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Phantasy Star Online Review |
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Phantasy Star Online
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One of the best RPG’s on the Dreamcast finally heads to the XBOX and it's about time.
PSO doesn't have much of a story at all. You are sent to the planet Ragol to investigate what happened to Pioneer 1, and to try to find out where and/or what happened to Rico. That's it for the story really and it's driven along by little posts that you 'talk' to during the course of the adventure.
The game at its core is a hack and slashes game. You will only be pressing a few buttons (all of which are customizable as to which button does which attack) throughout the course of the game, but it will be so enjoyable. PSO basically brings the whole Diablo 2 genre into the realm of 3D. The entire game is basically hack-slash-hack-slash-heal-repeat, a boring concept when you think about it, but once you actually try it you may be amazed. The idea's all come together wonderfully and the game ends up being much, much more than what you would expect. The bosses are all challenging and require a certain amount of strategy to beat (especially the cave boss at lower levels!) and the difficulty ramps up as you complete the game. (Online you only have to be level 20, 40, and 80 to gain access to new difficulties).
One thing that is a major problem in some 3rd person games is the camera. It can lock up, get trapped behind walls, and overall become a nuisance. In PSO, the camera is great, it 'slides' along walls and with the press of a button the camera shoots back behind your character. It works very well.
The main draw of PSO’s graphics has always been its flash; the texture work is very colorful and almost glows; though while they don’t look bad, they certainly are not Xbox quality. This game just cant seem to grow up, Sonic Team has had ample time to tweak the graphic engine, and replace some of the low-resolution textures with new high-resolution ones, but they just haven’t which is mind boggling. Another area that really needs attention is draw in and popup, now the game worlds are not that big, and on a system like Xbox issues like this should be nonexistent, enemies, items, and even other players will suddenly pop into view out of nowhere which can get a tad bit annoying.
Animation seems unchanged as well, almost every animation is fairly stiff and rigid, but at the same time it gets the job done, maybe a random combo animation system could have given this game a little spark of fresh. Of course not everything is the same. Sonic Team did tweak certain effects. For instance – shadows. They used to be circles on the floor, but now they are real-time with a certain level of detail in them, nothing great but a nice added touch. Water effects got the special treatment too, now it ripples again nothing major but it’s the little things that count. Spell effects also got a brush up with deeper colors and added graphic detail to go along with them, for the most part they are much more eye pleasing now then they were before.
The music in Phantasy Star Online is for the most part fantastic. A nice orchestral score mixed up with many different genres of music is almost always ear pleasing. On the downside it does get very repetitive, and might have some turning it off and listening to a music CD. The basic sound effects remain unchanged since the Dreamcast version, but now since the game runs in real time Dolby 5.1, you can hear details in the audio like never before.
Replay value here is kind of tough on the one hand you WILL be hooked on this game for days, even weeks. On the other hand once you get to those high levels you might get bored and not want to do the same stuff all over again. It's really a mixed bag.
Overall, PSO is one of the best RPG’s on the XBOX right now even though it has no story really like most RPG’s do. It still makes up for it with great online play and game play. If you’re an RPG fan, buy this now! If you already own this for your Dreamcast, you should still rent it.
Review By: Fernando Medina
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