What Makes PSO Special to You?

What first hooked me was the premise of the games story. It was one of the first games that made me say, "What happened to life to cause us to go to the stars to find a new home?" I was fascinated with the world of PSO, it's characters, and general style. Also, it was the first offline RPG that I could play splitscreen with friends as we tried to grind gear and fight the bosses over and over. There were so many nights I spent with friends just trying to find red drops or making new characters just to see how far we could get before passing out.

Before long, I finally got online with the game. I played a tiny bit of the DC ver. 2 online, but my connections were always bad and had a hard time playing it very long. But oddly enough, I found the game mostly playable on GCN online. SO that's where I spent most of my time. I loved connecting with players and being able to play all the holiday/limited missions online.

When PSO Ep. III came out, I was playing the hell out of that! I love card games, so just made sense. Plus the jukebox in the lobby made me join a dance team in game. We were all FOnewarl in the same yellow outfit, with different hair colors, and put together routines with the alt+letter actions. It was so stupid, but I loved it. Furthermore, it's the only game I've been able to do something like that in. I could go on forever about this game, but I guess that's why I still play it today.

EDIT: Fixed because I'm fucking trash. Kill me.

 

You guys need to learn how to use the enter key; your posts are an unreadable block of text.

I eventually realized that PSO is really fun because of its core principle as a game about whacking stuff. There's a certain rhythm between the combo system and choosing whether to press the button one more time, or take a step back to avoid an attack, which combined with the exceedingly simple enemy AI, brings out a sense of flow not unlike a Sonic game. Sasuga SEGA-san.

However, this dynamic is completely undermined when you play as a Ranger or a Force: my heart sinks whenever I have to quick-swap to a handgun just to take out a couple of Claws from across the room. No proximity, no pressure; no pressure, no fun. And having to double back to the city every five minutes to buy more fluids is just bad game design.

Of course, none of this would matter if it weren't for the stellar art direction. The environments only get better as the series goes on, the enemies start out interesting and end up delightfully abstract, and the amazing upbeat soundtrack permeates throughout. And when you finally find that big ass boss warp, you just know you're in for a hell of a time.

Fuck man, I miss PSO.

 

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Your English is fine! ?????????????

 

Love the music, the art, and the sense of adventure. The latter is something I feel is missing from PSO2, where it's just about finding the quickest route to the exit of some randomly generated area. I think that has its own merit--it's certainly still fun to me--but it's not much like PSO, y'know? In PSO episodes 1, 2 & 4 (BB PC), I had fun just going through the areas in sequential order with friends.

 

PSO2 is great! It's really just a glorified update of the original, but more free-to-pay feel. Combat feels good, but every class feels too much the same. Bosses are fun as hell to fight, and even more so in 20+ player raid groups. The story is... fine, but that's not why most people played the original. The cloud-based Switch port is coming in April, so I look forward to that! Hopefully, this makes it easier for western players to play, even though they'll still have to setup Japanese accounts and jump through hoops to play it.

 

I like the casual multiplayer. The games are easy enough to make a comfortable medium for discussion while also being engaging enough to be fun.
I got really burnt out by PSO2. I really didn't like its bland randomized level design, insane amount of collecting, and the sheer amount of random tedious things that the game has you do to optimize your build. The game just got more and more bloated with each update and at one point I just couldn't handle it anymore.
The new weapon grinding system can go to hell too: PSP2i similarly charged you an insane amount of meseta, but at least there was no chance of failure in that game.

The most lasting fun I had was just getting massive amounts of money to buy new cosmetics with. SEGA gave up on designing decent costumes and I gave up on playing.

 

I discovered PSO through PSO2, which I discovered through Project Diva F.

Anyway, compared to PSO2, PSO feels... slow, but it's a good kind of slow. Each attack (when it actually hits) feels like it has impact, and performing combos is satisfying. I honestly wish I could have played it back when it was alive, but at the time the house that I lived in only had broadband for our PC and I was a PlayStation person. Heck I didn't even know online gaming on consoles was a thing until I visited a friends' house who had an Xbox connected to the internet. That blew my mind as a kid.

Nowadays I play PSO Blue Burst on Ephinea when I'm burnt out with PSO2 and don't feel like playing anything else. I usually play as a Braver/Hunter on PSO2, but I've taken a liking to my Redria RAmarl.

Heck I like the game so much I made a section ID simulator for my last school computing project in Java last year. Looking back on the code it's quite a mess that somehow works. But hey, it looks nice at least :P

 

What made PSO really special to me? The right question would be "What didn't?". But let's start:

- Star Wars made interesting:
I'm not a fan of Star Wars, but I like some ot its elements, and I loved the way PSO mixed the elements of Star Wars with new stuff that replaced or improved upon the things I didn't like from that franchise. I'm a huge fan of the whole Phantasy Star franchise, quality of some games aside.

- Discovery of Phantasy Star:
I know the series existed, but PSO was the first game I played. I know that, strictly speaking, it was a different game series, but I started playing the old games thanks to this, and the first Phantasy Star is now one of my favourite videogames of all times. Seriously.

- Diablo-esque gameplay:
Simple, no-brainer hack-n-slash action with no real enemy AI and a plot almost irrelevant to enjoy the game was good shit. I liked the story, specially when they expanded it in Blue Burst, but I didn't need it to have fun, and the way enemies worked on PSU and beyond made me enjoy those games a lot less.

- Horde crusher:
Someone pointed something like this before, but I'll do my version: melee weapons that hit up to five enemies in just one swing, strong attacks that made enemies flinch, attack chains to combine at your convenience, and even units that raised the speed of attacks made me feel like a superhero. I could keept huge hordes of enemies at bay by hitting a lot of enemies with a combo, retiring a bit, and starting a new chain with the enemies that didn't flich on the previous round. Throwing so many enemies at me in a single room also satisfied my bloodthirst. Playing as a Ranger or a Force wasn't as fun as being a Hunter, but I played a HUnewearl just in case I needed to zonde those canadines.

- Decorative Mags:
I used them to define my character's look, and I was very careful at raising them so I didn't lose too many points in stats I didn't want. My usual choices were wings-shaped mags and shoulder companions.

- Setting:
I think they were really smart with the plot: they fucked the on-land colony, but the ship had came to far to come back, so they had a coherent hub map stuck in orbit. Previous settlers were the ones with the big army, so you can find loot manufactured by your people already abandoned on the new planet. Yours is a ship with a metropolis inside, so you have plenty of unknown people to make them become player characters. Since bounty hunters exist, you can have a military character operating independently as a merc but still recruited by the government, so they have a way to assign you missions while still letting you explore on your own. There's probably more, but that's enough to get my point.

- Level/environment design:
While it could sound stupid with the info I know now, back in the day I thought it was obvious that game's levels were designed by Sonic Team; I mean, they looked like the kind of places you would see Sonic running through had the game be a platformer and not an action RPG. IIRC, only some elements from Ruins 3 and of course the Dark Falz arena were unlike Sonic games. I've had a similar feel with most of the levels in modern PS games, if not all of them.

I maybe forgetting something, but that's all I can recall now. I used to call this game "Phantasy Star Offline" because I didn't play online until I tried a Blue Burst private server a while before PS Zero came out, and never online again until I entered PSO2 for the first time when episode III was already happening. I'm not very fond of online multiplayer in any game, specially with random people, so I suppose I'm really different from other posters from here. Not sure if it's good or bad, considering I enjoyed this game that much just by playing it alone.

 

I'm not saying I can't enjoy a multiplayer experience, but it depends on too many factors. Anyway, tell me how to connect my good old DC to your server, and I could be there some day just to give it a try.

 

Oh, I thought the console could do it without additional shenanigans. I mean, I don't want to buy new things for the good old DC, I already find trouble having the cash I need for recent releases. While one of the other ways of connecting they suggest could be at my disposal, they don't look very reliable. I'll take it all into account anyway, just in case my financial situation or my free connection chances get better.