Phantasy Star is back and its awesome
In Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus, you have the choice to play offline or online. This should be your first choice with the game. The online costs 10$ a month and the offline is obviously free. If you play offline you will have to play the game with AI only and online you can play with friends and team up to do missions. The whole point of this game is to do missions, level up your character and his classes(you can switch them.. for a fee) and complete the story mode. The story continues from the original PSU so if you have not played it SOME things may seem sort of weird. It does do a good job of recapping some things tho.
The missions section of the game is pretty simple. Gather a party of friends, go to the area you want to do the mission in and go from there. The missions are usually just go from point A to point B while killing everything you see but there are a few missions that involve a few other things. The boss battles in the game are brilliant. Usually at the end of a long mission line you will face off against a boss. Bosses are usually really hard to kill and the battle can last 10+ minutes depending on the difficultly you chose.
Leveling up in the game is not as easy as it sounds. You have a main level and your class level. When you level up your classes you get more skill points than you would if you level up normally and there are quite a few "Forte" classes like Guntecher, uses attributes and weapon trees from Ranger and Force classes, Fortefighter, harder to achieve due to you needing level 10 hunter and focuses mainly on the highest class swords and lower class guns. The three basic classes are Hunter, uses swords and lower class guns most balanced class, Ranger, mainly uses guns and some melee, and Force, uses "wands" and other archaic weapons like crossbows and longbows to deal out elemental damage or heal team mates.
The awesome thing about AOTI is it is standalone and it has EVERYTHING from PSU and a lot more. Another good thing is the low system requirements. It plays great on my E7200+HD 4850 and the Phenom 9500+HD 3200 in my HTPC, even at 1920x1080.