this allow you to attack faster, but your hits will grow increasingly accurate with each successive link.

Like most RPGs, Phantasy Star Online’s focus is on character building. Starting off as a wimpish level 1 player, killing things builds your experience points— once you’ve collected enough, you’ll rise to the next level, thus increasing your overall player statistics: accuracy, defence, attack and so on. Finding better items is also a vital step in this process. These are split into five main groups: weaponry, armour, shields, recovery and discs, with the latter two providing restoration services— healing potions and the like— and new spells to learn, respectively. Items themselves are found strewn randomly within the games’ stages, within crates or dropped by enemies, or may be purchased from the shop aboard Pioneer 2.

The clever bit is when you go online.

When you go online, suddenly all the business of killing, killing, killing becomes nothing but a convenient (and fun) catalyst for all the social activity you’ll be partaking in. Going questing with three of your finest friends, killing things, healing each other and swapping weaponry whilst discussing the finer points of Natalie Portman is one of the most sublimely invigorating internet experiences you’ll ever encounter. You’ll work together to open doors, kill bosses and reach the next level; you’ll kill Dark Falz on Very Hard Mode, you’ll get into amusing situations with dragons and robots and you’ll develop crushes on each others’ character classes. It’s like submerging yourself in a pool of concentrated social fun. There’s a variety of different methods of chatting to your fellow team-mates, the most basic being the “software keyboard”, whereupon the D-Pad is used to select individual letters in a slow and laborious manner— you’ll be wanting a keyboard as a substitute (although up to four phrases of your choosing may be bound to each corner of the D-Pad for easy access, streamlining things somewhat). In addition, there’s the fantastic symbol chat: spawning from the smileys of Internet lore, this allows you to design and use elaborate symbols created from a selection of basic shapes and pictures— in a manner reminiscent of the Game Boy Camera’s edit mode. Finally, and brilliantly, there’s the in-built translation system, which works through a series of comprehensive menus. By selecting words and phrases such as “I like”, followed by anything ranging from “canoeing” to “painting”, you can build up sentences that will be automatically translated into the language of any user you encounter. This allows you to actively chat with people from halfway around the world without worrying about language problems. The system covers a startling number of topics— your location, your hobbies, how many times your rabbit humps its food dish per week— and, I believe, should act as a basic starting point for future expeditions into such technology. If you meet someone you like, you can swap guild cards (PSO’s version of individual user ID) and arrange to meet again.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the chat system. Messages are displayed in opaque speech bubbles above each player’s head, meaning that your vision can occasionally be blocked, and the maximum word limit for each message is a tad inadequate: you’ll find yourself being cut off by the limit on several occasions, meaning you’ll have to continue into another bubble to finish. Add to that the absurdly overcautious word censorship— which will transform, for example, the word “Saturday” into “Sa%!&?ay”— and you have a slightly flawed system. However, it’s by no means world-shattering, and it won’t stop you from having even more fun than your rabbit does every week.

PSO, when in its natural habitat— online— is fantastic. Offline mode, despite having various mini-quests and side-stories, will eventually prove repetitive, it acting as nothing more than a method of growing stronger for the next time you connect. So if you can’t play it over the ‘net, don’t buy it.

Then again, the game’s not called “Phantasy Star Offline”, is it?

My point exactly.

9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/02/01, Updated 09/02/01