Review: Phantasy Star Universe
Posted 3 years, 3 months ago at 4:37 AM. 0 comments
Posted in Games.
Phantasy Star Universe came out about a month ago, I was one of the early adopters to get it the next day, fortunately for me I got a good chance to play it and share my uphills and downfalls. Phantasy Star Universe is the anticipated sequel of Phantasy Star Online. Many new features were added and many were dropped but the main deal of the game is to run through dungeons with your team mates and fight monsters. It stars Ethan Waber and during his trip around the Gurhal Star System, he meets up with a cast of friends and enemies all fighting the one major enemy, SEED! You can view more images in the Bumped.org Image Gallery.
The Highlights of Phantasy Star Universe
As I started playing, putting all my settings correct and having it played in Window Mode, Phantasy Star Universe fixed the one thing that got me annoyed with PSO. Basically PSO had an offline mode which you can play missions in a sort of disjointed storyline, you’ll slowly learn of new tidbits as you complete the missions. Phantasy Star Universe fixes this by providing story through each and every corner. Now we have Ethan, who’s this hot headed but cool guy running around talking like he owns the place. As with his lack of care for authority he gets in some pretty funny situations which is brought up to be even funnier by the poor voice acting. The game features some nice graphics, it may not be Next Gen but Sega provides some interesting architecture and eye candy. The cities are complex and each area feels more rounded and less flat like in PSO. The environments are pretty once you see them for the first time, but unfortunately they aren’t as dynamic as you’d like them to be. Luckily with multiple areas to visit, and different places to shop, it brings down the monotony in past PSO games. You’ll find different character attitudes on each planet, each with thier own small subplot. The combat system is great departure from PSO. Now their is a just a normal and a special attack, and wielding two weapons of your choice make the game more interesting. The special attacks let you do fun acrobatic dances as you slash the enemies. Once you get that particular attack passed a certain level, you’ll start to see glares of light as you attack. Offline you’ll be accompanied by story characters who sort of help out during the missions. Online you’ll join up to 6 people and travel from one section to the other as you rest stop in Transfer and Goal lobbies.
The Downfalls of Phantasy Star Universe
Unfortunately PSU has quite a glaring problem in offline mode. Your so called team members hardly help you. They will often get stuck especially in Chapter 6, and not move until you run up to them. It would be nice if they went to engage the enemy or have some sort of a Gambits system to let them do things. As story mode is fun to play just to see the character interaction being played out, some of the voice acting is terrible. To make matters worse, some characters don’t sync their mouth movements. Hal from Gurhal Channel 5 loves talking while her mouth isn’t moving. Other characters just have bad emotionless voices, Leo, which appears to be my favorite character for certain reasons, has the most cautious, uninspired voice ever. He talks like he’s bored with voice acting and wants to go home. The President Dallgun also suffers from emotionless acting, most of his lines seem to not reflect what he portrays on screen. Tonnio’s voice sounds dangerously close to Ash Ketchum. Fortunately Ethan’s voice which is hated by many is pretty good, but not as good as Karen. Karen presents the perfect voice thats fun and loving at appropriate times, and stern and cold at others.
Next is the graphics, unfortunately there is some slowdown, which appears to be caused by the latest patch, so now my game slows down to a crawl unless I resize the window. Playing online is another major problem, with no story to enhance the gameplay, your basically playing ever other korean mmorpg out there, and your just grinding and grinding all the live long day. We are currently waiting for a new update with a story mission, but this is not enough for me, I’d like 5 more chapters kthnx~… Online, the community is filled with vulgar, careless, racist, nazis, /b/tards. So you’ll see the tolerance level is pretty low. If your not "Normal" or "American" your quickly made fun of. Gladly most of the griefers will probably not renew their subscription with the lack of online content, which brings us to the next problem. There is nothing to do other than De Ragon. Even with the new areas, its best just to do De Ragon missions. The only way to make any real money in the game is to do a mission and make sure nobody dies, and this can cause some huge flame wars if you die during the boss. So you should make sure you can handle a boss before going into it. If your tired of doing the same missions all day, the game does add a new feature of making weapons. This can sometimes be quite fun as now you’ll have a cool weapon with a new color other than green. So its best if you make your own weapons than buy the ones in the store. At this current rate, $10 is way too high for a monthly subscription. If your buying this game just for online play, wait around janurary so you’ll have an expansion pack to look forward to and a substantial amount of online content. Those without online connections will have Extra Mode, which is pretty much the same missions you did in Story Mode, with the added boringness of no actual story.
So in conclusion, I give Phantasy Star Universe a C+ for its slowdowns, lack of online missions, and lack of new content in extra mode.
