One yard short of running the mile of excellency.
In Bounty Hounds, you take orders from the bigwigs of Quicksilver as Maximillian, the leader of the Bounty Hounds. With a few other Bounty Hounds, you are put through a simulation phase to get your group ready for a huge project. This project involves inhabiting various areas to clear them of alien-like lifeforms called ETIs to install devices on each planet that will "terraform" each planet to make it suitable for human lifeforms.
If it hasn't been made painfully clear yet, one of Bounty Hounds' major differences from Phantasy Star Online is it's huge focus on evolving it's storyline and character development. While it would have been nice to create your own character, or group of Bounty Hounds, the advantage of having pre-set characters was that they could ultimately build upon their personalities and relationships between each other... and they do spend a whole lot of time doing so by unfolding the story with some very nicely animated comic-book scenes.
In your campaign, you are sent through four worlds; Ghies - a cave-infested area with a lot of ETI bases, The Lost - a forestlike terrain that is home to many poisonous creatures, Anti-Babel - a barren desertlike area, and DGX, a large elevator based tower sustained by alien life-forms.
As you fight through hordes and hordes of ETI life-forms, you will gain experience and level-ups, that reward you with points that can be used to increase your Attack, Intelligence, Agility, and Vitality, as well as your technique set(which should strike familiar if you're a fan of the old-school pen&paper RPGs). You will also gain from a simply massive archive of weapons, armor and modules that can be used to personalize weapon/armor attributes.
Each portion of these four worlds have a number of different areas and are guarded by massive ETI mini-bosses and main bosses, that are simply menacing in strength and a challenge to take down. To combat these foes, you are able to select from swords, axes, hammers, spinners, pile bunkers, light guns, machine gun, heavy pulse guns, and heavy spread guns, which all can be modified to have all kinds of elemental and status-effecting attributes.
As you beat the game, you will unlock harder modes that, instead of forcing you to play with the same storyline, continue the storyline in a chapter-based method, so if you beat the game in the Ouroboros simulation mode, continuing to the "Welcome to the Real World" mode will unlock another set of chapters to the game's storyline.
The combat is the outstanding feature of this game, and you will be doing a lot of it. There are the basic sequenced combos, but by using certain key combinations, you can switch weapons in the middle of a combo and continue it with another weapon, as well as chain it with certain techniques(such as Force Dash) to chain some downright impressive combos. You are also granted a number of force fields that can either positively effect your status and fighting performance, or negatively effect your opponent's. These have also been tethered into the combat system with all kinds of techniques that can do anything from changing the elemental field to accumulating to cause massive Force Explosions to devastate your enemy.
While there is no proper custom character system as featured in Phantasy Star Online, you are given a fair amount of ways to customize your character with some very plentiful and nicely designed weapon and armor sets. With this being a Namco product, you can expect that it will be filled with many references to their past titles, such as Dig Dug and Soul Calibur, and as a total Phantasy Star Online clone, filled with tons of rare/legendary item drops as you progress into the game's harder modes.
Although it won't become apparent until the later areas, Bounty Hounds presents quite a fair bit of challenge. Certain ETIs have some very powerful melee attacks that are good at catching gamers off-guard, and some others have ranged attacks that can stop you mid-combo, and leave you open for many attacks. The bosses, however, are simply unforgiving! Each and every one of them have their own set of unfair tactics they can use to tear down your Force Shields, break your Force Fields, nullify your attacks, or just plain one-shot kill you, which can and will result in many lost items if you prefer fighting to the death instead of withdrawing from battle. This isn't helped by a somewhat buggy camera. It's fine and easy to center in most areas, but when in ETI bases(which are commonly filled with narrow hallways) the camera begins disobeying your command to center and just does whatever it feels like.
All sounds gravy to put so much depth into this concept, but where the gravy becomes cold and unenjoyable is the multi-player modes. Games like this, while entertaining as a single-player game, only truly shine when they are properly playable in multi-player modes. While the balance, storyline and gameplay of Bounty Hounds are done very nicely, there is absolutely no co-operative play to speak of. With the complexity of building and managing an online server devoted to such a robust game, it's understandable that Bounty Hounds features no infrastructure online play, but there's not even a simple four-player offline co-op mode, or anything aside from some simple player vs player. There's an additional challenge mode that pits a player in a sort of "survival" mode against 100 ETIs, and even that is not playable co-operatively. In the dungeon-crawling action-RPG genre where co-op is important, this game takes a huge hit for falling short of this much-needed feature.
Bounty Hounds is a fine example of how one aspect can make or break a game. It's great, balanced and solid, but dissapointing in the sense it comes so close to excellency - but doesn't deliver the most important component. It's truly a shame - with custom characters, co-operative infrastructure play and PSP microphone support, this game could very well have gotten near a perfect score.