Phantasy Star Universe is a good game with fun combat laced with a terrible story.
Rare is the day where you find yourself suffering through a horrendous storyline for good gameplay. Even games like Metal Gear Solid 2 that made you sit through a storyline of dubious quality never delved into being unbearably horrible on your first play through. Usually if a game has a horrible story mode that you have to sit through the gameplay isn’t good enough for you to waste your time. Enter Phantasy Star Universe: an enjoyable gaming experience if you can force your way through mess Sonic Team is passing off as a story mode these days.
The “story” for PSU is incredibly simple. You are a young man named Ethan Waber, a new recruit to the galaxy spanning GUARDIANS, and it is up to you to save the known universe from destruction. Blah, blah, blah… we have heard this all before. You will find no surprises here; you meet the villain of the game rather quickly and spend the rest of the game chasing after him. During the course of your travels you will go to three different planets with names obviously inspired by the planets of the previous Phantasy Star games (Palma becomes Parum, Motavia becomes Moatoob) and meet characters of all the different races.
There are four races that populate the Gurahl system are the humans, the CAST’s, the Newmans and the Beasts. Humans are your run of the mill, sticking their noses into everything that you are used to, except they have access to high technology and magic that is referred to as TECHNICs (Why is everything in this game capitalized?!). CASTs are the emotionless and cold machine men and women of typical sci-fi fare. The Newman are genetically engineered humanoids, literal test tube babies in some cases, who have pointy ears and excel with the use of magic. The Beasts are yet another genetically engineered species who seem to have been created to survive in harsh climates and they can transform into giant were-monsters that can wreck havoc in battle. You will acquire party members of all these groups during the course of the story.
Perhaps the most obnoxious part of the story mode, barring the one-dimensional characters, is the way that the story is told. When you start up the game you are treated to a few opening cutscenes that gives the game an almost cinematic feel, which is kind of cool. Sonic Team wasn’t going to stop there however, they decided to give the game a heavily anime feel to it. After you complete a chapter of the game you will get a closing “credits” followed by a next time on Dragonball… err, Phantasy Star Universe type summation. This is not only annoying, having to skip through these every time you clear a chapter, but it kills some of the tension of the game. When you know exactly what is going on, such as seeing Ethan getting knocked around by a familiar enemy, it isn’t as cool as just seeing it. It’s amazing that a developer would shoot themselves in the foot like this, especially since the game has so few surprises to it as it is.
Realistically interesting characters, a la Metal Gear Solid 2, can save a bad story. However this game does not have any such characters to help pull it out of the ditch it has fallen into with each character fitting with a very strong anime stereotype. You have the doofus main character who is such a dullard that he needs everything explained to him (thus they force feed the player every last detail of everything going on), the wanna be ladies man who slacks off work to hit on girls, the little boy who thinks he’s a super tough guy (I’ll touch a little more on him later), the super cutesy girl robot with super big guns and the perverted old sensei.
However Phantasy Star takes these stereotypes one step further into “who thought of this” territory. Not only is the perverted old man your headmaster but he’s also a CAST, a robot for non-Phantasy Star dorks, who supposedly have no emotions. However he seems to enjoy molesting girls and acting like a comedian showing plenty of emotion all the while. Not only is there the little boy who thinks he’s a tough guy but he’s what is called a “Small Beast.” These are full grown Beast men with the bodies and voices of little kids who are actually fully grown adults of their species. In reality this seems to be excuses to have the tough little “kid” meet a girl he’s known all his life, another small Beast, who is currently in a relationship with what appears to be a thirty-year-old Beast pirate. Can anyone say pedophile? It’s really kind of freaky seeing a little “girl” holding the hand of a full grown adult and talking about how much she loves him… and not as a parent. Yuck.
If you manage to force your way through the story mode you will unlock extra mode, which is the fun single player experience. In this mode you can create a character of your own from any of the four races, customize their appearance and play them how you like. You will not do the story mode missions; instead you will be able to play the side missions that you unlock by progressing through the story mode (meaning you have to play through the game to get them all).
The gameplay is the saving grace of this game. Anyone who has played Phantasy Star Online will be instantly familiar with the interface, consisting of one button to do a three hit melee combo (or fire a gun), one button to do a technique and one button to activate things and pick up items. However they have added in a new button that, by holding it down, enables you to quickly use items and switch weapons on the fly. This is really cool since you can carry five different weapon types, varying between two-handed swords, wands (which let you cast actual spells) or even sword / pistol combos, sword in one hand and gun in the other. This gives you a lot of flexibility when fighting enemies. Another major addition is the ability to lock on to enemies and strafe around them. This really opens up another dimension to the combat and really helps you avoid damage.
The graphics and sound are a matter of debate for this game. While the cities and characters all look fairly good, many of the enemies have a fairly bland look to them barring the bosses. Add to that the fact that many of the environments that you will explore look exactly the same. While the outdoor areas are fairly varied, many of the Relics sites are repetitive and bland as are the cave systems. No matter how many planets apart they are, they look almost totally alike.
Sound design is fairly bland but at the same time functional. All of the characters have voices that agitate me except for Leo, the first Guardian you meet. None of the weapons sound very impressive in battle and the little “pfft” noise that is made every time something is hit is always the same. It has a tendency to get really bland and easily ignored as you play the game more and more. I’ve found that the best way to play this game is to turn the sound off and listen to music of your choice. Since the music, sound and voices are all so weak it’s a waste of time listening to it.
If you like games in the vein of Diablo then you will be very much at home in this game. It might really consist of nothing more than mindless hack and slash over and over but what MMO can really say that this isn’t the case? Once you struggle through the horrible story mode you can find yourself with an enjoyable action-RPG on your hands. Now if we could only get some decent storywriters working with Sonic Team…
Score: 6