The Phantasy Star series began on Sega's first console, the Megadrive, as Sega's answer to the popular Dragon Warrior. It went on to earn a reputation as the Sega Genesis's answer to the Final Fantasy series on the SNES, with four titles total in the series having been produced before the storyline was finally completely resolved in Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millenium. It wouldn't be until the Dreamcast's release that Sega would revisit its flagship RPG series with Phantasy Star Online in the year 2000. This release, Sega's play at the burgeoning MMORPG market and one of the first console-based MMOs, would be followed up by several expanded re-releases for the Gamecube and Xbox in the years to come, a re-release on PC titled Blue Burst, and finally the release of a brand new game called Phantasy Star Universe for the PC, PS2, and Xbox 360 in 2006.
Phantasy Star Universe, another MMO that can be thought of as a revised PSO released in 2006, promised a re-visitation to the roots of Phantasy Star with three planets to explore, updated graphics, a more explicit story than PSO had, and severeal revisions in gameplay to make combat feel more fluid and dynamic. But what did the six years' difference between the two games really amount to? Let's find out...
Think about Diablo, but in space. Players explore dungeons, kill monsters, fight bosses, acquire loot, and salavate over rare items. Phantasy Star Online is in fact so similar to Diablo that it's frightening. It has the same melee-ranged-spellcasting dynamic, substituting swords, bows, and spells with beam sabers, guns, and techniques. It even has the same dungeon exploration scheme, with a single dungeon that players dive deeper and deeper into while unraveling the mysteries of some unknown disaster. Also, like Diablo, PSO features no cow level. Like Diablo II, though, PSU features a series of cow-like enemies and a level filled with them where its predecessor did not, along with a graphical upgrade, a number of interface changes, and a few new ideas. All that aside, though, both PSO and PSU reflect a pretty typical multiplayer-centered Action-RPG with Sega's trademark Phantasy Star brand. For the sake of clarification and ease of reading I'm going to first exclusively analyze PSO, then provide a comparison to PSU later on.
Players occupy one of three classes: Hunter, Force, or Ranger. These classes reflect melee, spellcasting, and ranged combat specialties, respectively. In the ideal multiplayer situation with three or four players in a group the players will almost always fall into specializing in one of them for efficiency's sake. A hunter will engage in melee, absorbing what damage there is to be absorbed and keeping enemies occupied with the one class of weapons that is almost guarenteed to stun or knock them back; a ranger will pick enemies off one at a time from long range or soften up a group of them as they approach the other players, keeping out of reach as much as possible; and a force will engage in support, casting techniques that increase the strength and defense of the other players, decrease it for the enemies, heal the party, and do extremely large amounts of damage to monsters-- multiple at a time--when not casting all the other different techniques. Without the hunter enemies will approach the other two characters and nothing will be there to intercept; both constantly have to distract themselves with fleeing. Without the Ranger the Hunter is on his own and has no one to watch his back while enemies approach from multiple directions except the Force, who will have to spend large amounts of TP (this game's equivalent of MP or Mana) blasting them for him with magic. Without the Force there is no way for the other two to operate at 110% efficiency and both the other players will have to fill in with support techniques intermittantly, thus distracting them from their primary roles.
It's perhaps notable that PSO doesn't treat the race/class relationship the same way other MMOs do. There's Humans, who are basically just normal, Newmans, which are essentially space-elves (I prefer Vulcans, but that's me) and cast techniques better, and Casts, which are Androids and have heightened physical characteristics, are the only race that can use trap items, and have the ability to see invisible traps, but possess positively no technique-casting ability. Even with Casts it isn't all that unusual, but unlike other MMOs which allow players to choose race, class, and gender as they please, PSO forces them to choose one of four packages within each class that are composed of a race and a gender. For instance, within Hunter, there's Human Male, Newman Female, Cast Male, and Cast Female, and within Force there's Human and Newman males and females. What's more, a character's appearance is rigidly dictated by this choice, with a few options in terms of hair style and color, outfit color, and face texture, but nothing else, so there's very little room for aesthetic options. Each of the four sub-choices always has different stats and a different leveling progression, making it a meaningful choice at least and sub-specializing the classes further. I'd like to be able to generalize on the rules Sonic Team used to figure this out, but it seems like there's always some exception because not all the options are always present. There's no Cast Forces, of course, but there's also no Newman males except the one that's a Force, nor are there Newman rangers at all. It seems less like they decided to fit stats to a race/class/gender and more like they had four sets of stats under each class and fit the race and gender to whatever seemed to make the most sense. It's difficult to even generalize on what the four subtypes are because they're different for each class. Under Hunter there's one super-physical offense-based, one super-physical defense-based, one average, and one technique-specialist. Under Ranger there's two fairly average types, one of which has more defense and one of which has more offense, two super-physical types, one of which has higher defense and one of which is a better aim. Under Force it's just an arbitrary mess. Saying that the human male is the physical strongest of them is like saying that of four worker ants lined up side-by-side the one second from the left is the toughest. Thankfully no logic is completely necessary for making a choice as the character selection screen provides a handy pie graph displaying the balance of all the characters' starting stats, and the choices do involve fairly meaningful trade-offs that dictate certain playstyles possible within each class, usually revolving around technique-casting frequency or just how careful players can be when encountering enemies.
All classes are able to employ all the basic play styles of the game, albeit at varying levels of strength from one to another, such that players have the self-sufficiency to be able to deal with any situation in single-player with moderate difficulty. The only thing barring each of them from using one another's weapons were their stats, which were used as prerequisites for being able to use higher levels of equipment. Eventually a Hunter at high enough levels with high enough ATA (Atack Accuracy) could equip a rifle, and a Force with high enough ATP (Attack Power) could use a saber. None of them, however, could use any of each other's weapons as effectively as players of the class they were meant for. Players' classes govern the advancement of their stats, and invariably the ones required for a class's specialty weapons will rise the quickest, therefore putting stronger blades in the Hunter's hands, more powerful guns in a Ranger's holster, and more potent spells (as well as more potent staves and rods) in a Force's arsenal.
Some gamers like to criticize stat prerequisites in a game such as this, arguing that if they can find the weapon they should be able to use it, but the stat prereqs do two important things. First, they elliminate the possibility of outlier scenarios that could break--for however short a time--class barriers. For instance, a low-level Force with an ordinary starting Cane might find a +3 Handgun and decide it's more efficient than using techniques until he finds a higher-level Cane. In a more extreme example he could find a rifle so much more powerful than his current techniques that he wouldn't use them for the next dozen levels, but this is unlikely. The stat requirements bar him from using these weapons until he's at such a level that the enemies that might be threatened by them become trivial and it hardly matters what he equips; his techniques could vaporize them one way or another thanks to his now (relatively) ultra-high MST (Mental Strength), and the handgun is now there for TP conservation more than anything. Second, the stat prereqs amplify the attraction to a class's own weapons and play style; continuing from the previous example, by this time the Force can equip a handgun he already has available to him a much more powerful assortment of Canes, Wands, and Staves, and there is a very clear advantage to equipping them. He will therefore--not necessarily even consciously--take the path of least resistance towards playing his class the way it was meant to be played.
Diablo also used that dynamic but PSO improves upon its spiritual predecessor in that it also featured some exotic, highly specialized weapons that couldn't be used outside a particular class at all. 3D graphics, animation, and collision allowed the game's designers to incorporate the speed, reach, and exact swing of the weapons into gameplay as a practical matter rather than simply as a presentational aspect on top of a series of statistics, adding the extra layer of depth to combat necessary for this specialization. Examples of such specialized weapons include the Ranger's shotguns, which fire five shots at once over a spread of enemies, and the Hunter's claws, which are quick, double-striking weapons like daggers but with greater power and an even shorter reach. Specialized weapons like these are one of the things that help guide players into more specialied roles in groups. Most of them aren't exceptionally viable for single-player combat. The shotgun, for instance, is too slow and too weak for a Ranger to be able to efficiently defend himself with it alone, and the claws, because of their extremely short reach, are impractical for Hunters fighting on their own against more than a single opponent unless they're overwhelmingly stronger than the enemies they're facing. But fighting in a group with a Force alongside them a shotgun is suddenly the most efficient way of softening a large group of enemies up and a set of claws can make much quicker work of any of them than most other, more versatile weapons. This is just one of many possible examples of how specialized weapons in PSO help guide members in groups into strategic niches befitting of their individual classes' combat roles.
Weapons themselves feature typical RPG elements. First there's the usual "+1, +2, +3" distinctions which provide increases in damage--although not in increments of +1 at a time but rather in the form of some function of the weapon's base attack and the number given after the "+." This is a game that spans across 255 levels, after all, and where attack ratings range from 15 to well over 1500. Weapons can also feature special bonuses or penalties against the four specific types of monsters in the game--Nature (Natural), A. Beast (Altered Beast), Machine, and Dark. They correspond to the four levels of the first four dungeons from PSO Episode 1: the Forest (Nature); the Caves (A. Beast); the Mines (Machine); and Ruins (Dark); which are populated entirely with one type or another. These bonuses are given in the form of a percentile value. For instance if you'd deal 200 damage normally and you hit a Natural monster with a weapon that's got a 15% against Nature, it deals 230 damage instead. These percentiles are always given in increments of 5, rarely climb higher than 25%, and are awarded based on sheer luck. Weapons with high percentiles are just as likely to be dropped on high levels as they are on low levels--barring any bonuses to luck players might have acquired, of course, and weapons that feature such bonuses can be easily distinguished by the green text that represents them in the menus. Finally, weapons also feature special abilities based on keywords like "burning" and "king's." In addition to being able to use a normal attack and a heavier "charged" attack players can opt to use one of these abilities if their weapon has one. The effects can be rewarding and range from dealing extra fire damage to draining health, TP, or EXP from enemies, but using the special attack associated with a weapon runs a high risk as it takes even longer to charge up than a heavy attack and has a much higher miss rate. Although this seems like a really clunky way to deal with keywords on weapons--I expect many players would just as soon have a flaming saber always deal flame damage rather than just when they use an unreliable special attack--it does have its advantages in that many unique weapons feature extremely inventive special attacks. The Lavis Cannon, for instance, is a saber that can throw blade waves at the cost of TP, and the Heaven Punisher is a pistol that can cause bullets to rain from the sky all over the battlefield. These kinds of attacks wouldn't be possible if the use of a weapon's special aspects weren't participated with directly.
The wide array of values--bonuses to attack, accuracy, and magic, bonuses against specific monsters, and special attacks--give PSO the advantage of having an incredibly broad potential for different weapons, such that the number of unique weapons--each of which feature unique and interesting-looking art assets--is much higher than the number of mundane ones. Combined with the potential for specialized, class-exclusive weapons, many of which range into the exotic to say the least, this gives players a great deal of loot to look forward to finding, rewarding them by both providing an interesting new combat option that has the potential to broadly effect their strategies and fighting styles and by presenting a new aesthetic toy.
Armor is somewhat less interesting in itself, featuring only defense boosts and boosts to elemental resistances and having no impact on a character's appearance apart from a continuous particle effect that some high-level rare armors possess. One thing that they do have is the potential for customization as they can feature a number of slots for head, arm, body, and leg modules that provide different bonuses, such as the "God Arm" which grants a significant boost to accuracy. Some of these modules provide more overt physical bonuses, such as faster casting speed with techniques and faster running speed. The inclusion of these slots and modules is something of a redemption in the otherwise flat landscape of armor. Like with the percentages on weapons, the number and types of slots a suit of armor possesses is entirely dependant on luck. Though the modules themselves aren't all that interesting--players advanced enough to be finding modules know well enough to try and max out stats that reflect their class--they do present advanced players with a little math to do as they calculate what equipment they would like to be using. They may possess the next generation of armor, with higher defense and greater elemental resistances, but it may feature fewer slots for their modules and they may be unwilling to make the tradeoff. In many cases the bonuses from those slots will outweigh the extra 50 defense. Elemental resistances can sometimes top that set of priorities, though, especially in the case of fighting high-level boss monsters.
Shields are treated much the same but lack slots and have a balance between defense and evasion rather than simply linearly increasing defense. They come in two varieties: Barriers and Shields. Barriers can be wielded by anyone while Shields are open only to Hunters and Rangers. Players are given a gamble to make here as they must decide whether they want to bet that their evasion will kick in if it's high enough and monsters simply won't hit them as often or whether they want to bet that they will most definitely be hit and want to reduce damage as much as possible accross the board. It's not the most interesting piece of equipment in the game as players' preferences will tend to be dictated by whether their other equipment and stats add up to enough to provide a strong enough EVP (Evasion) that a good shield would put them over the top, and even then it tends to be dictated just by what happens to provide the strongest defense bonus. Shields only really get interesting at the rare and unique levels when they begin adding special bonuses, such as with the Merge series, which enhances the power of various lines of techniques at the cost of defense, or the Love Heart, a shield that boosted Defense by 96 points on top of its usual 198 points whenever it was in the presence of one or more other players with another Love Heart.
The last and maybe the most intriguing piece of major equipment that players have at their disposal are MAGs, which are tiny, adorable little floating camera thingies that double as an ongoing A-life simulation and as perhaps the most potent peice of equipment in a character's inventory. They can perform powerful summon attacks, boost stats, and even produce emergency responses when their owners are dying or facing a boss monster. Each MAG feature Strength, Endurance, Mind, and Agility stats and add them as direct boosts to the player's corresponding stats. As the game progresses players are able to feed their MAGs mundane, consumable recovery items such as Monomates (IE health potions), antivenoms, and Moon Atomizers (IE revive potions) in order to increase those stats. Each stat has a gauge next to it that's based on a percentile, and when it fills up the stat will increase by 1. MAGs have a level equal to each of these stats' values added up, so that a MAG with 1 END, 2 STR, 0 MNT, and 1 AGI is level 4. Every so often the MAG will hit a level threshold where it will "evolve," changing appearance and gaining a new "Photon Blast," which players can activate whenever they fill a special Photon Blast gauge that wraps around the circle next to their health gauge. Photon Blasts are, as their name suggests, powerful, wide-sweeping attacks that can annihilate groups of enemies very quickly and vary by area of effect, although some of them aren't attacks at all and instead give temporary stat boosts or do mass heals. Any MAG may gain up to three different Photon Blasts, though they go through as many as four forms--including the default, base form which features no photon blast to speak of--before their level maxes out and their stats can't be improved upon. The way the items a player feeds their MAG affects it depends on which form it has, and the way a MAG evolves depends on the balance between each of its stats at the time during which it levels up. The lower-level MAGs are much easier to feed and gain stats quickly, but higher-level ones will both increase and decrease the gauges for particular stats depending on the items fed to it and build up tolerances for multiples of particular items fed to it in a row, becoming less and less affected, for instance, by being fed multiple Star Atomizers. They also feature a set of stats called "Sync" and "IQ" that raise and lower depending on what items a particular MAG does or doesn't "like" to eat. Sync boosts the power of a MAG's photon blasts and is represented as a percentile by which it increases its power. IQ is a sort of morale or happiness rating that determines how likely the MAG is to produce emergency response such as a spontaneous healing spell or a buff spell.
The key thing that makes this equipment system work is that the choices players are given are all interesting. I've seen games where equipment just isn't fun to deal with. Either the choice is all too clear--just take the armor with the bigger number and the bonus to whatever stat is most relevant to you at the time--or players are put in too much control of what the good choice is, as in Morrowind and Oblivion where players can train themselves to get ten times more armor bonus from light armor than from heavy armor if they so choose. It's so mechanical. There just isn't any thought to be put into it. Does it make the numbers go up? Yes? Use it! Here, there's interesting choices and dillemmas on every front--at least if you play it long enough to get beyond the basics. And hard decisions are the spice of good gaming. To spice things up a little more, Sega brought the names that people give their characters into the equation. On creation the ASCII value the letters in a character's name are run through a computation; depending on the result, players are placed into one of many "Section IDs," which are indicated by a color-coded symbol somewhere on their outfit. This Section ID determines the frequency of different types of loot that players can find. One ID might find more staves while another might find slicers or swords. Though many people have programmed their own Section ID calculators to determine what name will yield what ID the formula is otherwise completely hidden, and without these calculators nobody would know about this subtle yet significant function. Without players knowing what their name will yield it may as well be random, and even then in general people will still tend towards what they like rather than what gives them a good ID. At the point where it starts really mattering--two difficulty levels in and about 70 character levels up, when rare items start showing up--it's far too late to go back and make a new character to get a new Section ID. All of the player's progress would be lost. It is therefore vital for players to team up in online play in order to find and trade the loot they want.
Beyond the interactions between equipment there isn't a whole lot to say about Phantasy Star Online. The dungeons are just a series of rooms and corridors for the sole purpoes of segregating one battle from another. In a sense they are random, but only in that the game will place the level entrance and exit teleporters and certain locking mechanisms and gates in random rooms; the topology of the dungeon map never changes. Enemies will teleport into the dungeon's rooms in waves, and all of them are separated by gates which must be unlocked either by killing everything that moves or by finding and flipping a switch somewhere else in the dungeon. In multiplayer they sometimes require players to stand on a series of pads simultaneously, and on higher difficulties sometimes traps are present that are invisible until triggered and have to be revealed with an item or with a trap-vision ability that Android characters have. Monsters are all very basic, coming in three flavors of average grunt (normal, strong, super-strong), one variety of super-huge brute, one variety of miniature punk, one variety of elite monster, and leaving some room for odder enemies here and there. Apart from the grunt enemies; the Boomas, Sharks, and Deminians; the monsters are all far from being cookie-cutters of one another and pose unique and sometimes creative strategic challenges, even when their roles obviously overlap. The Hildebear in the forest, for instance, is a huge beast that spits fire at a distance and clubs its enemies with its enormous fists or performs leaping stomp attacks. Its equivalent in the caves is the Grass Assassin, a mantis that can hold its enemies in place with web-like spit. In the mines it's the Garanz, a humongous mech that fires increasing numbers of homing missiles as it takes damage and loses armor; and in the ruins it's the Dark Belra, a massive, lumbering, almost statue-like alien monster that can launch its arms off at ultra-high speeds for super-long-range strikes, making nowhere in the room safe. Some of them, like the wolves in the forest, work best in groups, gaining bonuses for having a pack leader and becoming weaker when their leader is killed. Others are more complex in their behavior, such as the Chaos Sorcerer, which teleports around rooms and hurls spells. All the enemies share this pattern of increasing complexity, and all of them are a great deal more active than the traditional MMO monster; again noting the relatively early Hiledbear's ability to leap across rooms in order to close large gaps between itself and its prey as a small example. Enemies like the aforementioned wolves even go so far as to circle their prey, and the centaur-like Chaos Bringer in the ruins charge opponents with their weapons like a runaway freight train. The exceptions are the most basic enemies like the grunts, which all have the same zombie-like attack pattern, virtually the same animations, and no differences apart from increasing strength and speed. The bosses are the real highlight of the monsters, though, being both visually imposing as well as formidable opposition. All of them feature their own special, customized room and operate on attack patterns like a Mega Man boss, sometimes focusing their attacks on particular characters and sometimes using the whole room as their playground. The Dragon in the forest area, for instance, will fly into the air and spit fire at individual characters, but it'll also dive into the ground and burrow in varying patterns through the dome that serves as its arena. They're all large enough to feature multiple targeting points, and they're never inactive. Every second they're either preparing to attack or attacking. Even when the dragon is just walking around the arena it's dangerous, with its clawed feet being able to trample players.
For the limited options that players have in combat and certain deficiencies in the controls--combat is notably stiff in PSO--the enemies are never uninteresting to fight, and varying configurations of them combined with increasingly better loot are more than enough to keep players interested. It should be apparent that it's a very short game, though. Each episode of it is about four full dungeons long, with two or three levels per each dungeon. That's why whenever players beat one episode they unlock a higher difficulty level, ranging through Normal, Hard, Very Hard, and Ultimate. These difficulty levels serve as a New Game +, allowing players to carry over their character and equipment from a previous game into a new, tougher one. The easy way of gauging them is to say that the Forest on the next difficulty up is about as high-level as the third-level Ruins from the previous one--though this is speaking purely in terms of stats. Only at the Hard Ruins and the Very Hard levels do players start really finding rare and unique items and weapons, so that can be said to be where the game truly begins. In some cases the stats increase, but in others the enemies behave more complexly and start unloading attacks that they were holding back on in previous difficulties, making the higher difficulties both higher-level sets of dungeons that make a reasonable challenge for higher-level players as well as genuinely more strategically difficult. The grand daddy of them is Ultimate, which goes a step even beyond that by changing every boss and monster's appearance completely--from the model right down to the texture--as well as making significant alterations to their behavior. Sometimes they just move faster and hit harder, but sometimes the change can be incredibly drastic. The gopher-like Boomas and GoBoomas, for instance, are replaced by turtle-like Barbles and Bartles, which behave more or less the same; but the GigoBooma, the strongest of the three, is replaced by a mantis-like monster called a Tollaw, an elite monster that's much faster and far more intimidating than the Bartles and has longer reach. Even the bosses change, adopting completely overhauled attack patterns.PSO's expansions in Episode 1 & 2 and Blue Burst brought an especially great boost to its longevity by providing sets of new dungeons, bosses, and enemies. The other episodes even went as far as to mix up the enemy types (IE including Altered Beasts, Machines, and Dark enemies all in the same level together) within each dungeon where Episode 1 kept every dungeon completely homogenous. Some things about them were a little cut-rate, with Episode 2's first two dungeons being populated with monsters from the last Episode and the first two dungeons containing (admittedly very unique and interesting) remixes of Episode 1's first boss, but they each made up for it in that the new content that they provided was extremely creative and sometimes departed dramatically from the forumla the first episode did in the structures of its dungeons. The third dungeon in Episode 2, for instance, is the Wilds, which is composed of three drastically different sub-dungeons with mini-bosses its own unique enemies. It even had a hidden sub-area that could only be unlocked via online play. Of course, it didn't hurt that each new episode also featured new weapons and loot to keep players hooked.
In general PSO proved one of Sega's most successful efforts in the post Dreamcast era, being one of the few games in its library that survived past the death of its console efforts and the only one to merit full-length, nearly sequel-quality expansions, and the reasons are clear. Although the class system had some annoying aesthetic limits the characters' roles were very clear and managed to be well-defined without being so strict that players couldn't be self-sufficient in single-player. This is in part due to the strong equipment list, featuring interesting options for players of all types as well as specialized, class-specific ones that helped define group roles more strongly. All of this combined with a competent and creative presentation and a reasonably challenging variety of enemies and dungeons made for one of the most competent pre-Xbox Live online multiplayer experiences that people could experience on a console.
Phantasy Star Online had its share of problems. As I mentioned briefly before the controls were very stiff; three-hit comboes required unusually precise timing, and the individual hits didn't chain together very fluidly as there would always be a pause between attacks as a side-effect of the design. Special attacks were unimpressive but for those of the unique weapons and generally extremely unreliable. Meanwhile movement was often hampered as players couldn't choose how fast they moved; if enemies were nearby their characters would automatically slow down. Presumably the game assumed that they would want to attack the enemy and dropped them automatically into a fighting stance, but all this led to was a whole lot of unnecessary and frustrating damage being taken. Many players cite these awkward controls as PSO's key issue, though I would cite the lack of aesthetic options and the online play structure as being more important. First, being able to customize characters in every way, shape, and form possible is very important to MMO players and has been ever since Ultima Online and Everquest, being the factor that both helps players carve out their identity both in their own minds and in that of other players. It's important if only for the reason that you need to be able to pick yourself out from a crowd. Second and even more importantly, the online structure was just poor. PSO had all of the online complexity of Diablo, allowing players to fight and explore the world in groups of up to four or six or so at a time, but Sega still saw fit to use their own private servers instead of allowing players to host games themselves. During PSO's brief run on the Dreamcast this wasn't as much of an issue because the online service was free, though it did have some security holes as it went largely unmoderated and was frequently hacked, but the problems really surfaced when PSO moved to Gamecube, PC, and Xbox, and Sega started demanding a $10 a month fee for what wasn't even a full MMORPG experience. Xbox owners had to pay the fee for PSO on top of the Xbox Live fees, further exaserbating the issue. What's more, Sega hadn't cleared up is security issues even with the revenue it was pulling in from online fees. In general it just wasn't worth it to go for online play and PSO should have been a game that operated on player-run hosts, so the player base dwindled and it didn't see quite the success it should have.
Enter Phantasy Star Universe, Sega's play at revising its flagship online series and addressing some of these issues. By 2006 the Xbox 360 had hit the shelves and the PS2 was in its heyday and the Dreamcast-based technologies of Phantasy Star Online were well out of date. PSU was announced at E3 with a grandiose CG trailer, hyping Phantasy Star's fans up as it displayed an epic adventure across three planets--just like the classic Genesis games--with the same flashy high-tech aesthetic as PSO. As time went on they released a slow trickle of gameplay features, some of which were incredibly flashy but totally enigmatic. I myself kept trying to guess how they would work constantly, having recently entered college. October '06 rolled around and Sega released it in the US. Those of us who were on the edge of our seats over this game nabbed it off the shelves immediately. We stuck it in our consoles or PCs and started playing.
PSU features one improvement right off the bat in that it has a more traditional MMORPG character creation structure, leaving race, class, and gender completely up to the player and dissociating the simple aesthetic changes from stats. Otherwise it's pretty well the same, as to be expected. The classes are Hunter, Force, and Ranger, and they serve the same roles as in PSO. There's an additional race called Beasts, which are essentially large, muscular cat-people. The new relationship is that humans are average, Newmans are better at casting techniques, Beasts are better at physical combat, and Casts--who are now no longer unable to cast techniques--tend to be better with guns, which makes it a more well-rounded group of races but maybe too directly so. Any savvy player can put two and two together and understand that a Beast Hunter, a Cast Ranger, or a Newman Force are all the best options speaking from a group dynamics standpoint. When the rather intuitive relationship is understood fully--and this is understanding that can be derived from the manual if not from the characters' appearance--the choice becomes less interesting. The only fudge factor is aesthetics, which are a poor substitute for legitimately thought-out play styles. You could make the argument that there are legitimate alternate play styles within each race-class combination. Most races and classes can be rationalized. Newmans are more agile and have higher evasion than humans, so they can make good Hunters for those who want to avoid damage. Casts have higher defense than Newmans or Humans and can sometimes be more attractive Hunters to those who expect to absorb a lot of damage rather than deal it, so they can make good Hunters. Beasts have high endurance but not as low a spellcasting ability as Casts so they make better Forces for those who are afraid of taking damage.
Ordinarily this system would at least not be broken, but there's something else. Casts and Beasts both have a special gauge that fills up as players kill monsters and take damage, much like the MAG's photon blast meter in PSO. When it's full they can trigger a special attack; either a massive SUV weapon in the case of Casts that attacks across a wide range for massive damage on dozens of enemies at a time or in the case of Beasts a vicious werebeast transformation called a Nanoblast that boosts attack and movement speeds, defense, and damage significantly. They each come in multiple varieties, from missile launchers to huge miniguns in the case of SUV weapons and in speed, defense, attack-based varieties for Nanoblasts--as well as one special one that provides temporary invincibility on top of being more well-rounded--but all you really need to know is that Casts and Beasts get them and the other races have positively no equivalent. There are no penalties associated with using them, no downsides associated with the races that counterbalance these significant benefits, so it's almost stupid to use any of the other races and definitely stupid to use anything other than a Beast for a Hunter or a Cast for a Ranger. From an aesthetic standpoint they're too cool-looking and appealing to ignore and from an intrinsic standpoint there are no other things in the game that approach the level of power that they bestow. So in addition to being the best at a couple of key aspects of the game they're irrefutibly the best, making the character creation choices even less interesting. To make issues worse players' stats don't advance by way of classes in PSU but rather by way of races, which makes the discrepency between different race-class relationships even more apparent. What's more, players are free to change classes at a whim just by visiting an NPC at a desk in the game's main hub city. The classes have their own stat bonuses and their own levels, but the class-levels max out at 10 and make little difference apart from weapon restrictions. Overall in this area PSU took one fairly progressive step forward from PSO, then about eight giant steps backward.
The combat in PSU behaves virtually the same as PSO, with players taking similar weapons and similar roles. The animations are much more fluid and dynamic-looking than in its predecessor and the timing-based system is no longer present, so players' clumsiness with the buttons is no longer an excuse for not being able to complete a combo. But there's more unsettling changes. In PSO the interface was fully customizeable, and by holding the L and R buttons players could access different sets of quick options--either techniques, varying types of attacks (normal, heavy, special), or various items. In PSU the interface is rigid and control options vary entirely by equipment. Instead of employing the quick options it employs an "action pallette," which features a series of about five quick items and sets of weapons and is navigated by holding the shoulder button down and browsing through the menu vertically by way of a control stick. This system is central to the game because much of it revolves around switching weapons...
And this is where the pain begins...
In order to go into how combat works we need to examine how weapons work. In PSO there were attack and accuracy attributes as well as special attacks. In PSU there's attack and accuracy attributes as well as "PP," or "Photon Points," which take the place of TP. Characters don't have their own and draw it directly from their weapons. Instead of special attacks there are Photon Arts for melee weapons, Bullets for guns, and Techniques for caster weapons. Each weapon has a varying number of slots to which players can equip these special attacks--which means that players need to switch between them frequently to obtain the attacks and abilities that they need or want. Before we go too far into that, though, let's examine the different types of special abilities as special attacks proved an extremely important aspect of PSO's weapon differentiation.
Photon Arts are the equivalent of PSO's special attacks, and they level-up as they're used. Each melee weapon can be equipped with exactly one at a time, and it fills an alternate attack button on the controls. Naturally they consume the weapon's PP each time they're used. As they develop they often gain more attacks to add onto an ongoing combo. Most Photon Arts are multi-hit rather than single hit, and most of them do as much as or more damge than normal attacks. In general they're extremely dynamic pieces of eye-candy, too, but there's a problem. For every different type of weapon there's exactly two photon arts. They're never elementally aligned and have different configurations of hits and areas of attack. In every instance for every weapon, one always comes out better than the other, hitting more times in a row and subsequently dealing far more damage. In general they're also clumsily handled, with some of them doing far more damage than even the most potent attack techniques and many of them spreading the damage around over ludicrous areas of effect. One such Photon Art is the double-saber's Tornado Dance, which propels players forward faster than they can run, spinning sideways and usin the double-saber as a propeller, hitting many more times than can be counted in the process and allowing players to steer. Whether it's against a single large enemy that the tornado can hit twelve dozen times with a single attack or against a whole group of opponents, this attack kills quickly. It's one of several clumsy and mis-balanced attacks that can down a boss monster in twelve seconds or less (believe me, I've measured it). How can we begin to talk about group dynamics when things like this exist? Groups just aren't necessary. Any player can obtain the power necessary to kill any boss in an absurdly quick and tidy fashion on their own. Worse yet, it's boring, taking the excitement out of boss encounters and battles by reducing it to a spam-fest of special attacks. By the time I or anyone else I observed playing this game got to the point where attacks like this were available, we were ignoring normal attacks and entirely depending on these. Some of them are definitely cool-looking, and they're certainly a lot more fluid and dynamic than anything in PSO, but Photon Arts are a huge game-breaking element, and what's worse, they're boring.
There's one type of bullet for each element under each type of gun and it merely changes the elemental alignment and color of the gun's blasts. It behaves like ammo, draining PP with each shot and defaulting to non-elemental shots that don't drain PP when not equipped. Here's the problem: elemental alignment is an extremely poor criteria for special forms of ammunition. They can either be more powerful, just as powerful, or weaker than using normal shots depending on the enemy, which means that unless the enemies have an uneven distribution of elemental alignments the different bullets are just pointless PP drains on more than two thirds of enemies. In the best-case scenario the player understands that a particular area has enemies that are of a particular elemental alignment and that a particular opposite alignment would be especially called for, so it becomes another boring clear choice. Any way you slice it, Bullets are boring. What's worse, in a game positively rife with broken mechanics like maggots on a corpse, they're ineffectual.
Techniques are bound to caster weapons and caster weapons only. Already we have a problem. If players want to use them--whether they're healing techniques or attack techniques--they have to sacrifice the ability to defend themselves. It's not just like in PSO where caster weapons simply didn't make good fighting implements and had lower damage stats than their cousins but a high boost to technique casting; you actually can't attack with them at all. All caster weapons have at least two slots for techniques here--one of which overwrites normal attacks. To do a normal attack players have to switch to a different weapon that's more suited to them, but if they want to go back to using techniques they have to switch back again. What's worse the slot limitation is overly restrictive. At best players get up to four slots by wielding a staff, which is fewer slots for techniques than they could reasonably have in PSO. It's not a strategic limitation because players can just bring another staff with them in the action palette--which also provides double the PP. It's just a hassle and an inconvenience where there didn't have to be one. What's worse, the techniques are really lazily defined. In PSO there were three sets of attack techniques and each one in each progression had a completely different effect. In PSU many of the techniques substitute one particle for another along with one elemental alignment for another and otherwise have nearly exactly the same effects. There's really only about five. They're definitely interesting to use since they can be pretty dynamic and it's rare to see spellcasting like this in an action-based game, but not in so much a strategic sense--especially because they're an incredible hassle to use. The verdict: not boring, just really annoying and overshadowed by the more powerful, less risky Photon Arts.
My, but this game is poorly balanced! To top everything off, characters are turned into a diluted mishmash of roles by the action pallette, which allows players to--get ready for this--dual wield certain weapons. All one-handed weapons can be mixed-and-matched except with weapons of the same class; IE you can't dual wield pistols, or use one pistol and one machinegun, or use one saber and one dagger, or use two wands, or any other such combination. Dual pistols are actually a separate weapon from single pistols, though they behave more or less the same as if players had one pistol in each slot. The same holds true of double sabers. The equivalent of dual wands is a staff. Wielding a saber alone, though, is the same as wielding a saber with a gun equipped as a side-arm, so there's never any reason for players not to have two weapons except in the case that they're using a two-handed one. This alleviates some of the nuisance in using techniques since players can equip a saber and a wand, but not by a lot because it still limits them to only two at a time in that instance without switching weapons--to an entirely different set of them, because weapons are always equipped to the acton pallette in pairs. That means if one weapon isn't yet out of juice but another one is you still have to switch, which is just plain inconvenient. But the worst thing about this system is that every player being equipped with up to five quickly acessed pairs of weapons at once means that every player is also perfectly versatile, being capable of switching from ranged support to melee combat without even a moment's notice. There's a reason people are limited to one weapon at a time in other games and a reason D&D makes being able to swap them quickly worth a whole feat. Unlimited versatility in a role-playing game is just as bad as having unlimited ammo in a first-person shooter. Weapons in RPGs--especially action RPGs where the weapon's very animation has a major impact on the way it's employed--are the equivalent of characters' strategic roles, and switching from one weapon to another in under a second is just plain unfair to players who dedicate themselves to a role and especially unfair to the designers themselves, who have to somehow come up with monsters that can challenge a group of characters that can adapt to any role--not to mention characters that can deal unreasonable amounts of damage with painfully poorly balanced special attacks.
In short the whole combat system compromises all of the values that made the original in PSO effective, wrought with one clumsy design decision after another not in the interest of meaningful design but rather in the interest of superficial design. The designers tried to find ways of getting players to be able to do everything along with ways of trying to make things look cooler compared to PSO's relatively lower visual production values without any forethought on the consequences these changes could have on balance.
Unfortunately it doesn't stop there. To finish this game off, Sega flushed the excellent equipment catalogue from the previous game down the toilet. Because weapons are composed of much more simplistic parts--accuracy, damage, and PP--and special attacks are now a separate, interchangeable element, the progression becomes much more linear. The only thing there is to differentiate one weapon from another is power. It's such that PSU originally had exactly one set of unique weapons at the top of each progression where PSO had scores of them. With nothing special to any of them it's hardly worth playing but to find different varieties of weapons to experiment with, and PSU runs out of those quickly. Worse yet what players can find is often rendered superfluous by the already highly developed photon arts that they will already have at their disposal by the time they see a new weapon. With the key motivation of the game thoroughly eviscerated the only thing left is the excitement of new enemies, locations, and bosses. The bosses are especially disappointing and sit next to PSO's bosses like a mouse next to the Incredible Hulk, often sitting completely still for several minutes at a time and in general being non-aggressive and boring. The enemies are similarly dull, often merely repeating the same attack rather than employing interesting strategies or dynamics, and many of them are re-colors of re-colors. Even the bosses feature re-colored re-hashes! PSO used a couple of these but at least didn't pretend they were different monsters and at least they were interesting. The Gol Dragon of PSO Episode 2 was clearly another version of the Dragon, but it was very significantly different strategically, employing multiple breath weapons and summoning a holographic double of itself in addition to a number of other things and an incredibly scenic arena. In general it was a much more complex boss without Sega putting significantly more man-hours into its programming or animation. Meanwhile, PSU has the Onmagoug and the Dimmagolus, which are the same monster in every respect but with different stats and different textures. To add insult to injury the expansion to PSU, Ambition of Illuminus, re-hashes De Rol Le from PSO, right down to the raft moving through the tunnel. It then re-re-hashes it by making Dark Falz, the expansion's final boss, a re-color of it.
Everything else is hardly worth discussion, so I'll keep it brief. There's an equipment synthesis system that depends on ingredients found all throughout the game, but it's really just random loot substitution and dilution just like with the invention system from Bioshock. Synth items can be bought at shops, but the cost of that is unreasonably expensive next to just buying a weapon from a shop. There's some wiggle room in that substituting one ingredient for another can result in different elemental alignments with armor and melee weapons (and melee weapons only), but overall the game could have done without this. The three planets provide a lot of potential for more diverse locales, but compared to PSO they're all really generic and dull. Often times the exact same environment will be recycled, sometimes as many as five times in a row, just with different configurations of locked doors, crates, enemies, and gates. To try and work in some story-world detal and lift the monotony the developers saw fit to add a puzzle segment to certain levels. In these levels there's objects called SEED blooms that have to be destroyed. By equipping special items called Photon Erasers and Photon Reflectors--which are absolutely no different from one another but for the fact that they work on different SEED blooms--players can destroy them and move on. They're invisible, though, so players need to use special goggles. They get all of these by default, so it's just a mindless, boring chore that slows down the action and takes up a couple of equipment slots in the action pallette. They aren't even threatening enemies; just static objects that need to be destroyed. Overall the SEED extermination segments are like the beurocratic red tape of the game, a series of masturbatory motions there but for the purpose of making players submit paperwork to three different offices before they can proceed into the next room. Like with everything else in the level design in this game, they repeat these segments about five times, by the end of which players are relieved to go back to mindless combat.
No matter how you slice PSU--comparing it to PSO or just on its own--it's just a mess of a poorly designed, broken, unsatisfying, disappointing game, which probably has something to do with why it bombed on its release. The fact that they were still charging for this game like it was World of Warcraft in spite of using the same group-based structure from PSO can't have helped, nor could the fact that this is just genuinely an aesthetically displeasing game. Everyone dresses like they're from the bad part of the 80's and the characters are obnoxious and unlikeable. The monsters look pretty cool, I'll have to admit, but if they don't behave cool then what's the point?
Overall, though, the comparison between PSO and PSU is, I feel, one of the strongest arguments against just grabbing at any idea that sounds cool on the surface and thinking it'll make a good game. Looking back at PSO, it may not have been a graphical achievement for the ages and it may have handled a little clunkily, but all its elements were meaningful to gameplay and made for interesting decision-making on the part of players, and it proved surprisingly well-balanced and engaging with no shortage of reward. It took what the original Diablo had done and improved on it with the technology that was available, generating a considerable breadth of ideas without losing focus. It didn't have the breadth of enemies--unique or otherwise--that its spiritual predecessor did, but what it did have was well thought-out and strategically interesting to face, more so I'd say than what Diablo had. Where PSO left enough room for versatility in single-player without compromising class specialties, though, PSU made more than half the possible specialties meaningless and diluted the playing field and class dynamics considerably with broken, superficial additions and options and interface changes that are ten times more hampering than the merely clumsy attack button from the previous game. It's like the developers confused the ease of executing any given action and the visual appeal of it with the impact of the action itself. As a result the strategic edge of the series suffers dramatically.
All of this says one or both of two things: either in six years all the talent left Sonic Team and PSU was left with a team of amateurs or Sega's corporate department intervened and strongarmed the team into going with style over functionality in the design. Both are consistent with Sega's present corporate culture as much of its core talent--including Hirokazu Yasuha, the original director behind much of the Sonic the Hedgehog series--have left the company. Rumors have also been circulating for some time that Sonic Team is considerably stressed, with its masters at Sega constantly pushing them to develop Sonic games in roughly half the time it would take for anyone else to make a normal game, and such a claim wouldn't be without precedent. Within the same year that PSU was released they also released the infamous Sonic 2006, a glitchy, clunky game that had been rushed as a launch title for the PS3, which was followed quickly by Sonic and the Secret Rings in early 2007, a project that they had been developing alongside both these games. It wouldn't be surprising if this didn't contribute to PSU's problems, but that's a completely different story.