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This thread has been linked to the game 'Phantasy Star Universe'.
I play the 360 version of Phantasy Star Universe (PSU). The reason this needs pointing out is that the 360 version has its own exclusive servers, whilst the PS2/PC users play on cross-platform servers. The main difference between the two versions is that on the PS2/PC version the economy went out the window last year when a duping exploit was discovered making PC players very rich and PS2 players very poor in comparison.
On the 360 version, when there's a major glitch everyone gets the same chance to benefit. That's really the only difference, aside from comms of course, the 360 version offers full headset support. This review is all about the 360 version, but I'm guessing 99% of it can equally apply to the PC/PS2 versions.
So What Is PSU?
It's an RPG, along the same lines of Phantasy Star Online. You can buy it just for the offline missions which will take you about 20 hours to complete, but then you can play around with Extra Mode - new missions with rewards depending on how well you perform your objectives against the clock - basically a complete MMORPG experience but just with you playing offline, by yourself. If you're really sad you can pretend the NPCs are real people and talk to them if that's your cup of tea.
The main storyline sees you playing as Ethan Waber, a reluctant teen Guardian who gets sucked into saving the local planetary system. Extra mode lets you design your own Guardian and spend the rest of your life farming neat items to show off to your cat.
If your cat isn't impressed, then online is where it's at, and you don't need XBox Live Gold membership, however you do need a Guardian's Licence from the Marketplace which will cost you £6.99 a month. This allows you to choose your race (Beast, Newman, CAST or Human) and one of 3 'Types' (melee, guns or magic) and then jump in to where the fun is really at. There is a great deal of customisation here so you can spend hours making a fat little Newman with spikey hair, a tall stringy robot CAST with no hair, a muscle-bound Beast or, and it seems disturbingly popular, a cute little blonde with minimal clothing (and yes, you can adjust other aspects of your cute little blonde, including the voice).
The Ambition of the Illuminus Expansion came out a few months back, you can download this from the XBox Live Marketplace for 1600 MS Points to make the full range of the game available (only worth it if you're playing online). Considering the original PSU game is now in the shops for as little as £3.99 (check the bargin bins) it's a small price to pay.
What do I do online?
Your first stop should be the tutorial given by your 'Partner Machine' in 'My Room'. That's 'Your Room', they just call it 'My Room'. Now that you've got to grips with the combat you can head out into Clyez City and look for the real missions (4th floor, top right hand corner is a good start if you're lost).
Now the neat thing about missions in PSU is that if you're the lone wolf type you can start a mission and stick a password on it so you can whack those level 1 beasties to your heart's content solo. Alternatively you can set loot options to Random or In Order or Free For All, go without a password and have up to 5 complete strangers jump in at any time to help out, or steal your loot, or sing 'Achey Breaky Heart' down the mic at you, become your best new friend or die deliberately to blow your S-rank finish out the window. Your choice.
Most mission rank results simply factor in amount of kills and number of deaths. Early on the game is forgiving and you'll probably get an S-rank finish (100% kills, no deaths) on your first couple of outings. Rank is important as it awards you with both Meseta (ingame currency) and Mission Points, which level up your Type. Along the way the stuff you kill will drop money, items, weapons, armour, photons, all kinds of neat things that you won't have a clue what to do with. Fortunately you can store it all in your Partner Machine when you get home, you also have a Common Box in your room if you need extra storage, and your Common Box can be accessed by your other 3 characters on your online account.
How's the Combat?
I'm a melee type so the majority of my combat time is spent pressing the Y-button with the occasional bash of the X-button. It's that simple. Magic types can equip up to four different skills to one weapon, so more buttons for them to play with. Ranger types can pull up a FPS-type cross-hair on their screen and unleash righteous photon fury via whatever rifle/gun they have equipped.
There are also a few race specific moves, Beasts can go nuts once they build up their damage meter and transform into... Beasts, who do huge damage for a limited period. CASTS can equip 'SUV's, satellite-powered devastating cannons for instant damage, again for just a limited period. Newmans and Humans don't get anything, but they have large ears and nice legs to make up for it aesthetically.
At end game it's all about the right weapon/spell in conjunction with the right tactic and photon art, but that's really about as complicated as it gets. I once summed up a PSU race/type debate as: "PSU is such a simple game that a 5-year old could create a Lego Gimptecher and complete every mission just by pushing a couple of buttons now and again. Basically you can turn up in a party in any race/type combination you wish and nobody will be any the wiser unless they check." I still stand by that comment.
How do I get that neat Sword/Whip/Slicer/Armour I saw someone using?
You can:
a) Buy it in the shops, and there are shops on Clyez, Neudaiz, Moatoob and Parum, as well as hidden away in remote locations.
b) Make it via your Partner Machine, you'll need an Item Board and the Materials. To increase you chance of a successful synthesis, you'll need to feed your Partner Machine the right kinds of foods to level it up.
c) Find it (monsters, boss monsters and containers can all be smashed open for loot), like most RPGs, this is where the really neat stuff comes from.
d) Trade for it - PSU has a very neat 'shop' which you can open in 'My Room' ('Your Room', that is) where you can set the price on stuff in your storage for others to buy, and there's a comprehensive search option if you're looking for specific goodies via a terminal in your room.
How do I develop my character?
This is where Phantasy Star Universe really goes to town.
Currently you can level your character with experience points to level 140. Each time you level up you get more points automatically thrown into your Health, Attack, Tech (magic ability), Resistances and so on. As with Phantasy Star Online the final level cap is expected to be 200.
You can also level your Type to level 20. Each time your Type levels you'll notice, you get a rather bigger boost to your stats than you do when your character levels. As your Type increases, you'll gain access to Expert Types, e.g. if your Hunter Type gets to level 10, you can then access Fortefighter, a more specialised melee Type. If you get your Force Type to 5 and your Ranger Type to 3, you can then access Acrotecher, an advanced support class. Currently there are 3 basic Types, 9 Expert Types and soon to come Master Types which are very specialised but very powerful in their respective areas of expertise.
What's the point of it all?
Same as any online RPG, it's about having fun with your friends, showing off your loot, scamming the newbies, cornering the market and making millions from it, showboating your 1337 axe-wielding skills against all odds and spamming in the MMO-type lobbies where 100s of other players can pop you on their Blacklist at the push of a button. I spend most of my lobby time checking out who's wearing what, how much Meseta they have, and whether they've bothered to level up their weapon skills as much as I have.
Is That All There Is To It?
Fortunately, PSU has a deceptive depth as well as the seemingly endless grind for experience points and mission rank points.
- There's the slightly random daily luck feature which affects your drops.
- There's the elemental system (Fire beats Ice, Lightning beats Earth, Dark beats Light and vice versa). Most enemies are weak to one element, and you can synthesise your weapons with anything from 10% to 50% added elemental damage, you'll become very very rich indeed if you manage to pull out a 50% weapon that's in demand. Same goes for armour, you can synthesise that too with elemental bonus to reduce damage taken.
- There's a casino where you can spend all day playing Roulette or Slot Machines, the casino tokens can be turned in for special items.
- There's 'My Room' (that's... nvm.). You can deck it out with furniture, statues of defeated enemies, murals, strange machines, you can even redesign the layout, redecorate with a new theme, and change the music running on your jukebox (assuming you've been diligent and acquired a few tunes to play on it).
- There's the challenge. Want to see if you can solo an S2 difficulty mission against level 155+ monsters? Go for it, but you'll probably have to be level 100 to start it. (Most missions have level requirements).
- There's the huge range of weapons and abilities. Spears, Double Sabres, Axes, Wands, Staves, Whips, Rifles, Pistols, Knuckles, Daggers, pretty much every generic RPG weapon is available, and each one can be tied to several 'Photon Arts' which in turn can be levelled up as you use them, which makes them more damaging, more accurate and, as you progress, can move from a simple one-move attack to a several-hit attack affecting several enemies on-screen.
- There's the 'Event System'. Currently there are 15 events which kick-in depending on the time of year. Lobbies change, game music changes, rare mobs can appear, special npcs offer special rewards in exchange for special items and so on.
- There's the sheer variety. Four planets to visit, each with their own lobbies and sets of missions leading off from them. At the last count there were 59 missions, anything from one to five stages long, and a handful of these missions are mega rare, they only appear randomly but if you get one go for it, the rewards are great. Each mission also has a 'difficulty select', the higher difficulties can be accessed once you've levelled up a bit and reward better Mission Points, loot and Meseta at the end if you survive.
- There's the party system. Fed up with pesky human-controlled party members? Invite a couple of automated NPCs along instead. Although you can only have 2 'bots' in your party at any one time, the fact that one of them is always 10 levels higher than you (your Partner Machine, feed it enough of the right type of food and it'll turn into a lean, mean killing machine just the way you intended) and the other one can be chosen for specific abilities (does a lot of damage, does a lot of healing, wears a short skirt etc.), this comes in quite handy for those times when you want to whack a boss 'solo' and keep all the loot to yourself.
- There's the storyline. The offline story finishes after about 12 chapters, the online mode offers two further Episodes of the storyline via a special mission lobby. Episode Two has 10 Chapters, Episode Three is currently up to Chapter 5 with more Chapters to come in future updates.
- There's weapon upgrading. Got your nice 50% Fire Ank Pikor synthesised? You can do more! Take it to a grinder NPC and they'll attempt to grind it from 0/10 up to 10/10 which increases the damage and number of times you can use a photon art before it runs out of points and needs a refill. However, if the NPC fails, you start again from scratch, this time with a 0/9 weapon. Then with a 0/8 weapon and so on. 10/10 weapons are rare, I usually get to 4/10 and chicken out, you'll see lots of 5/5s etc.
Try Before I Buy?
The PSU demo is available from XBox Live. It'll give you a taste for the gameplay, and there are some cheapskates who play it full-time despite having their characters automatically deleted at the end of each month. The full game, due to having had about a billion major content updates since it was launched, is massively different in terms of things to do, community, economy and so forth.
Final Verdict
I've played on and off since PSU first launched. The intial excitement wore off after a few weeks when I started hitting the original level caps and had to sit around waiting for the next update. Reviews of the game at the time took note of the extremely restrictive content at launch and never really bothered going back and having a look at the present day game. Having returned quite recently from a 7 month break I'm now faced with a huge grind for my characters and their types and their photon arts (32 of them per character!) because all caps have been raised considerably, which is rather neat, just like old times.
Surprisingly there is still lots to do, lots of new monsters to defeat, lots of new areas to explore, and some really great challenges (one of the recent missions added not one, not two, but EIGHT bosses at the end of it).
Not to mention my armour could do with an upgrade (I specialise in crafting my own melee weapons so no problems there, just need to hunt around a bit for the right synthesis boards which will only take... a few months).
If you're new to the game, you might at first be intimidated by the number of Level 140 Type 20 characters running around, but don't be put off, I still see loads of level 1s and 2s wandering around looking for the mission lobbies and wondering where the shops are, so the community is good, I'd guess roughly 1,400 regulars around at all times, 2-3,000 at peak times. On the 360 version there are 30 'shards' which can each hold about 1,000 players so capacity isn't exactly a problem.
If you're an old timer who quit ages ago, it's worth having another look, but if grinding for xp isn't your thing have a good think about it, because the grind is fierce.
PSU is still a good game, a great life-sapper of an RPG with plenty of updates in the works from SEGA.
8.5/10 if you take it online, 6.5/10 if you buy it just for offline.
On the 360 version, when there's a major glitch everyone gets the same chance to benefit. That's really the only difference, aside from comms of course, the 360 version offers full headset support. This review is all about the 360 version, but I'm guessing 99% of it can equally apply to the PC/PS2 versions.
So What Is PSU?
It's an RPG, along the same lines of Phantasy Star Online. You can buy it just for the offline missions which will take you about 20 hours to complete, but then you can play around with Extra Mode - new missions with rewards depending on how well you perform your objectives against the clock - basically a complete MMORPG experience but just with you playing offline, by yourself. If you're really sad you can pretend the NPCs are real people and talk to them if that's your cup of tea.
The main storyline sees you playing as Ethan Waber, a reluctant teen Guardian who gets sucked into saving the local planetary system. Extra mode lets you design your own Guardian and spend the rest of your life farming neat items to show off to your cat.
If your cat isn't impressed, then online is where it's at, and you don't need XBox Live Gold membership, however you do need a Guardian's Licence from the Marketplace which will cost you £6.99 a month. This allows you to choose your race (Beast, Newman, CAST or Human) and one of 3 'Types' (melee, guns or magic) and then jump in to where the fun is really at. There is a great deal of customisation here so you can spend hours making a fat little Newman with spikey hair, a tall stringy robot CAST with no hair, a muscle-bound Beast or, and it seems disturbingly popular, a cute little blonde with minimal clothing (and yes, you can adjust other aspects of your cute little blonde, including the voice).
The Ambition of the Illuminus Expansion came out a few months back, you can download this from the XBox Live Marketplace for 1600 MS Points to make the full range of the game available (only worth it if you're playing online). Considering the original PSU game is now in the shops for as little as £3.99 (check the bargin bins) it's a small price to pay.
What do I do online?
Your first stop should be the tutorial given by your 'Partner Machine' in 'My Room'. That's 'Your Room', they just call it 'My Room'. Now that you've got to grips with the combat you can head out into Clyez City and look for the real missions (4th floor, top right hand corner is a good start if you're lost).
Now the neat thing about missions in PSU is that if you're the lone wolf type you can start a mission and stick a password on it so you can whack those level 1 beasties to your heart's content solo. Alternatively you can set loot options to Random or In Order or Free For All, go without a password and have up to 5 complete strangers jump in at any time to help out, or steal your loot, or sing 'Achey Breaky Heart' down the mic at you, become your best new friend or die deliberately to blow your S-rank finish out the window. Your choice.
Most mission rank results simply factor in amount of kills and number of deaths. Early on the game is forgiving and you'll probably get an S-rank finish (100% kills, no deaths) on your first couple of outings. Rank is important as it awards you with both Meseta (ingame currency) and Mission Points, which level up your Type. Along the way the stuff you kill will drop money, items, weapons, armour, photons, all kinds of neat things that you won't have a clue what to do with. Fortunately you can store it all in your Partner Machine when you get home, you also have a Common Box in your room if you need extra storage, and your Common Box can be accessed by your other 3 characters on your online account.
How's the Combat?
I'm a melee type so the majority of my combat time is spent pressing the Y-button with the occasional bash of the X-button. It's that simple. Magic types can equip up to four different skills to one weapon, so more buttons for them to play with. Ranger types can pull up a FPS-type cross-hair on their screen and unleash righteous photon fury via whatever rifle/gun they have equipped.
There are also a few race specific moves, Beasts can go nuts once they build up their damage meter and transform into... Beasts, who do huge damage for a limited period. CASTS can equip 'SUV's, satellite-powered devastating cannons for instant damage, again for just a limited period. Newmans and Humans don't get anything, but they have large ears and nice legs to make up for it aesthetically.
At end game it's all about the right weapon/spell in conjunction with the right tactic and photon art, but that's really about as complicated as it gets. I once summed up a PSU race/type debate as: "PSU is such a simple game that a 5-year old could create a Lego Gimptecher and complete every mission just by pushing a couple of buttons now and again. Basically you can turn up in a party in any race/type combination you wish and nobody will be any the wiser unless they check." I still stand by that comment.
How do I get that neat Sword/Whip/Slicer/Armour I saw someone using?
You can:
a) Buy it in the shops, and there are shops on Clyez, Neudaiz, Moatoob and Parum, as well as hidden away in remote locations.
b) Make it via your Partner Machine, you'll need an Item Board and the Materials. To increase you chance of a successful synthesis, you'll need to feed your Partner Machine the right kinds of foods to level it up.
c) Find it (monsters, boss monsters and containers can all be smashed open for loot), like most RPGs, this is where the really neat stuff comes from.
d) Trade for it - PSU has a very neat 'shop' which you can open in 'My Room' ('Your Room', that is) where you can set the price on stuff in your storage for others to buy, and there's a comprehensive search option if you're looking for specific goodies via a terminal in your room.
How do I develop my character?
This is where Phantasy Star Universe really goes to town.
Currently you can level your character with experience points to level 140. Each time you level up you get more points automatically thrown into your Health, Attack, Tech (magic ability), Resistances and so on. As with Phantasy Star Online the final level cap is expected to be 200.
You can also level your Type to level 20. Each time your Type levels you'll notice, you get a rather bigger boost to your stats than you do when your character levels. As your Type increases, you'll gain access to Expert Types, e.g. if your Hunter Type gets to level 10, you can then access Fortefighter, a more specialised melee Type. If you get your Force Type to 5 and your Ranger Type to 3, you can then access Acrotecher, an advanced support class. Currently there are 3 basic Types, 9 Expert Types and soon to come Master Types which are very specialised but very powerful in their respective areas of expertise.
What's the point of it all?
Same as any online RPG, it's about having fun with your friends, showing off your loot, scamming the newbies, cornering the market and making millions from it, showboating your 1337 axe-wielding skills against all odds and spamming in the MMO-type lobbies where 100s of other players can pop you on their Blacklist at the push of a button. I spend most of my lobby time checking out who's wearing what, how much Meseta they have, and whether they've bothered to level up their weapon skills as much as I have.
Is That All There Is To It?
Fortunately, PSU has a deceptive depth as well as the seemingly endless grind for experience points and mission rank points.
- There's the slightly random daily luck feature which affects your drops.
- There's the elemental system (Fire beats Ice, Lightning beats Earth, Dark beats Light and vice versa). Most enemies are weak to one element, and you can synthesise your weapons with anything from 10% to 50% added elemental damage, you'll become very very rich indeed if you manage to pull out a 50% weapon that's in demand. Same goes for armour, you can synthesise that too with elemental bonus to reduce damage taken.
- There's a casino where you can spend all day playing Roulette or Slot Machines, the casino tokens can be turned in for special items.
- There's 'My Room' (that's... nvm.). You can deck it out with furniture, statues of defeated enemies, murals, strange machines, you can even redesign the layout, redecorate with a new theme, and change the music running on your jukebox (assuming you've been diligent and acquired a few tunes to play on it).
- There's the challenge. Want to see if you can solo an S2 difficulty mission against level 155+ monsters? Go for it, but you'll probably have to be level 100 to start it. (Most missions have level requirements).
- There's the huge range of weapons and abilities. Spears, Double Sabres, Axes, Wands, Staves, Whips, Rifles, Pistols, Knuckles, Daggers, pretty much every generic RPG weapon is available, and each one can be tied to several 'Photon Arts' which in turn can be levelled up as you use them, which makes them more damaging, more accurate and, as you progress, can move from a simple one-move attack to a several-hit attack affecting several enemies on-screen.
- There's the 'Event System'. Currently there are 15 events which kick-in depending on the time of year. Lobbies change, game music changes, rare mobs can appear, special npcs offer special rewards in exchange for special items and so on.
- There's the sheer variety. Four planets to visit, each with their own lobbies and sets of missions leading off from them. At the last count there were 59 missions, anything from one to five stages long, and a handful of these missions are mega rare, they only appear randomly but if you get one go for it, the rewards are great. Each mission also has a 'difficulty select', the higher difficulties can be accessed once you've levelled up a bit and reward better Mission Points, loot and Meseta at the end if you survive.
- There's the party system. Fed up with pesky human-controlled party members? Invite a couple of automated NPCs along instead. Although you can only have 2 'bots' in your party at any one time, the fact that one of them is always 10 levels higher than you (your Partner Machine, feed it enough of the right type of food and it'll turn into a lean, mean killing machine just the way you intended) and the other one can be chosen for specific abilities (does a lot of damage, does a lot of healing, wears a short skirt etc.), this comes in quite handy for those times when you want to whack a boss 'solo' and keep all the loot to yourself.
- There's the storyline. The offline story finishes after about 12 chapters, the online mode offers two further Episodes of the storyline via a special mission lobby. Episode Two has 10 Chapters, Episode Three is currently up to Chapter 5 with more Chapters to come in future updates.
- There's weapon upgrading. Got your nice 50% Fire Ank Pikor synthesised? You can do more! Take it to a grinder NPC and they'll attempt to grind it from 0/10 up to 10/10 which increases the damage and number of times you can use a photon art before it runs out of points and needs a refill. However, if the NPC fails, you start again from scratch, this time with a 0/9 weapon. Then with a 0/8 weapon and so on. 10/10 weapons are rare, I usually get to 4/10 and chicken out, you'll see lots of 5/5s etc.
Try Before I Buy?
The PSU demo is available from XBox Live. It'll give you a taste for the gameplay, and there are some cheapskates who play it full-time despite having their characters automatically deleted at the end of each month. The full game, due to having had about a billion major content updates since it was launched, is massively different in terms of things to do, community, economy and so forth.
Final Verdict
I've played on and off since PSU first launched. The intial excitement wore off after a few weeks when I started hitting the original level caps and had to sit around waiting for the next update. Reviews of the game at the time took note of the extremely restrictive content at launch and never really bothered going back and having a look at the present day game. Having returned quite recently from a 7 month break I'm now faced with a huge grind for my characters and their types and their photon arts (32 of them per character!) because all caps have been raised considerably, which is rather neat, just like old times.
Surprisingly there is still lots to do, lots of new monsters to defeat, lots of new areas to explore, and some really great challenges (one of the recent missions added not one, not two, but EIGHT bosses at the end of it).
Not to mention my armour could do with an upgrade (I specialise in crafting my own melee weapons so no problems there, just need to hunt around a bit for the right synthesis boards which will only take... a few months).
If you're new to the game, you might at first be intimidated by the number of Level 140 Type 20 characters running around, but don't be put off, I still see loads of level 1s and 2s wandering around looking for the mission lobbies and wondering where the shops are, so the community is good, I'd guess roughly 1,400 regulars around at all times, 2-3,000 at peak times. On the 360 version there are 30 'shards' which can each hold about 1,000 players so capacity isn't exactly a problem.
If you're an old timer who quit ages ago, it's worth having another look, but if grinding for xp isn't your thing have a good think about it, because the grind is fierce.
PSU is still a good game, a great life-sapper of an RPG with plenty of updates in the works from SEGA.
8.5/10 if you take it online, 6.5/10 if you buy it just for offline.
There have been no replies to this thread yet.
I play the 360 version of Phantasy Star Universe (PSU). The reason this needs pointing out is that the 360 version has its own exclusive servers, whilst the PS2/PC users play on cross-platform servers. The main difference between the two versions is that on the PS2/PC version the economy went out the window last year when a duping exploit was discovered making PC players very rich and PS2 players very poor in comparison.
On the 360 version, when there's a major glitch everyone gets the same chance to benefit. That's really the only difference, aside from comms of course, the 360 version offers full headset support. This review is all about the 360 version, but I'm guessing 99% of it can equally apply to the PC/PS2 versions.
So What Is PSU?
It's an RPG, along the same lines of Phantasy Star Online. You can buy it just for the offline missions which will take you about 20 hours to complete, but then you can play around with Extra Mode - new missions with rewards depending on how well you perform your objectives against the clock - basically a complete MMORPG experience but just with you playing offline, by yourself. If you're really sad you can pretend the NPCs are real people and talk to them if that's your cup of tea.
The main storyline sees you playing as Ethan Waber, a reluctant teen Guardian who gets sucked into saving the local planetary system. Extra mode lets you design your own Guardian and spend the rest of your life farming neat items to show off to your cat.
If your cat isn't impressed, then online is where it's at, and you don't need XBox Live Gold membership, however you do need a Guardian's Licence from the Marketplace which will cost you £6.99 a month. This allows you to choose your race (Beast, Newman, CAST or Human) and one of 3 'Types' (melee, guns or magic) and then jump in to where the fun is really at. There is a great deal of customisation here so you can spend hours making a fat little Newman with spikey hair, a tall stringy robot CAST with no hair, a muscle-bound Beast or, and it seems disturbingly popular, a cute little blonde with minimal clothing (and yes, you can adjust other aspects of your cute little blonde, including the voice).
The Ambition of the Illuminus Expansion came out a few months back, you can download this from the XBox Live Marketplace for 1600 MS Points to make the full range of the game available (only worth it if you're playing online). Considering the original PSU game is now in the shops for as little as £3.99 (check the bargin bins) it's a small price to pay.
What do I do online?
Your first stop should be the tutorial given by your 'Partner Machine' in 'My Room'. That's 'Your Room', they just call it 'My Room'. Now that you've got to grips with the combat you can head out into Clyez City and look for the real missions (4th floor, top right hand corner is a good start if you're lost).
Now the neat thing about missions in PSU is that if you're the lone wolf type you can start a mission and stick a password on it so you can whack those level 1 beasties to your heart's content solo. Alternatively you can set loot options to Random or In Order or Free For All, go without a password and have up to 5 complete strangers jump in at any time to help out, or steal your loot, or sing 'Achey Breaky Heart' down the mic at you, become your best new friend or die deliberately to blow your S-rank finish out the window. Your choice.
Most mission rank results simply factor in amount of kills and number of deaths. Early on the game is forgiving and you'll probably get an S-rank finish (100% kills, no deaths) on your first couple of outings. Rank is important as it awards you with both Meseta (ingame currency) and Mission Points, which level up your Type. Along the way the stuff you kill will drop money, items, weapons, armour, photons, all kinds of neat things that you won't have a clue what to do with. Fortunately you can store it all in your Partner Machine when you get home, you also have a Common Box in your room if you need extra storage, and your Common Box can be accessed by your other 3 characters on your online account.
How's the Combat?
I'm a melee type so the majority of my combat time is spent pressing the Y-button with the occasional bash of the X-button. It's that simple. Magic types can equip up to four different skills to one weapon, so more buttons for them to play with. Ranger types can pull up a FPS-type cross-hair on their screen and unleash righteous photon fury via whatever rifle/gun they have equipped.
There are also a few race specific moves, Beasts can go nuts once they build up their damage meter and transform into... Beasts, who do huge damage for a limited period. CASTS can equip 'SUV's, satellite-powered devastating cannons for instant damage, again for just a limited period. Newmans and Humans don't get anything, but they have large ears and nice legs to make up for it aesthetically.
At end game it's all about the right weapon/spell in conjunction with the right tactic and photon art, but that's really about as complicated as it gets. I once summed up a PSU race/type debate as: "PSU is such a simple game that a 5-year old could create a Lego Gimptecher and complete every mission just by pushing a couple of buttons now and again. Basically you can turn up in a party in any race/type combination you wish and nobody will be any the wiser unless they check." I still stand by that comment.
How do I get that neat Sword/Whip/Slicer/Armour I saw someone using?
You can:
a) Buy it in the shops, and there are shops on Clyez, Neudaiz, Moatoob and Parum, as well as hidden away in remote locations.
b) Make it via your Partner Machine, you'll need an Item Board and the Materials. To increase you chance of a successful synthesis, you'll need to feed your Partner Machine the right kinds of foods to level it up.
c) Find it (monsters, boss monsters and containers can all be smashed open for loot), like most RPGs, this is where the really neat stuff comes from.
d) Trade for it - PSU has a very neat 'shop' which you can open in 'My Room' ('Your Room', that is) where you can set the price on stuff in your storage for others to buy, and there's a comprehensive search option if you're looking for specific goodies via a terminal in your room.
How do I develop my character?
This is where Phantasy Star Universe really goes to town.
Currently you can level your character with experience points to level 140. Each time you level up you get more points automatically thrown into your Health, Attack, Tech (magic ability), Resistances and so on. As with Phantasy Star Online the final level cap is expected to be 200.
You can also level your Type to level 20. Each time your Type levels you'll notice, you get a rather bigger boost to your stats than you do when your character levels. As your Type increases, you'll gain access to Expert Types, e.g. if your Hunter Type gets to level 10, you can then access Fortefighter, a more specialised melee Type. If you get your Force Type to 5 and your Ranger Type to 3, you can then access Acrotecher, an advanced support class. Currently there are 3 basic Types, 9 Expert Types and soon to come Master Types which are very specialised but very powerful in their respective areas of expertise.
What's the point of it all?
Same as any online RPG, it's about having fun with your friends, showing off your loot, scamming the newbies, cornering the market and making millions from it, showboating your 1337 axe-wielding skills against all odds and spamming in the MMO-type lobbies where 100s of other players can pop you on their Blacklist at the push of a button. I spend most of my lobby time checking out who's wearing what, how much Meseta they have, and whether they've bothered to level up their weapon skills as much as I have.
Is That All There Is To It?
Fortunately, PSU has a deceptive depth as well as the seemingly endless grind for experience points and mission rank points.
- There's the slightly random daily luck feature which affects your drops.
- There's the elemental system (Fire beats Ice, Lightning beats Earth, Dark beats Light and vice versa). Most enemies are weak to one element, and you can synthesise your weapons with anything from 10% to 50% added elemental damage, you'll become very very rich indeed if you manage to pull out a 50% weapon that's in demand. Same goes for armour, you can synthesise that too with elemental bonus to reduce damage taken.
- There's a casino where you can spend all day playing Roulette or Slot Machines, the casino tokens can be turned in for special items.
- There's 'My Room' (that's... nvm.). You can deck it out with furniture, statues of defeated enemies, murals, strange machines, you can even redesign the layout, redecorate with a new theme, and change the music running on your jukebox (assuming you've been diligent and acquired a few tunes to play on it).
- There's the challenge. Want to see if you can solo an S2 difficulty mission against level 155+ monsters? Go for it, but you'll probably have to be level 100 to start it. (Most missions have level requirements).
- There's the huge range of weapons and abilities. Spears, Double Sabres, Axes, Wands, Staves, Whips, Rifles, Pistols, Knuckles, Daggers, pretty much every generic RPG weapon is available, and each one can be tied to several 'Photon Arts' which in turn can be levelled up as you use them, which makes them more damaging, more accurate and, as you progress, can move from a simple one-move attack to a several-hit attack affecting several enemies on-screen.
- There's the 'Event System'. Currently there are 15 events which kick-in depending on the time of year. Lobbies change, game music changes, rare mobs can appear, special npcs offer special rewards in exchange for special items and so on.
- There's the sheer variety. Four planets to visit, each with their own lobbies and sets of missions leading off from them. At the last count there were 59 missions, anything from one to five stages long, and a handful of these missions are mega rare, they only appear randomly but if you get one go for it, the rewards are great. Each mission also has a 'difficulty select', the higher difficulties can be accessed once you've levelled up a bit and reward better Mission Points, loot and Meseta at the end if you survive.
- There's the party system. Fed up with pesky human-controlled party members? Invite a couple of automated NPCs along instead. Although you can only have 2 'bots' in your party at any one time, the fact that one of them is always 10 levels higher than you (your Partner Machine, feed it enough of the right type of food and it'll turn into a lean, mean killing machine just the way you intended) and the other one can be chosen for specific abilities (does a lot of damage, does a lot of healing, wears a short skirt etc.), this comes in quite handy for those times when you want to whack a boss 'solo' and keep all the loot to yourself.
- There's the storyline. The offline story finishes after about 12 chapters, the online mode offers two further Episodes of the storyline via a special mission lobby. Episode Two has 10 Chapters, Episode Three is currently up to Chapter 5 with more Chapters to come in future updates.
- There's weapon upgrading. Got your nice 50% Fire Ank Pikor synthesised? You can do more! Take it to a grinder NPC and they'll attempt to grind it from 0/10 up to 10/10 which increases the damage and number of times you can use a photon art before it runs out of points and needs a refill. However, if the NPC fails, you start again from scratch, this time with a 0/9 weapon. Then with a 0/8 weapon and so on. 10/10 weapons are rare, I usually get to 4/10 and chicken out, you'll see lots of 5/5s etc.
Try Before I Buy?
The PSU demo is available from XBox Live. It'll give you a taste for the gameplay, and there are some cheapskates who play it full-time despite having their characters automatically deleted at the end of each month. The full game, due to having had about a billion major content updates since it was launched, is massively different in terms of things to do, community, economy and so forth.
Final Verdict
I've played on and off since PSU first launched. The intial excitement wore off after a few weeks when I started hitting the original level caps and had to sit around waiting for the next update. Reviews of the game at the time took note of the extremely restrictive content at launch and never really bothered going back and having a look at the present day game. Having returned quite recently from a 7 month break I'm now faced with a huge grind for my characters and their types and their photon arts (32 of them per character!) because all caps have been raised considerably, which is rather neat, just like old times.
Surprisingly there is still lots to do, lots of new monsters to defeat, lots of new areas to explore, and some really great challenges (one of the recent missions added not one, not two, but EIGHT bosses at the end of it).
Not to mention my armour could do with an upgrade (I specialise in crafting my own melee weapons so no problems there, just need to hunt around a bit for the right synthesis boards which will only take... a few months).
If you're new to the game, you might at first be intimidated by the number of Level 140 Type 20 characters running around, but don't be put off, I still see loads of level 1s and 2s wandering around looking for the mission lobbies and wondering where the shops are, so the community is good, I'd guess roughly 1,400 regulars around at all times, 2-3,000 at peak times. On the 360 version there are 30 'shards' which can each hold about 1,000 players so capacity isn't exactly a problem.
If you're an old timer who quit ages ago, it's worth having another look, but if grinding for xp isn't your thing have a good think about it, because the grind is fierce.
PSU is still a good game, a great life-sapper of an RPG with plenty of updates in the works from SEGA.
8.5/10 if you take it online, 6.5/10 if you buy it just for offline.
On the 360 version, when there's a major glitch everyone gets the same chance to benefit. That's really the only difference, aside from comms of course, the 360 version offers full headset support. This review is all about the 360 version, but I'm guessing 99% of it can equally apply to the PC/PS2 versions.
So What Is PSU?
It's an RPG, along the same lines of Phantasy Star Online. You can buy it just for the offline missions which will take you about 20 hours to complete, but then you can play around with Extra Mode - new missions with rewards depending on how well you perform your objectives against the clock - basically a complete MMORPG experience but just with you playing offline, by yourself. If you're really sad you can pretend the NPCs are real people and talk to them if that's your cup of tea.
The main storyline sees you playing as Ethan Waber, a reluctant teen Guardian who gets sucked into saving the local planetary system. Extra mode lets you design your own Guardian and spend the rest of your life farming neat items to show off to your cat.
If your cat isn't impressed, then online is where it's at, and you don't need XBox Live Gold membership, however you do need a Guardian's Licence from the Marketplace which will cost you £6.99 a month. This allows you to choose your race (Beast, Newman, CAST or Human) and one of 3 'Types' (melee, guns or magic) and then jump in to where the fun is really at. There is a great deal of customisation here so you can spend hours making a fat little Newman with spikey hair, a tall stringy robot CAST with no hair, a muscle-bound Beast or, and it seems disturbingly popular, a cute little blonde with minimal clothing (and yes, you can adjust other aspects of your cute little blonde, including the voice).
The Ambition of the Illuminus Expansion came out a few months back, you can download this from the XBox Live Marketplace for 1600 MS Points to make the full range of the game available (only worth it if you're playing online). Considering the original PSU game is now in the shops for as little as £3.99 (check the bargin bins) it's a small price to pay.
What do I do online?
Your first stop should be the tutorial given by your 'Partner Machine' in 'My Room'. That's 'Your Room', they just call it 'My Room'. Now that you've got to grips with the combat you can head out into Clyez City and look for the real missions (4th floor, top right hand corner is a good start if you're lost).
Now the neat thing about missions in PSU is that if you're the lone wolf type you can start a mission and stick a password on it so you can whack those level 1 beasties to your heart's content solo. Alternatively you can set loot options to Random or In Order or Free For All, go without a password and have up to 5 complete strangers jump in at any time to help out, or steal your loot, or sing 'Achey Breaky Heart' down the mic at you, become your best new friend or die deliberately to blow your S-rank finish out the window. Your choice.
Most mission rank results simply factor in amount of kills and number of deaths. Early on the game is forgiving and you'll probably get an S-rank finish (100% kills, no deaths) on your first couple of outings. Rank is important as it awards you with both Meseta (ingame currency) and Mission Points, which level up your Type. Along the way the stuff you kill will drop money, items, weapons, armour, photons, all kinds of neat things that you won't have a clue what to do with. Fortunately you can store it all in your Partner Machine when you get home, you also have a Common Box in your room if you need extra storage, and your Common Box can be accessed by your other 3 characters on your online account.
How's the Combat?
I'm a melee type so the majority of my combat time is spent pressing the Y-button with the occasional bash of the X-button. It's that simple. Magic types can equip up to four different skills to one weapon, so more buttons for them to play with. Ranger types can pull up a FPS-type cross-hair on their screen and unleash righteous photon fury via whatever rifle/gun they have equipped.
There are also a few race specific moves, Beasts can go nuts once they build up their damage meter and transform into... Beasts, who do huge damage for a limited period. CASTS can equip 'SUV's, satellite-powered devastating cannons for instant damage, again for just a limited period. Newmans and Humans don't get anything, but they have large ears and nice legs to make up for it aesthetically.
At end game it's all about the right weapon/spell in conjunction with the right tactic and photon art, but that's really about as complicated as it gets. I once summed up a PSU race/type debate as: "PSU is such a simple game that a 5-year old could create a Lego Gimptecher and complete every mission just by pushing a couple of buttons now and again. Basically you can turn up in a party in any race/type combination you wish and nobody will be any the wiser unless they check." I still stand by that comment.
How do I get that neat Sword/Whip/Slicer/Armour I saw someone using?
You can:
a) Buy it in the shops, and there are shops on Clyez, Neudaiz, Moatoob and Parum, as well as hidden away in remote locations.
b) Make it via your Partner Machine, you'll need an Item Board and the Materials. To increase you chance of a successful synthesis, you'll need to feed your Partner Machine the right kinds of foods to level it up.
c) Find it (monsters, boss monsters and containers can all be smashed open for loot), like most RPGs, this is where the really neat stuff comes from.
d) Trade for it - PSU has a very neat 'shop' which you can open in 'My Room' ('Your Room', that is) where you can set the price on stuff in your storage for others to buy, and there's a comprehensive search option if you're looking for specific goodies via a terminal in your room.
How do I develop my character?
This is where Phantasy Star Universe really goes to town.
Currently you can level your character with experience points to level 140. Each time you level up you get more points automatically thrown into your Health, Attack, Tech (magic ability), Resistances and so on. As with Phantasy Star Online the final level cap is expected to be 200.
You can also level your Type to level 20. Each time your Type levels you'll notice, you get a rather bigger boost to your stats than you do when your character levels. As your Type increases, you'll gain access to Expert Types, e.g. if your Hunter Type gets to level 10, you can then access Fortefighter, a more specialised melee Type. If you get your Force Type to 5 and your Ranger Type to 3, you can then access Acrotecher, an advanced support class. Currently there are 3 basic Types, 9 Expert Types and soon to come Master Types which are very specialised but very powerful in their respective areas of expertise.
What's the point of it all?
Same as any online RPG, it's about having fun with your friends, showing off your loot, scamming the newbies, cornering the market and making millions from it, showboating your 1337 axe-wielding skills against all odds and spamming in the MMO-type lobbies where 100s of other players can pop you on their Blacklist at the push of a button. I spend most of my lobby time checking out who's wearing what, how much Meseta they have, and whether they've bothered to level up their weapon skills as much as I have.
Is That All There Is To It?
Fortunately, PSU has a deceptive depth as well as the seemingly endless grind for experience points and mission rank points.
- There's the slightly random daily luck feature which affects your drops.
- There's the elemental system (Fire beats Ice, Lightning beats Earth, Dark beats Light and vice versa). Most enemies are weak to one element, and you can synthesise your weapons with anything from 10% to 50% added elemental damage, you'll become very very rich indeed if you manage to pull out a 50% weapon that's in demand. Same goes for armour, you can synthesise that too with elemental bonus to reduce damage taken.
- There's a casino where you can spend all day playing Roulette or Slot Machines, the casino tokens can be turned in for special items.
- There's 'My Room' (that's... nvm.). You can deck it out with furniture, statues of defeated enemies, murals, strange machines, you can even redesign the layout, redecorate with a new theme, and change the music running on your jukebox (assuming you've been diligent and acquired a few tunes to play on it).
- There's the challenge. Want to see if you can solo an S2 difficulty mission against level 155+ monsters? Go for it, but you'll probably have to be level 100 to start it. (Most missions have level requirements).
- There's the huge range of weapons and abilities. Spears, Double Sabres, Axes, Wands, Staves, Whips, Rifles, Pistols, Knuckles, Daggers, pretty much every generic RPG weapon is available, and each one can be tied to several 'Photon Arts' which in turn can be levelled up as you use them, which makes them more damaging, more accurate and, as you progress, can move from a simple one-move attack to a several-hit attack affecting several enemies on-screen.
- There's the 'Event System'. Currently there are 15 events which kick-in depending on the time of year. Lobbies change, game music changes, rare mobs can appear, special npcs offer special rewards in exchange for special items and so on.
- There's the sheer variety. Four planets to visit, each with their own lobbies and sets of missions leading off from them. At the last count there were 59 missions, anything from one to five stages long, and a handful of these missions are mega rare, they only appear randomly but if you get one go for it, the rewards are great. Each mission also has a 'difficulty select', the higher difficulties can be accessed once you've levelled up a bit and reward better Mission Points, loot and Meseta at the end if you survive.
- There's the party system. Fed up with pesky human-controlled party members? Invite a couple of automated NPCs along instead. Although you can only have 2 'bots' in your party at any one time, the fact that one of them is always 10 levels higher than you (your Partner Machine, feed it enough of the right type of food and it'll turn into a lean, mean killing machine just the way you intended) and the other one can be chosen for specific abilities (does a lot of damage, does a lot of healing, wears a short skirt etc.), this comes in quite handy for those times when you want to whack a boss 'solo' and keep all the loot to yourself.
- There's the storyline. The offline story finishes after about 12 chapters, the online mode offers two further Episodes of the storyline via a special mission lobby. Episode Two has 10 Chapters, Episode Three is currently up to Chapter 5 with more Chapters to come in future updates.
- There's weapon upgrading. Got your nice 50% Fire Ank Pikor synthesised? You can do more! Take it to a grinder NPC and they'll attempt to grind it from 0/10 up to 10/10 which increases the damage and number of times you can use a photon art before it runs out of points and needs a refill. However, if the NPC fails, you start again from scratch, this time with a 0/9 weapon. Then with a 0/8 weapon and so on. 10/10 weapons are rare, I usually get to 4/10 and chicken out, you'll see lots of 5/5s etc.
Try Before I Buy?
The PSU demo is available from XBox Live. It'll give you a taste for the gameplay, and there are some cheapskates who play it full-time despite having their characters automatically deleted at the end of each month. The full game, due to having had about a billion major content updates since it was launched, is massively different in terms of things to do, community, economy and so forth.
Final Verdict
I've played on and off since PSU first launched. The intial excitement wore off after a few weeks when I started hitting the original level caps and had to sit around waiting for the next update. Reviews of the game at the time took note of the extremely restrictive content at launch and never really bothered going back and having a look at the present day game. Having returned quite recently from a 7 month break I'm now faced with a huge grind for my characters and their types and their photon arts (32 of them per character!) because all caps have been raised considerably, which is rather neat, just like old times.
Surprisingly there is still lots to do, lots of new monsters to defeat, lots of new areas to explore, and some really great challenges (one of the recent missions added not one, not two, but EIGHT bosses at the end of it).
Not to mention my armour could do with an upgrade (I specialise in crafting my own melee weapons so no problems there, just need to hunt around a bit for the right synthesis boards which will only take... a few months).
If you're new to the game, you might at first be intimidated by the number of Level 140 Type 20 characters running around, but don't be put off, I still see loads of level 1s and 2s wandering around looking for the mission lobbies and wondering where the shops are, so the community is good, I'd guess roughly 1,400 regulars around at all times, 2-3,000 at peak times. On the 360 version there are 30 'shards' which can each hold about 1,000 players so capacity isn't exactly a problem.
If you're an old timer who quit ages ago, it's worth having another look, but if grinding for xp isn't your thing have a good think about it, because the grind is fierce.
PSU is still a good game, a great life-sapper of an RPG with plenty of updates in the works from SEGA.
8.5/10 if you take it online, 6.5/10 if you buy it just for offline.