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Systems > Dreamcast > P > Phantasy Star Online > Staff Review
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Review by Felix Arabia
March 14, 2007
The servers were jam-packed with people to play with. You and a group of up to three others would be able to form a team of enemy killing machines by hacking, shooting, and casting deadly magic at the minions of Dark Falz, the traditional Phantasy Star nemesis, who had ruthlessly destroyed the entire Pioneer 1 team. This group of relatively weak scientists had been sent by their home world into outer space so that they could find a new hospitable world to reside on. Their home planet was facing imminent destruction.
After landing on Ragol, a newly discovered world lush with fauna and flora, the Pioneer 1 team built a great structure and channeled their findings back to the rest of the survivors from their now dead home world. These people lived on a super ship called Pioneer 2. Shortly after it reached Ragol, however, all contact with Pioneer 1 was lost in a grand explosion that engulfed the exquisite structure they had constructed. In order to seek answers to what had happened down below in the chaotic tempest, groups of warrior mercenaries – you – were sent to the surface to investigate.
It would have been wise to go armed to the teeth when exploring the leafy forests of Ragol or its dangerous subterranean lava caves. In fact, the further you delved, the more horrific things became. Cavernous mines and ominous ruins provided a memorable experience not only playing a sweet game by combating hordes of renegade robots or twisted mutants, but also by allowing you the chance of getting to know people who lived halfway around the world.
With a card system, you could send your player information to other players you had befriended and vice versa. You could send mail to anyone, provided you had their card and they happened to be online. It was a great way to check and see if your friends were handy for assisting you in a dangerous quest in the third level of cave clearing and demon exercising. Chatting with them was not a problem if you had a keyboard; but if you didn’t, you could use the Dreamcast controller to type less quickly. The obvious drawback to that was that you could not move and type at the same time. There was plenty of c u l8er and other atrocities of the English language. Sonic Team attempted to eliminate language barriers by having preset messages as an option for communication. This worked for conversing with Japanese and European players, but it was rather flat for good old American conversation. Who the hell says ”Wicked!” anyways? Likewise, they attempted to ban the use of foul words – much to my chagrin. You could write fu.ck and get away with it, but when it came to talking about your basement or shoes, you had better believe it would come looking like ba@*#$!t and s@&es.
There also were typical amounts of racism, confusion, and rather seedy characters. The most popular server, Oberon, was nothing but a ghetto full of cheaters, backstabbers, and shady conmen.
Yes, there was plenty of cheating. Rare weapons (which could take literally hundreds of hours to find) were always in high demand, and it got to be that there were more fake ones than legitimate ones. Likewise, thanks to Game Sharks, cheaters could kill other players with a feared player killing glitch. Then they’d go and steal your meseta (currency) and weapon. Why you drop those when you die is beyond me.
Even trading your weapons was dangerous because there weren’t any real means for making a transaction. You would just plop down your end of the bargain and hope that the other player would do the same. Sometimes, you could get burned. Granted, you could always burn someone in retaliation.
Despite all of those nasty practices and such, Phantasy Star Online was just a game about playing online. You could make your own character from a variety of different classes (android, ranger, hunter, etc.) and then you would spend countless hours trying to befriending people, looking for good weapons without much success, and leveling up.
Even though there were only four main levels split into several stages, they provided solid entertainment and enough replayability for thousands of players to spend hundreds of hours on. The graphics were up to date, featuring articulate areas brimming with mystique and excitement. The music fit really well, too. Quiet melodies whispering in the forests of Ragol would crescendo into controlled eruptions of spirit-lifting compositions to perfectly accompany the frantic battles. In its heyday, PSO was as good as any other game for any other console, save for only the grandest games.
But then… people stopped playing.
Checking into the various servers, you could no longer find lobbies filled with chatting players. Gone was the camaraderie, the enjoyment of meeting new people. There was talk that PSO was going to be ported to the upcoming Nintendo Gamecube. Most regulars decided that they would wait for that version to come out, so they quit logging on.
The great server ships with names like Ophelia, Oberon, and Puck became empty. Even the ghettos of Oberon – usually occupied by neo-nazis, virtual prostitutes, and player killing fanatics – became eerily silent and depopulated. The Playstation 2 had come out, and nobody played Dreamcast anymore. After a while, Sega even decided to pull the online function. This spelt doom for the few diehard PSO fans who had so stubbornly refused to stop playing… or upgrade to the pay-to-play ways of Phantasy Star Online Version 2. The only way to play this once shimmering experience was now to play solely offline.
And playing Phantasy Star Offline sucks.
The levels are the same. The graphics are still crisp, and in the forest, even still somewhat gorgeous. Even the music is still good… but the massively multiplayer online aspect has been lost in the annals of time. Only the most rabid of the PSO diehard can squeeze enjoyment out of the once awesome segments that now have been made boring thanks to the loss of the online mode. Playing very hard mode by yourself and facing a room full of charging beasts, claws cocked to kill, is nowhere as enjoyable as doing it with friends… or even total strangers for that matter.
Thus, Phantasy Star Online becomes remembered as a great game when it was capable of going online, but only to those who had the luxury of experiencing it online. Offline mode advocates will tell you it is still a great game. Don’t believe them. They’re ignorant of the forgotten excellence, and had they gotten the chance to play online, they would not believe their ludicrous claims of offline mode excellence.
Even finding a newer version on a newer console may not remedy what was once so good. Phantasy Star Online was a pioneer for online console gaming, and now it is but a mere memory – a bright memory marred by a sad, sad reminder: online games, while fun, eventually become useless. This is the perfect example of then and now.
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Weak Though there may be a few bright spots, the overall product is fairly weak and does not come recommended. |
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Staff reviews represent the opinion of the individual staff member that wrote them and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the site staff as a whole. If you disagree with the contents of this review, you may click to leave feedback on our dedicated forum. Thank you!
| HG 2010 Fundraising Progress: $233 / $3000 (8%) |
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Title: Phantasy Star Online |
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Phantasy Star Online Version 2 is another Dreamcast game in the Action RPG genre that has been attracting activity lately, so you might want to check it out and see what all of the fuss is about!
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