What was meant to be a gift from Sega to oldschool "Phantasy Star Online" fans turns out to be a nightmare.
It was hard not to, since "PSO" managed to get everything just right. The levels were large and well designed, the combat was extremely fast and addicting, the drop system was predictable and simple to understand, the co-op was incredibly easy to drop in and out of, and the soundtrack that played in the background was phenomenal. It still sits in my memory as the most fun I ever had with an online game, and considering how many I've played that's no small feat.
Sega, perhaps trying to recapture what made the original PSO so great (And avoid what the spin-off/sequel Phantasy Star Universe made so horrible), decided to make a spiritual sequel to it on Nintendo's RPG-heavy DS.
To put it bluntly, it didn't work.
Phantasy Star Zero turned out to be one of those rpgs that I continually forced myself to play in the hope that I'd eventually hit the magic part of the game where I'd start enjoying it. Though this tactic has worked in the past with games like Lost Odyssey and the third Atelier Iris, it never happened with Phantasy Star Zero. No matter how hard I tried to ignore its shortcomings and annoyances I couldn't find a single solitary element of it that made me enjoy what I was playing.
The first and biggest gameplay design sin that Sega committed with PS0 was the combat. Unlike Phantasy Star Universe, in which its improved combat system was the *only* facet of the game to have been improved over the original PSO, PS Zero takes the series backwards in terms of control by removing several key aspects to Sega's relatively successful formula.
First, they implemented a very glitchy, jumpy camera redirection control scheme that actually makes the camera controls the original PSO placed on the Dreamcast analog triggers seem preferable by comparison. The quick jump and inaccurate "re-adjustment" that you get with the DS shoulder button feels awkward, and I never fully acclimated to it. Making it even worse is the fact that the screen feels too small for the action it's meant to show. It's as if you have "tunnel-vision" and don't get the benefit of having any periphery. Objects and enemies that aren't in front of you are about as invisible as a ghost, and roughly as hard to target as well.
Matching up rather poorly with that problem is the game's very slow, clunky attack movements. Though 2006's Phantasy Star Universe improved upon the original game's weak combos and overall sluggish attack speeds, PS Zero is even worse than the first game in this category.
Taking away the combo ability of several key weapons (Mostly two handed equipment like some of the bigger guns) PS Zero goes even one further by making every weapon combo significantly slower than they've ever been before. This is especially evident in the rifles, since the gap in between shots done during a combo is about twice as long as any previous PS game. Add in the fact that they removed the shotgun class of weapons and replaced them with a 3-way shot "gunblade" that is prevented from combo'ing at all and you can see what I'm talking about. Even the daggers, usually the fastest weapon class in the series, moves unnaturally slow and has too large of a gap in between its combo animations. This makes combat a very frustrating and boring affair.
All of this might be easy to overlook if only the game wasn't so unbalanced. Boss fights require such an inhuman amount of camera repositioning and team work that you simply can't expect to progress forward without grinding out a dozen levels or more in between boss areas. Unlike the rest of the series (Sensing a re-occurring theme here?) you can't just coast through the first few areas without having to "Grind". The absolutely insane amount of hit points the bosses possess, combined with the fact that they all have one weak point that is incredibly hard to hit without some sort of auto-targeting or first person mode (Neither of which is available, even though the PSP Phantasy Star game has them both) makes PS Zero an experiment in finding the limits of human patience.
I remember getting to the first boss, a giant octopus that had its mouth as the only workable weak point. At level 8, he killed my RAcast before I could even make it to the second phase of the battle. Attacking his mouth was difficult since it only opened for a very brief time and soon after it became exploitable, the monster would spit out a highly damaging projectile that would nearly remove all my health in one hit. It wasn't until I made it to level 17 that I finally could do enough damage to him (And sustain enough damage FROM him) to kill the monster before running out of both patience and healing items. As a veteran gamer, I felt I was starting to show a decline in skill...until I visited the message boards and discovered a couple dozen topics where others even higher level than me couldn't beat the monster either.
Now, again, this wouldn't be a problem if only two other very big "sins" hadn't been committed during the game's development. Those two being the complete ineptitude of your AI controlled partners and the abysmally lousy drop system.
One of the things I hate with some action RPGs is how they base merchant inventory on the amount of the game you've cleared instead of your player's level. While most "dungeon hack" games will level shopkeeper equipment up to be equivalent with your own, there are still a few poorly planned ones that only unlock the next level of weaponry after you beat each boss. This doesn't work since you often need better weapons than what is dropping in an area to beat the boss that impedes your progress. Phantasy Zero's developers decided to implement this flawed system and then do us one better by making drops in an area one "level" worse than what you buy in shops. This leads to situations where you don't even bother looking at drops and instead shovel everything off on the NPC shopkeepers. The only remedy I found was to exploit the game's item import/export feature by purchasing high level equipment with my strongest character and then sending them to my lower level characters by way of the in-game item transfer "trunk". You know the loot distribution table is broken when you keep a weapon so long that you're able to use grinders (An item in the series that levels up your weapons) on it long enough for it to hit the upper 80's in level until you buy a better one.
The other half of this problem is, as I said a couple paragraphs ago, the inefficiency of your AI controlled team mates. Not only can't they do even the simplest of combat maneuvers, but they never truly upgrade their equipment either, making them "one shot and their dead" liabilities that are useless in normal combat and nothing less than an outright hindrance in boss battles. It would be a better game if you could leave your partners behind, but story mode quests demand that you take them with you.
Therein lies another problem, the story. One of my favorite things about the multiplayer Phantasy Star series, and Action RPGs in general, is that they don't bog you down with tons of boring dialog. While I enjoy a great story as much as any other RPG'er, I don't like my action based roleplaying games to be saddled with a few million lines of slow scrolling text that pop up every few minutes. That's acceptable in Dragon Age, Fallout or Oblivion, but not an action RPG. Action RPGs are about leveling, fighting monsters, clearing dungeons and searching for loot...not scrolling through text boxes for half an hour before you start a mission. Unfortunately, PS Zero is guilty of this, and it suffers greatly as a result.
After several missions that were delayed as long as 15 minutes due to constant running back and forth between extremely chatty NPCs that demanded I speak with them before being allowed to leave town, I eventually gave up and held down the skip button every time someone so much as asked my character a question. Though I missed out on the plot, it didn't seem to matter since it was incredibly silly anyway. I think the fact that you risk your neck for a rare flower in a dragon's nest only to find out it was used for the balding mayor's shampoo is all the proof you need. It's very typical early 90s era Japanese RPG "Fluff" that doesn't fit in with the tone of the rest of the series at all.
By now you're probably thinking that a lot of these problems could be removed if I were to play this online. While it is nice to have other human players take the place of the inept AI partners, it isn't really feasible. Not only do you have to deal with the laughably archaic friend code system Nintendo still insists on using, but everyone gets removed from the party after the end of a mission...which means even if you did go the "random online matchmaking" route and find a great group of players your joy will be replaced with anger when the game breaks up your party at the end of the level. Throw in the lack of any mature way to communicate (Unless drawing male genitalia in chat bubbles appeals to you) and you have to question whether this game is really meant to be played online in the first place.
Last but not least, we have the soundtrack and the graphics.
While I didn't expect the visuals to be astounding, I didn't expect every monster to look like fuzzy multi-colored polygonal blobs either. No matter how far you go in the game you'll never find an interesting looking monster. They all look horribly disfigured and slathered with muddled colors when rendered by the DS. After playing Phantasy Star Portable on the PSP, I expected something a bit better than this. Even the Mario 64 remake that launched with the system looks better, which is sad considering how experienced Sega is. There are certain levels where the ground is the same color as the enemies bodies, which makes it even harder than usual to effectively target them.
The soundtrack isn't much better either. Once again, I didn't expect something legendary from the DS, but after finishing the system's Final Fantasy 3 and Dragon Quest 4 remakes I expected something a bit more "grand". The music is very bland and forgettable, which is something I've never had to say about a Phantasy Star game before. It even lacks that familiar "techno" style that I've come to love with this series. Perhaps it's due to the game being a prequel that takes place in a decidedly less advanced world than the rest, but I feel they still should have done more with it. In what is a first for an audiophile like me, I played a game with the sound turned off.
With unbalanced combat, sluggish controls, lack of any useful targeting system, poor camera control, horrible loot distribution, useless AI controlled partners, a weak online mode, muddled graphics and lackluster music I found it hard to point out any positive aspects that Phantasy Star Zero may possess. The game was meant to be a "love letter" to old school PSO players from Sega, but it is anything but. As much as I disliked the new direction they took the series in 2006's Phantasy Star Universe, at least PSU remained somewhat playable. This game, as much as it pains to me say, is a complete wreck of an action RPG. It was poorly planned and seems confused as to where it fits in with the rest of this long running series. Why so many people seem to enjoy it is beyond me.
If anything good came out of my experience with this game it is that I actually hooked up my Dreamcast for the first time in 4 years and played my level 156 RAcast again. Not only did it help clear my mind of the horrible experience Phantasy Star Zero left me with, but it helped me see where the DS prequel to this game came up short.