Finding Fun #1: Phantasy Star Online

Be Who You Want to Be

The character creation in PSO is the first time I felt like I was creating a truly unique identity. You choose from melee, ranged, or magic classes and within those you can choose between different races and genders. Within each of those is a ton of more customization for your size, hair, colors, etc. Lots of fan service throughout these options as well so that you could make a character that looks like Goku, Solid Snake, or a Gundam. This was a minigame in itself which I spent a lot of time with.

A Tune for Every Room

Getting kicked offline from losing my dial-up connection forced me to sit on the home screen more than I would have, but the music is so good that I didn't mind. It's futuristic, orchestral, and highly varied depending on which environment you are in from the shop on your ship to the ancient ruins. Later on you can even find music tracks to overtake the current background music on command.

A New World

Pioneer 2, while small, feels like a living cyberpunk city with elements just familiar enough for you to have an intuitive sense of what's what. Forest is lush and rainy with twisted takes on bears, birds, and gorillas. Caves has lava and water running through it full of aquatic-inspired monsters. Mines is filled with rundown technology. Ruins is a mix of ancient magic with futuristic tech. Each one is interesting to run around in and remains engaging even after you visit them hundreds of times.

Slash, Shoot, Zap

This is an action RPG, so the combat is a big part of the game and it doesn't disappoint. PSO almost plays like a fighting game. When you press a button to swing a sword or cast a spell, you're locking yourself into an animation that you think is going to win over your enemy's move. When you dodge, you don't want to stray too far because then you won't be able to hit back. There are mechanics for staggering, a variety of status effects, and each weapon handles a little bit differently in its combo timing, reach, and abilities.

Smack, Blast, Fire

Combat is both immediately fun and fun in the long-term. It evolves as you continue to unlock new weapons, new spells, and new difficulties:

• Finding a new weapon type means you're learning new timings to do your light/heavy/special attacks. Some weapons have unique abilities tied to their special attack so there's a reason to test out each one to see how they work.
• As you find stronger versions of spells you'll observe new animations and more potent effects. The types are intriguing as there are support spells, light/dark spells, and more basic fire/ice/lightning magic. Mixing and matching these with weapons is definitely satisfying.
• Your command palette is limited so you have to strategize for which attacks/spells/items you have at the ready.
• Once you reach the max difficulty of ultimate basically all the enemies get upgraded and you have new timings to learn for each encounter.

Red Boxes

Drops in this game are split into weapons, armor, spells, consumables, and money/meseta. After you kill an enemy or break a room full of boxes you see color-coded drops spinning on the ground which will be identified once you walk over them. This builds in a constant cycle of anticipation as you see new items appear and then check out what dropped. Occassionally a special rare red box will drop which gives you that moment of excitement and encourages you to do full clears.

Fight Using a Monkey's Head on a Stick That Shoots Fireballs

An ancient centaur's laser rifle arm, Wukong's staff, a frying pan, a pistol that shoots lasers coming down from the sky, Knuckle's fists. The weapons in this game are so diverse and cool that I often chose not based on what did the most damage, but what was the most fun to use.

Level Up

Typical of an RPG, leveling up is a key mechanic. While I wasn't thrilled to see "DFP +1", "ATA +1", and "EVP +5" scroll by after each level up, it was satisfying to see my character get stronger over time and compare my level to others in the lobby knowing some are where I've been and others are where I'm going.

Party Up

I played PSO mostly online and connected with people across the world. Seeing everyone's unique characters in lobbies and partying up with them only to find out that they speak Japanese was something that kept me coming back. Each session had a new dynamic in the form of a new set of people I played with.

Mags: The Pets You Never Knew You Wanted

Mags were little pets that you could feed every 3 minutes like an in-game Tamagotchi. It would follow you in combat and let you build up meter to use an offensive or defensive super move. The time-gated feeding offered a sense of the creature being alive and the varied evolutions of the mags were fun to discover and many just looked cool.

Draw Your Messages to Others via Symbol Chat

Similar to the character creation, symbol chat was a minigame in itself where you could draw your chat reactions. You were given some basic shapes like circles, squares, and triangles and the ability to resize, rotate, and layer these. I was always amazed at the art people could make. I'd often be doodling with any downtime in the game like waiting for a party to form or someone doing a quick run to town.

Lobbies Decorated for Halloween

For many western and eastern holidays the lobbies in PSO would get redecorated along with new music. Sometimes they even had new missions with special drops. As someone living in the US, This was interesting from a cultural perspective to learn about new traditions from Japan and gave the world that extra bit of community and feeling alive.

Control During Loading Screens

Many games in this console generation let you do something in the loading screens. For PSO, you'd simply control a little sparkly star that moves around while you teleport. This was impossible to resist and made those environment transitions engaging.

The Principal Wants Me to Do What Now?

I could not tell you what the story of this game was. Maybe it hit differently for people who were more familiar with the Phantasy Star series, but to someone where PSO was my first entry I had no interest in it.

New Armor, Yay...

Armor, along with money, quickly felt like a chore. Most of it wasn't visible and your upgrades just made your stats go up so it felt like you had to do it to keep up even though it wasn't fun to manage.

Disrespecting Time

Traps, certain zone layouts, and enemies like slimes would just slow down your traversal/combat instead of adding significant meaning to the gameplay. One could argue that these existed to give things like the android race an edge as they could see/lay traps or encourage you to bring ice attacks to freeze the slimes, but even with those in mind these mechanics are more boring than they are fun.

I find these types of game elements interesting because I'm not sure if they were absent that something else would readily replace them as the most boring aspect or if they were truly unnecessary.