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9 |
Graphics |
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9 |
Sound |
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7 |
Gameplay |
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10 |
Value / Lastability |
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7 |
Reviewers Impression |
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Difficulty: Moderate
Learning Time: About 1 hour
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Review: Phantasy Star Online Ver.1 |
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| Saturday, July 19, 2003 | 10:32:30 PM | By: nuckles87 |
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The Flawed Beauty
Phantasy Star Online (PSO) is probably one of the most innovative and most highly acclaimed Dreamcast game ever released. It brought online RPGs to home consoles and allowed gamers to communicate with other gamers from across the world with a new “universal communication” chat system, which translated Japanese, Spanish, French, or English dialogue to the local language of the user. It even allowed several Japanese couples to find each other and fall in love, essentially turning PSO into an online dating service. In fact, there were even several real marriages that took place in PSO’s lobby. But, offline, the fun ends. PSO lacks strong single player gameplay. The game can get very dull, and very repetitive, considering the only thing to the game is to kill anything that moves, as well as flicking switches to open new areas of the dungeons you must explore. I found the combat very frustrating. Your character attacks very slowly, and I found it hard to hit enemies. But, as the game progresses and you level up, it will be considerably easier to hit enemies, and you character won’t move so slow while attacking. Even then, the game will still be fairly average in single player.
The only flaw in PSO’s online gameplay is hackers. Anyone with a Gameshark can easily nole other PSO players. In other words, someone can erase you character from your memory card, and replace it with theirs. Luckily, there are ways to prevent this. Check my “PSO hacker survival guide” at the bottom to find out how. Other hacking problems include hackers killing other players, hackers stealing all your items, and hackers deleting all your memory card files. PSO is a very dangerous place, but when you find the right group of people, the experience will be worth the risk.
Graphically, PSO is very impressive. Dozens of enemies can be shown on screen with little, if any, slowdown (although I did still encounter some frame rate problems). The lighting effects and the lush environments looked very impressive. While average for today’s standards, it was quiet beautiful in its day.
The lasting appeal is almost infinite. There are many online quests to take part in, many weapons to buy, many dungeons to explore, as well as several difficulty setting, each with its own ending. The online play alone offers infinite replay ability.
My score isn’t as high as some might want it to be, but after evaluating just how fun the game is, feel that this is what it has earned
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Pros & Cons |
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The Good
• The online gameplay is still unbeatable
• Was the first, and still one of the best online RPGs
• Great graphics for its time
• Broke the language barrier in online games with its universal translator
• Almost infinite lasting appeal
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The Bad
• Fairly cruddy, average, and downright lonely offline play
• Hackers run rampent. Be sure to always make your game password protected once you have some fans, or just join SoniClan
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