Phantasy Star Universe

"Next time Sonic Team, I'd like a PAUSE menu in my OFFLINE game!"

Phantasy Star Universe...a new addition to the ever popular series that I have just now begun playing. Yes this is my first review for a Phantasy Star game and so that means I couldn't tell you if it's improved or not over the previous games. Nevertheless, gather round and I'll tell you about an Massively Mutiplayer Online Role Playing Game where humans, robots, elves and beasts live in an intergalactic place of magic and mystery. Not to fear for those without Xbox live and/or money, this game has an offline story mode as well. And an easy 1000 achievement points too. But more on that later.

In the online world you create your own personal avatar and choose whether he/she will be a human, a CAST, a Beast, or a Newman. Insert your Seinfeld jokes here. CASTS are essentially robots, and Newmans are magical humans with pointy ears, so basically they're elves. Each race has their own advantages and disadvantages so choosing the right race may take a little bit of thought. Humans are well rounded, CASTS excel at ranged combat, Beasts with close combat, and Newmans are the magical race that excel with spells and whatnot. Creating a character is pretty good because you can change their hair colour to whatever you want, you can set how tall or fat they are, and you can even change the pitch of the 10 or so voices they can have to sound lighter or deeper. If you do see a few clones running around, it's because of the lack of clothing there is in the game. They have 4 different clothing shops and yet the amount of unique outfits are almost non-existent. This is an MMORPG guys! Open up the closet a little more we need more clothes! But I digress.

Anyhoo the online experience doesn't really have a story. All you do is go to the various missions that the game has to offer, and try to clear them with a good high score so that you earn the S rank and get the best experience and rewards. You can team up with 5 different people you meet, and all 6 of you can go and accomplish the missions together. It's all about teamwork in this game, so don't expect to battle any real life combatants. And that's really all the online game has to offer. You can buy better weapons and armor and decorations for your own personal room....and you can boast to all of the online people and show them how powerful you are and whatnot. But that's about it. Me? Personally I don't care for MMORPGS and never have. But luckily this game is offline as well, and it features a story mode with a ton of cutscenes and a diverse cast of characters along with it.

In the story mode you take control of a spunky red haired kid named Ethan Waber. Ethan and his sister were just living their lives in this intergalactic space city when evil creatures invaded out of nowhere. These monsters are called the SEED, and when Ethan gets surrounded by them, he gets stabby! After saving his sister from a giant creature and helping out the GUARDIAN hunters, he decides that he should follow in his late father's footsteps and become a GUARDIAN himself, despite the fact that 20 minute's ago he absolutely despised them! This game won't be winning a writing award in the story department. Anyhoo he meets a new set of friends within the GUARDIANS and becomes a sort of hero for the galaxy. The plot continues from there and as you can guess he meets some bad people, he has quite the adventure, and he uncovers the mystery that is the SEED. The one thing that bugged the hell outta me was the fact that the story mode is broken into 12 chapters. In between each of the chapters, we get treated to a preview of next chapter and all the events in it (breaking any suspense that there could be), and replaying the opening cinematic everytime. Apparently we're watching a TV show or something. It makes no sense.

Anyhoo let me get on with how the game actually plays. It's basically a hack and slash experience where you go from point A to point B, killing EVERY monster that gets in your way, then rinse and repeat for the next mission. That's it. Every now and then you'll get a boss fight but for the most part, it will hurt your thumbs with how much you'll be mashing that A button. And literally you only have 2 buttons to work with. You get the A button, and you use Y to do your special attacks. That's it. Your character can't jump, nor is there a difference if he runs and attacks or stands and attacks. It's a dull hack and slash. The more you use your special attack for a certain weapon, the stronger and longer your Y button combos will become. You can also use spells if you're equipped with a rod, and you can use guns. Guns require ammo that start full at first, but then you'll soon run out of bullets and have to wait for it to charge back up. Oh and it doesn't charge unless you have it out in your hands. Cause that's convienient! You get a whole slew of different melee weapons to choose from. You can have one laser sword, two laser swords, two tiny laser swords, claws, and all kinds of stuff. Pick the type of weapon you want early on, because the more time you spend on it, the better your combos will be later. Well, your special combos.

Going through the generic environments feels more like a chore than it needs to be however. You get areas labeled A-1, and A-2 and that really doesn't help should you mistake where you are. You'll come up to closes doorways that are there for no reason at all. You can be in a long forgotten forest, but oh look, a laser grid is blocking your path! That means you have to kill all the enemies in the area for a red key to drop, which you then use to open the grid. And that's all you do! It gets painfully boring after awhile and if the story mode doesn't interest you, I don't know what else will. You can buy new weapons and armor and all that jazz normally seen in a regular RPG. You can also assign yourself a GUARDIAN class type that best suits your need. There are only 3 and it's obvious which one you want to be depending on what kinda fighter you are. I use two laser swords, so naturally I chose the Hunter class which has S ranks with the two laser swords. The more that goes up, the stronger you become. You ascend in levels and I'm not sure how high you can get, but I know you can clear story mode by level 55, which I was when I beat the game.

Speaking of Story Mode, I hate the fact that the offline experience wasn't changed at all from the online experience. The biggest problem about that is that there is no PAUSE MENU! You can't pause the game! The only time you're safe is if you've made damn sure that you cleared every monster in the area or that you're not in a mission. But guess what? When I get a phone call, or my doorbell rings, or maybe I have to see what my crying nephew is doing, I cannot pause the game to go check on my real life problems. So what'll happen is I'll have to leave, and when I get back all I see are the words: GAME OVER. You have any idea how frustrating that is?! Especially because of the fact that save points are literally 20 to 30 minutes away from each other and if you should get killed along the 15-25 minute mark, so sad too bad you have to restart it all over again. Offline treats you like you're one person in an online world, so even in the story mode you can't manipulate what your AI partners do. You can't make the healers heal you, you can't do anything but fight alongside them and hope that they'll attack the monsters with you. 30% of the time you'll fight the monsters, and they'll stand in the background and do nothing. The AI is terrible. If they die, they just revive themselves to full health 15 seconds later. If you die? Game over. They can't revive you with a revive item, you just die. Yay.

The game also has annoying missions where you have to switch out your weapons to search and locate SEED cocoons so that you can taser them with electricty. Basically you have to go into first person view with these binoculars, look at the pods that show up (they start off invisible) then they'll appear on screen so you can zap them. Now you know there's a problem when you can clearly see a cocoon in front of you, but you're not close enough to make the lock-on work. Screw the lock-on I can see it! And if I can see it then what's the problem? And though I may be nitpicking at this point, I really hate Ice creatures. They can freeze you and hit you when you're in the icicle, and it gave me many a game over. Which led to a huge amount of time redoing missions which were repetitive already. Was a continue option to much to ask for? Do we really need to be kicked to the save menu? Yeesh.

Visually the game is not all that impressive. While it does run at a smooth 60 frames per second and I don't recall ever seeing slow down, the fact is that this game could've been on the Dreamcast. But last I checked this was an Xbox 360 title. Soooo, what up Sonic Team? You made Sonic the Hedgehog as well and that game had spectacular graphics...so why are we still dealing with blocky anime stuff here? This game is also for the PS2 but that's no excuse. The one thing I do like about the environments is how big they are. Take the shopping mall in the main hub of the GUARDIANS Space Station. You can see all kinds of flying cars in outer space, you can see buildings that stretch far, far, far into the sky. The backgrounds are definitely a treat to look at because of the size and scope of everything. Too bad the actual worlds themselves aren't massive at all. Still, at least loading isn't a problem. In the sound department however, there's nothing worth mentioning. The voice acting for the story mode is AWFUL. Whoever voiced Ethan Waber: I HATE YOU. Okay not really, but even still the voices really kill the cutscenes of this game. They're either too whiny or not even trying and it just gets annoying after awhile. Music wise....I didn't take anything from it. It's generic anime stuff and that's all you need to know.

And that's Phantasy Star Universe in a nutshell. Personally there are just so many better games out there and this game is far too repetitive to enjoy. Also even if you have Xbox Live, you've gotta pay another membership just to play this game online and to me that just seems like a waste of money with a game as bland as this. It's hack and slash city and I wasn't a fan. If you enjoy Phantasy Star, I'd suggest a rental because it can be addicting and fun in small doses. But as a whole, I was mostly bored or angry at the design problems.

IN THE END...
Phantasy Star Universe is very repetitive. You do the same missions over and over, the battle system is weak, offline play leaves more to be desired, and the game LACKS A PAUSE MENU! There are so many better games out there and this one doesn't deserve extra cash. A rental at best.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/08/07

Game Release: Phantasy Star Universe (US, 10/25/06)