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I’m a pretty poor video game fan these days. That’s for a couple of reasons – First, most new games these days are horrible. Second, most new games these days are horrible! Third, I’m too poor to afford new games. And lastly, I’m usually too busy doing other things to really sit down and enjoy a good game. As a follow up on that last one, I had to get a temporary job since I’m living at home for free, so that just cuts my available free time down to pretty much nothing ( ). But the one exception to all of this has been, surprisingly enough, the DS. At current I own three current gen consoles – a 360, a PSP, and a DS. By a large margin, I have enjoyed my DS the most. My library of DS games is pretty huge (considering how poor I am) and I’m still looking forward to some games that are coming out. One of which was Phantasy Star 0 [zero]. My aunt bought me the game a few days after it came out as an early birthday present and I haven’t looked back since. I guess you can consider the following as a mini-review of sorts

Back in the day, when the Dreamcast still had that new console smell and when I was oblivious to most of the interwebs, Sega released a game called Phantasy Star Online, or PSO for those fans of acronyms. I can’t remember why now, but I was really looking forward to this game and I bought it on the day it came out. I do remember the concept of playing with other people on a console game over an internet connection to be very attractive…and for good reason. It was a lot of fun slashing monsters and robots, digging around for rare items, trading items and chatting away with random players! The same concept can be said for Phantasy Star 0. How Sega managed to fit this game on the DS has me amazed.

I’ve been told that Phantasy Star 0 is a bit of a mixing of Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe‘s gameplay and mechanics. Seeing as how I’ve never played PSU before, I can only assume this to be the case. For certain though, it has many similarities and concepts taken straight from PSO. You can pick from 3 different classes and 3 different races, with a total of 14 different characters you can choose from. You can have 3 separate characters per cart, which makes my mind boggle. Also, just like in PSO, you can customize your characters with different colors, hair styles, etc, so the customization is fairly deep (as it should be). There is also a Mag system (again, ala PSO) which allows you even more customization. The game, for lack of a better word, looks f’ing incredible for a 3D DS game. I would have to say that this game just might have some of the best 3D graphics for a DS title to date. The environments are varied and colorful, which is to be expected given it’s anime art style. I almost think that the game would look even better if it were cel-shaded given how well that style seems to do on the DS and anime-styled games. Maybe I’m just saying that because Vega is going to be cel-shaded?

As far as playing the game goes, again, it’s very similar to how PSO plays. There are three separate ways to play the game – Story Solo Mode, DS Wireless Play, and Nintendo WFC. Story mode, as you might have guessed, let’s you go through the game’s main story line with a number of NPC’s to help you along the way. You can also do side-quests and gain access to certain parts of the game that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do in online games. As far as the story goes…well, it’s nothing to write home about and I’m not going to leave any spoilers here. Depending on which race you pick for you character, the story will be slightly different (there are 3 different races and 3 different takes on the story). But from what I can tell, the story is pretty much the same from race to race. I guess DS Wireless Play is pretty much getting two or more DSs together to play the game that way. And the Nintendo WFC is where the meat of the game is; this is where you get to play with people all over the world! More on that in a bit. Let’s get on with how the game handles. I thought that maybe navigating around in a 3D area might be a pain to do with the D-Pad (see: Mario 64 DS), but it wasn’t at all. Although if you hated the camera in PSO then your not going to be much happier here. The L button resets the camera behind the player, just like it does in PSO. I personally don’t have a problem with it because I’ve played many MANY hours of PSO and I’m use to it. The action palette is, yet again, just like it is in PSO; you’ve got 3 slots and 3 more slots while holding down the R button. I personally would have liked to have a 8 slot palette…and I’ll explain why in a bit. There’s also the addition of the roll action which is actually really handy (and I would have loved to have it in PSO). It allows you to dash in any direction quickly to dodge an attack. Your options of attack are pretty much taken directly from PSO; you’ve got your normal attack, hard attack, and then all of the techniques like Zonde, Foie, Barta, etc. However in loo of a special attack like in PSO, all of your attacks can now be “powered up” by holding down the action button. For normal/hard attack, this powered up attack is known as the Photon Art. The photon art varies from weapon to weapon and it usually does lots of extra damage over a shorter period of time. Techniques also work in a similar way. Instead of having 3 different versions of each attack technique (eg Zonde, Gizonde, Razonde), the base technique can be powered up to unleash it’s more powerful form (eg Zonde powered up will be like Razonde). However, a BIG annoyance so far is that, for techniques atleast, your can only use them if they are in your palette. Force users are going to have a hard time with this since there are many different techs that you will want to use but you’ll be limited to a small number of palette to which you can append those techs. There’s not even a way to use a tech in the menu; atleast in PSO you could go to the technique sub-menu to use Reverser or Buff/DeBuffs. An additional set of slots for the X button would have helped, but Sega reserved that slots for picking up items and talking with NPCs. Needless to say, limited techs like that is a big negative for me, but I digress. Weapons are much more dynamic in PS0 than they were in PSO. Aside from grinding weapons, you can also apply all sorts of different special effects to any weapon in the game. Remember stuff like Arrest and Dark on weapons in PSO? Well you can get different sorts of elements that you can apply to a weapon, such as Freeze, Burn, Dark, etc, which add a whole new layer of depth. And hey, they even managed to fit a Mag system in here somehow! Mags work pretty much the same way they do in PSO, except this time it’s even better. You aren’t limited to just consumables to feed your mag this time; you can feed it pretty much anything you want; weapons, armor, disks, photon drops, grinders, consumables, etc. You can also feed your mag 5 things at a time instead of 3, and I think the time inbetween feedings is shorter than it was in PSO. Mags also have new traits called “natures” which can affects their Photon Blasts and what they do to you given certain situations. However this time around, Mags can only have 1 Photon Blast instead of 3. And I believe there are 4 different Photon Blasts in the game.

I played the game in Solo mode first so I could get a feel for the controls and so I could unlock as much stuff as possible. Once you get around to trying out the wi-fi play, you are given three options: Play with friends, Free play, and Play alone. Ugh, this is where I feel like ranting a bit. If your just starting out and you don’t know anyone to play with, your pretty much left with one option; Free play. Free play is basically a matchmaking service which pairs you with 1-3 different players based on a filter which you set. You can pick from the 3 different difficulties and the 8 different areas and then have it find you players with the same choices. Then you wait about 5 minutes (depending on how many players there are to choose from) and then it’ll throw you into the game with whomever it picked. This is where things start to make no sense to me. In PSO, communication was very important in order to play the game properly. However in Free play, Sega decided that it would be a good idea to limit all of the players to a pre-determined selection of chat messages instead of having free chat or a mixing of both. WTF. Seriously? It’s not that the preset chats aren’t good, but restricting to only THOSE messages totally takes away one aspect I loved in the original PSO; chatting away with random people. Not to mention how awkward it feels when everyone is using the same stupid messages . AGH SEGA WHYYYYYKDDOIN LAKJLSAJDLASKDJ….ahem. And that brings me to another annoyance, although this time it has more to do with Nintendo than Sega. Friend codes. Well, ok then. If you want to play the game as it should be (with free chatting and without the rigid structure of free play) then the only way to do it is to grab some FCs and hope to find someone online when you are. You can store a pretty large number of FCs in the game and it will show when any of those friends are online and playing. However, the only way you can obtain any FCs is to get them from somewhere online (like here or here); forget about trying to get a FC from someone in a Free play game as Sega does not provide a way to do that. So unless you know someone who plays when you do at some PSO community, it’s going to be hard to find someone to play with. The whole system is just too restrictive for me when you compare how easy it was to do in PSO. PSO was join a lobby, make a room and wait for someone to join or join a room with players already in it, play and chat with said players. Then…”hey, that was fun! wanna trade guild cards and play again sometime?” “Sure!”. It was quick, easy, and painless to just grab someone, play the game, and if they weren’t retarded, trade info. For PS0, it’s either find and enter a bunch of 12-digit codes one by one and hope that some of them will actually be playing when you do OR go play Free play and pretty much have your hopes of enjoying the game to it’s fullest destroyed. Yuck

Overall though, the game is a pretty dang good time. I hate that the online play was such a big flop for me as that is where I would be spending a significant portion of my time playing (and it was pretty much the biggest draw for me when I saw it for the first time). But for a DS game, it’s got so much packed into it, especially for it being in full 3D. It still boggles my mind when I go through the game’s 8 different areas and bazillion different weapons and monsters. And it looks great too! If you were a fan of PSO in the least, then I would recommend finding yourself a copy of this game. And then after you do that, send me your FC so we can play the game properly

By the way, my FC: 3180-6197-2239. Add me up! I haven’t had much time to play since my job, but once things slow down for me I hope to be playing some more.