Phantasy Star Online Hands-On

Sonic Team's most ambitious project yet is the first console-based massively multiplayer game. And while we've had only a few glimpses of actual online US play, our man in Japan was recently able to take the Japanese version online to see what the final gameplay will be like.

The game has a main story arc in whichever mode you play - online or offline. You start out in a forest area, and you move on to the following areas by defeating the boss at the end of each area. The story of the game progresses much faster while you play online and moves at a much slower pace while you play offline. However, there are side quests that add flavor to the otherwise dull offline mode. You can access the various side quests by joining and visiting the Hunter's Guild, which is located in the game's major city. The quests vary in function, and you'll find yourself having to rescue someone, find a particular item, and escort other people through dangerous dungeons. You'll also find yourself having to perform some other, more oddball tasks. Basic tutorials are integrated in some of the earlier side quests, and online mode offers only few quests. Plus, you can't access the offline quests. New side quests open up when you enter the next area as well. The difficulty level in offline and online mode are pretty different. You can select from normal, hard, and very hard in online mode.

In the final version of the Japanese PSO, we found mags, one of the unmentioned gameplay additions. Mags are essentially mindless automatons that support you in battle. A mag will follow you around and assist you by increasing your chance of blocking an enemy attack and using its own stats to help increase yours. You will start out with a simple mag and will eventually be able to upgrade your mag to a more powerful bit. The mags will evolve differently, depending on your character class and the types of items you feed to the mag. Each mag has several different stats that gauge its power and ability, and these stats will increase depending on what you feed the mag. At the outset of the game, you'll be able to feed almost anything to your mag to increase its stats, but after a while, you'll find that only the more rare and expensive items will have an effect on your mag. Your mag also has a gauge that, when filled, lets you release a photon mirage attack. The attack varies depending on what type of mag you've developed, and certain mags will be able to release a photon mag attack equivalent to the summon magic in the Final Fantasy series.

The game has several different languages built into the game. US players will be able to set the Japanese version to English and play through the game with dialogues and menu screens in English. When you're online, the game lets you type letters in only the language you've selected. This feature is certainly a bonus for avid importers who want to get their hands on the game months earlier than the rest. A word of caution for importers, though - each disc has a serial number that you are required to enter when you play online for the first time. Once you are registered, you can play online on that specific Dreamcast unit only. You can use the same disc on different units on offline mode.

The face icons, which is another feature, work well. Obviously, there will be communication problems when players all over the world play the game, so Sonic Team has prepared several different icons and symbols, which you can edit to create your own face icon. There are so many to choose from that you can pretty much convey your message or thoughts to others by just the face icons. You can map several face icons (or pretyped text messages in your own language) onto your D-pad and keyboard for easy access.

Phantasy Star Online is certainly impressive, but there are little things that could have worked better. The menu has a memory option, so it remembers which category you selected previously. Unfortunately, it remembers only the first category you picked and not the subcategories. So, for example, if you picked items and then potion, the menu system will default only to items when you reopen it. Also, the action palette, a programmable hot-key system that uses the face buttons of the Dreamcast controller, is fairly limited. The action palette allows for only six slots, and it is fairly limited when you use characters (like magicians) that need lots of menu systems. Additionally, you can carry only ten items of the same type, and sometimes that isn't enough when you're fighting a tough boss character. Also, you will often want to switch from one weapon to another, and it would have helped if there were some sort of weapon switch command. As for the network online mode, the game suffers from some graphical slowdowns when more than a dozen characters are displayed onscreen - even though we've mentioned several times that there is virtually no lag in the online mode. Although there aren't lags in forms of slow motion, characters appearing to "teleport" from one spot to another do occur occasionally - it seems to happen more often when one player has a higher bandwidth than the others (broadband adapter vs. 33.6k modem). During high traffic hours, there is a chance that you'll get booted off the servers. When you attempt to return to your game, it tells you the server is full, so it will take a while to get back into your own game.

Phantasy Star Online is still an excellent and fun game, and it certainly paves the way for more online-intensive games. With Phantasy Star's legacy, Sonic Team's reputation, and the game's massively multiplayer premise, Phantasy Star Online is sure to please fans of the series and those new to the game alike.