Phantasy Star Online

"Phantasy Star? Not really.."

And upon the horizon, the Dreamcast came forth, and we loyal Sega fans were rejoicing. And then, it happened - a new Phantasy Star title was announced. And we rejoiced yet again... Until buying the game and playing it.

Gameplay: The gameplay in PSO is absolutely horrible. Despite the good idea of having a third person view in combat, you're really limited in what you can do. Combat involves three hit combos - that is, once you master tapping a button three times, you're set. Unless you really want to go all out and master the dark secrets of menu diving.. Menu diving, it's the ancient art of frantically screaming in real life as your team is dying, while you're forced to open and close menus, digging for that right technique or item to use. Why would this happen? Because, you're limited to six total 'hotkeys'. With three different attack types, any combat class is going to only have three of these left for techniques and/or items.. And that's not enough.

Boredom will soon claim you.. PSO has three different difficulty settings: Normal, Hard, and Very Hard. You can't play Hard until you've either beaten Normal offline, or are playing online, and are level 20. Very Hard requires either Hard offline, or playing online at level 40. An interesting approach at stopping 'power levelling', though, toss a level one a spread needle and he'll be thirty in no time. The problem with the difficulties is this.. They all take place on the same four stages. Once you 'beat' the game in Normal, you won't see anything new when you play it in Hard. You'll start back on the first stage, and enemies will be harder, but that's it. It's not so bad on Hard, but once you get to Very Hard, and you're strugging to reach level 100.. Well, there's a good chance you'll be driven to insanity when you have to play through certain stages twenty or more times..

Story: What story? Other than a short blurb in the beginning cinematics about Pioneer 2 leaving 'their homeworld' behind to colonize a new planet, there really isn't a story. You'll find a few message pods laying around the stages as you play through them, but these are far from clear and concise. Characters will talk with you during quests, yes, but their ideas often conflict with one another's.. But in the end, you're left with incoherent theories and musings, and no hard-core proof of what's going on. If you're like me, and want a nice, old-style story in your games, you won't find it here. If you're a conspiracy theorist, you'll have a field day with PSO, though. :)

Audio: The sound effects aren't too bad.. They don't stand out in my mind as anything special though. As for the soundtrack, it's a mixed bag. There are some tracks which are pure genius, such as De Rol Le's background music, ''From Seeing the Rough Wave''. Others, though, like the various bgms aboard Pioneer 2, will make a person wish to slit their wrists from listening to them.. That's how repetitive and annoying they are. A pity there's no in game sound controls - the boss bgms simply *cannot* be missed. The rest of the game's music, can.

Graphics: Just so you know, I'm of the firm belief that graphics shouldn't make a game.. Still, they're a nice touch. PSO's graphics, at first glance, appear to be nothing less than divine. Standing in the Forest, you can see massive amounts of detail upon single leaves of plants. In years of gaming, I've seen nothing that rivals the beauty of the waterfall room in the Caves. Yet, while the background is detailed to the extreme, details on characters and monsters are sorely lacking. The walking animations are horrid - you don't walk so much as skate. Without skates, mind you. It would've been nice if they showed armor on your character, but they don't.. At least in v2, they're making shields show up. For the most part, aside from rare weapons, the offensive tools you'll use all look exactly the same - the only difference is color. That might've been passable a few years ago, but with the power of the Dreamcast, there's no reason they couldn't have been a little more creative.

Roleplaying: There is none. 'nuff said. Roleplaying isn't, ''d00d ne1 h@v l@v1s c@nn0n?!'' - And you will eventually hear that. Don't hold this against PSO though, the industry has tried to hijack the word 'roleplaying' to mean, 'I kill things, get experience, and get the level!' when it has a totally different meaning. Blame the industry. ;)

Phantasy Star: Long time fans of the series will be disappointed, horrified and angry to see what Sonic Team has done to the glorious world of Algo. Everyone's favorite races, the Dezorisians and Motavians, are gone. Just.. Gone. No mention of them anywhere. They've magically disappeared. Numans still abound, but they're now 'newmans', some of them come with handlebars instead of those cool looking cat ears, and apparently, if you believe what the game tells you, they die at totally random times. Be warned if you're a numan, you can now, according to PSO, just be walking along, going to the grocery store, and - BAM! - you're dead. A sad difference from the rest of the series, eh?

The Reverent Lutz must be rolling over in his cryo chamber.. Not even Espers were sacred, they've been ousted and replaced with 'forces' - technique users. The human force looks dressed for the senior prom, and the numan forces.. Well.. They look as if they'd be more at home in a King's court as jester, rather than in combat.

..Honestly, there's too much to list. So I'll sum up what's in PSO that's related to the rest of the series: The name Phantasy Star. That's about it, other than a few token monsters such as Grass Assassins and Rappies. What we have here, gentlemen, is not the continuation of the series that we were promised, but a totally different game that simply steals the name Phantasy Star.

Online Play: You'd expect this to be a stellar section, being that the game is an online game and all, wouldn't you? Not so. Through poor design and implementation, Phantasy Star Online leaves itself wide open for all manner of nastiness. The Game Genie, the Gameshark, and others, are constantly used to duplicate items, create rare weapons and armor out of thin air.. There's even ways to get around password-protected games without knowing the password, not to mention player killing and character killing - that is, corrupting the data of your VMU so that you can no longer use that character to play - ever.

Most of this could've been solved by having critical data handled server-side instead of through each player's Dreamcast. Sonic Team could've made the game all but cheat proof if they only would have looked at games that have been through the same struggles, like EverQuest, or Ultima Online. Instead, they decided to go their own way and failed miserably. You can't swing a dead Motavian around Pioneer 2 without hitting some form of cheater, and that's what's truly sad about this game.

Version 2 promises to be hack proof, but, at the time of my writing this review, it's already been hacked to the ninth circle of hell.

Conclusion: If you buy only one Dreamcast game this month, make it Skies of Arcadia or Grandia II.

If you're a hardcore Phantasy Star fan, be warned, you will be disappointed with this game. The only resemblence this game has to the rest of the series is its name.

Born in sin? Come on in, cheaters are especially welcome, Sonic Team makes a very poor showing to stop cheating in the game. Even if you don't wish to purchase a cheating device yourself, there's more than enough hacked and duplicated items out there, just join a random game and you'll soon be decked out with a suit of 4-slot celestial armor and a shiny new lavis cannon.

..And if you're just looking to get into massively multiplayer games, look elsewhere.. Despite claims of it, PSO is not massively multiplayer - with four person limits on teams. The only real platform for massively multiplayer games is still the PC. And that's a pity.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 10/17/01, Updated 10/17/01