Phantasy Star Online

I played it recently and it is dated but still fun if it is the kind of game you like. Something I noticed is how much modern games like The Division and Destiny owe to PSO's design and to be fair, Diablo as well.

I know a girl who loves PS0 and played it on an emulator. She linked me some videos, and it looks nearly as good as a 3DS game. Embed related. Skip past the menus, which are sprites and therefore can't be upscaled.

t. Played the actual handheld version

PSP2 is unironically my favorite Phantasy Star game. The Braver class was cool as fuck, the weapon proficiency and ability equip system is at the franchise's peak, and there was a huge variety of weapon types. If you get the Infinity version, there's even a full FIVE races to play as. Human, Neuman, CAST, Beast, and Duman. Most of which get unique race-based Photon Blast options.

I wonder if Infinity ever got translated. I stopped playing before it came to fruition. Always wanted to try a Duman, though. They got super saiyan-y energy attacks for their Photon Blasts.

Holy mother of fuck, the project is ongoing with active online presence.

gbatemp. net/threads/phantasy-star-portable-2-infinity-english-translation.368328/page-72

It looks like it's gonna happen, eventually. I'm happier about this than I expected.

If you're a fan of the series, then play Blue Burst. Also emulate C.A.R.D. Revolution for GameCube and finish it off with Phantasy Star 0 for the DS. These are the games of PSO's timeline. As for a sequel, the DS game PS0 is as close as you can get to a sequel since PSO2 takes place in an alternate Universe.

PSO2's universe is somewhat parallel to PSO's. Ash is a side character in PSO but his PSO2 counterpart was given a much greater role as the protagonist (default hunter) who ends up wielding a double saber after the events of Episode 3, first two images are both Ash. Rupika is a side character in PSO, yet she appears as the default Force Newman and canon support partner of Ash in PSO2, last two images are Rupika. Arkz is an opposing faction in PSO while Arks is the hero's organization in PSO2. The characters and names are when the similarities end.

Games part of PSO2's timeline are PSO2es and Phantasy Star Nova for Vita. Does this info help?

Do you like low-reflex action games wherein you run around and beat things with swords? If yes, then play PSO. Having never played PSO2, i assume it's better, but then i liked PSUniverse just fine for all the walk-around and beating on shit it had in it.

Diablo is a ugly, dark, three-quarters view click game, though. PSO is anime and colorful and plays perfectly fine with a controller, as long as you don't have to type out messages. PSO is far closer to Dynasty Warriors than Diablo.

I honestly feel like going back to this but not sure how many people play. It's comfy solo though. Play Blue Burst if you can find a decent private server as the official one is dead. I used to play on SCHT.
WoW is shit, so yes.
PSO2 is amazingly fun. Download the Arks-Layer launcher and play in mostly full English.

Yep, grab a copy of Blue Burst and hop on Ephinea server.

ephinea.pioneer2.net/

There's still a lot of people playing. I might even join in.

Episode 4 is pretty shit though. I still consider the Gamecube v3 the best overall version of the game. Shame you need a functioning Gamecube and memory cards with finite read limits to play it. I lost one of my level 200 characters a while back from a totally random file corruption that didn't even have anything to do with the typical bullshit corruption mechanisms.

PSO2 > PSO1
This is how average PSO2 "raid" looks like, skip to 5:30 for additional crazy.

If you haven't played the story aspects of PSO I would recommend playing it for that reason.

Pick one, movement in PSO was relatively slow.

Except PSO wasn't a crazy wacky anime game. It was a stoic tragedy where the player was always in over their heads against enemies they really shouldn't have beaten.

Now go play it again and read text boxes this time.

What red text boxes are you referring to? Are you talking about the "red box" rare items descriptions?

Why the fuck did I see the word red, god I'm tired.

Gave me a chuckle there.
Basically PSO1 is just full of weird anime humour and over-the-top heroics as PSO2, except it's all in text, whereas in PSO2 it's all animated and voice acted.
While PSO2 has just as much drama and sobby scene as PSO1.
So most "old-fags" just skipped most of PSO1 dialogue, only reading obviously important one, building some unrealistic image of a grimdark game peppered with nostalgia and muddy DC textures.

Now PSU, that was a fucking furry circus.

While there were certainly some side missions that were humorous like The Fake in Yellow they never fought a WWII battle ship in large mechs in a main story mission.
But please if you can point out where in the main missions there is weird anime humor go right ahead, and fortunately the games script is online at pscave.com/pso/script/

First mission
Tyrell is a stoic character

Also in the same room
This is not humorous at all its fucking dark.

Also in the first mission

The only really cringeworthy humor in PSO popped up in certain event quests

Well shit I don't have script for PSO2, but basic outline is
Aint shit tragic? I hated this dude, but in the end he turns into badass and one of the best characters in the game.
Aint shit dark and edgy?
And there is shitloads of plot and characters like this. There are like 3 joke characters in the whole game, and two of them are sexy elf twins, so the get a pass.

Exactly like PSO2. There are optional scenes with jokes and shit, that you can safely skip and not miss out on anything.

I liked the escort quest with the little girl looking for her "online friend" from pioneer 1.

My problem fundamentally with PSU is that they changed a game of skill–which PSO genuinely was; if you know what you're doing you can really go far on your own–to a game that, in spite of its many different weapons and the somewhat increased mobility of characters, actually relies more on teammates for mob control because of the way that mobs work and are placed and the poor hit stun the game features. Not to mention the appalling drop rates for even basic rare items, and then the chance to craft something with them once you get them, further exacerbating the grind.

I have heard descriptions of PSO2 many times before and it always sounds to me like it has retained the fundamental problems of PSU.

And I'm perfectly fine with design that encourages teamwork by the way. The problem with PSU is how it hamfistedly enforced teamwork to the detriment of satisfying action skill.

There are videos of youtube with people soloing raids and quests that are designed to be unsoloable. And with most classes to boot, if not all of them.

Yes, this was a severe problem. To the point that Sega gad to address is a couple times.
First they introduced "welfare" gear, that you could get by grinding materials with fairly good drop rate.
Secondly they introduced crafting that enabled making regular gear to be on par with rare top-tier gear.
And finally their recent addition is "collection file" system, where you're guaranteed to get desired top-tier weapons if you kill specified enemies a certain amount of times.

Did all of that fix the issue? I guess it did? I mean I don't have to rely on RNG anymore.

The question of ability isn't quite the problem here. I was quite able to solo a lot quests in PSU. The problem was it was often tedious as fuck because of said game design that actively punished people playing alone.

I often see people on Holla Forums complaining about modern mmos removing actual need to play with others from them, but it's the first time I saw the reverse.

PSO is not an MMO.

youtube.com/watch?v=efeUvcTc9-8
To be fair it does give some serious lines but ultimately it suffers from horrible mood whiplash. Where as PSO1 manged to keep the less serious moments out of the main story in only in the side quests, PSO2 doesn't and suffers for it story wise.

PSO was never a transitional MMO. It was more like Diablo where it was a single player game that could also be played multiplayer with up to 4 players.

PS:Z is fantastic - I still play it online somewhat often via altwfc.

Is that mobile version?
I though it's a different type of a game rather than straight port.

It's still called instance-based mmo.
PSO2 supports up to 12 people per map.

What? No its the main game did you not watch the video?
The mobile game story has shitty OCs only and is told in typical VN minimal effort style, pic related

Well I guess I never knew just how low can you set graphics then.

Also PSO2 is a PSO game in name alone, its more like PSU then PSO. For example PSO didn't have over the top flashy moves but PSU did starts at :26 in embed
Further, PSU story was about maintaining the status quo against a space bug race and guess what? PSO2 is about maintaining the status quo against a an almost identical threat. PSO was about a desperate struggle against extinction.

Oh hey, the clementine PSU server is in open beta now and was updated just this month.
Maybe they will fix the shit that alluded to.

PS0 is hamstrung by a lack of content, and a lot of the best gear is locked behind the Eternity Tower - which is about 500 rooms long to get to the final boss.

PSP2 is alright, but they really need to kick somebody in the ass with that english patch because it would make the game a hell of a lot more playable. The biggest fuckup I can recall offhand with that game was how they made the new shotgun PA insanely OP. You roll up to an enemy and blast them point blank with all five projectiles in the gut - then rolls you out of counter-attack range while firing off two extra shots, but you can turn slightly while you're recoiling - so you can either use those two extra blasts to deal more damage to your target - or turn a bit and use it for crowd control.

Couple that with even a -slight- combo chain and a shotgun with special effect (like Spread Needle's stun) - and there is really no reason to use any other weapon aside from a good rifle for long-distance enemy weakpoints.

It broke rangers.

I mean the english patch for the Infinity expansion to PSP2. The shotgun PA changes is Infinity specific as well.

They "fixed it" in PSP2 where items dropped whole and intact based on RNG depending on what areas you were hunting, and what enemies you were killing. It's very similar to PSO's method of item drops, but it gets rid of the dumb Section ID locking and introduces (in PSP2i) Infinity Missions where you basically get to be a mission breeder - merging missions you have, so their offspring missions have a mix of elements from both parent missions… letting you craft missions optimal for hunting the items you want.

It took the item drop schema of PSO and ADDED GAMEPLAY to it, rather than just making it an arbitrary gameplay rule to be followed.

Unfortunately, that system was never followed up again in later installments - and probably never will be seen again.

...

How bad a break?

You walk instead of run. It disables running basically.

Fuck. I thought you meant just the animation was broken.

Chances are something broken as well, since it obviously breaks something in input parsing.
I now it became a meme at this point, but I can't play anything real time at under 60 fps. Especially after PSO2 and it's unlimited fucking framerate.

Yes, get over to ephinea.

The fuck you talking about man.

It consists of literally about 3 maps, a bunch of cheap enemies, and a single bullshit boss that's more about gear and DPS than skill. It was a lazy phoned-in addition that adds very little to the overall experiences and, instead, severely unbalances the quite nice rarity-power balance that v3 had achieved with its new items. When I play Blue Burst I spend 80% of my time on episodes 1 and 2.

I dug my PSP out and am reminded of what I disliked about PSP2. Having to equip a spell to a wand/staff/mag/whatever to use it is retarded as fuck. Not just from a gameplay perspective, but it loses the feel of being something I'm doing supernaturally rather than just using a tool.

I want to cast with my bare hands, dammit.

Well techs are tools. In-universe. Like weapons.
You're not supposed to feel it being supernatural.

I played through the story of PSZ, but I didn't like the waifushit and the story was generic "hurr durr god is evil" bullshit that Japan falls back on wh en they got nothing else to say.

damn. I used to love PSZ back in the day. It looks gorgeous in the emulator, I'm glad it's getting the love it deserves.

Sadly, as much as I love it, it's definitely not as good as PSO. It's just awfully limited by the system it was on.
that was the biggest gripe. Understandable since techs need to be charged up in this game, but still

If you didn't know, X + L or R rotates the camera. I think holding a button then pressing start skips straight to the equip screen.

Techs are psionic in fluff. Even if they're downloaded to your brain with sci-fi tech via Disks like the Matrix, there's still something inherently abnormal about them. It stales the flavor to force the player to apply them through an item like selecting a cartridge for a firearm. Especially considering the entire principle of psionics is a well of inner power that's used to act on the world (via resonance with Photon in this setting's case), not a drawing of external forces like ley lines, sympathetic magic, familiarism, or divine influence.

Gameplay wise, it's retarded because it forces you to arbitrarily boil your skillset down to at maximum 4 techs unless you want to be changing through palettes constantly, which is a hassle, and worse you can't put the same item in multiple slots in the palette. So if you want to equip multiple sets of techs, you have to grind up equipment to fill more slots. It's dumb and aggravating on every level. It also goes against PSP2's strength of having a huge variety of techs to choose from relative to most other PS games.

I have this problem often with PS games. The setting can be great, but the plots are often grating and generic.

There was definitely more people playing this game then Diablo II on a private server, but other than that it was pretty empty.

Looks better than FFXIV. FFXIV was worse than classic WoW in terms of gameplay. FFXIV was super slow.

Doesn't sound that hard. In classic WoW you needed gear or else you couldn't even go to the raid.

I wanna play PSO2, how the fuck do i do it?

arks-layer.com/setup.php
arks-layer.com/tweaker_tutorial.php

So, it's basicly a phantasy star game, and it online.
So you could say it's a phantasy star online.

Yes.

It's one of the few MMORPG's/Online RPG's that doesn't involve clicking shit to death and spamming hotkeys but actual fucking gameplay.

No.

Is there still a team on Ephinea?

Are you the same autist that got triggered by space kids in warframe?

PSO2 is miles better than PSO1. Unless you mean PSU.

Know what the best part about PSO on Gamecube was? Split screen, man, especially back then, when I had two other regular buddies to play with. We played the hell out of PSO. Varista is still my favorite handgun in terms of aesthetics.

I bet they only play once a week or month at best, the ones who went over to Ephinea a year ago and a few others a month or 2 ago. I started a hardcore character 2 days ago on Ephinea, lvl 46. I feel like playing slow and man is this server slow in terms of endgame weapons/units compared to Ultima.

Is Nova any good?

Well it's episode 1 (meaning 3 classes) pso2 with og story and NPCs.
It does have some unique stuff like colossal bosses and exclusive dress up options.
It's a hard sell, but if you're giant pso2 faggot you might as well bite this bullet.

No, it's pretty shit. All that content that was already created by Sega, and Tri-Ace decides to just make the entire game take place in one of two areas - bleak wasteland or ancient ruin. There is very little enemy variety, virtually no environmental variety, only four "bosses" per sey, aside from the final boss - and they're captureable - so you'll be fighting a lot of incrementally tougher versions so that you can catch the tougher ones to replace your older versions.

Also, weapon crafting from PSU is back. This time in a language you can't read. Thanks Tri-Ace.

How they fucked this up that bad coming off of PSO2 to use as a template and PSP2i as an example of how portable PS games are done right, I have no idea.

So PSO had better games in their timeline than PSO2, huh?

Considering if this user is right about canon.

Thanks user, got a account, got the game installed and it's patching now. Is there an unofficial English server?

This game was fucking awesome on the gamecube. One of the best Co-op games I ever played.

I think it is a real shame more split screen games like this are not made anymore.
Splitscreen co-op is the beesknees imho.

>having (((friends)))

BIG APPLE, 3AM

Genesis TMNT > Snes trash

Arcade > All

Wrong

I await your points.

Those faggots better get that shit together. Spending years sitting on it over a compression bug is incredibly retarded. If they'd just released what they had back when it first hit that roadblock the community would've finished it ages ago.

I had a decent amount of fun with it, most notably with dual SMG's which were more like melee weapons than ranged, and also rifles, and the fact that headshots mattered, all of that was neat, but otherwise largely covers it.

The language barrier is a real problem, though there's some translation project working if you have a modded Vita or PSTV, dunno how far it is though, I gave up on Vita homebrew/piracy since it's such a pain in the dick. The game also has an unnecessarily complicated basebuilding system that directly impacts your drop rates and quality in missions. It would probably be really cool if I understood wtf was going on and there were any competent guides online but after playing it for several weeks using the google goggles translate function by taking photos of text on screen and trying to work out wtf it meant or if it had misunderstood a character, I kinda gave up. I can't be fucked to learn moonrunes to play like two games.

Probably better to wait for the PSP2:i translation patch, which looks to be ACTUALLY making progress based on the thread linked in

Some translators/teams are pure cancer. I dunno about these guys, but from your post I can smell it.

Weren't all of those the same game basically?

Arcade version was 4 player and overall superior. Was also produced to be played on a larger screen than most people had in their homes at the time, which was great for multiplayer.

Probably silly question, but how does it compare to shadow over mystara?

Less depth, more radical. The only difference between the characters are their weapons and melee combos.

pso2mod.com/

Fuck some of these almost make me want to reinstall the game to try them out. Luckily the fact that I would probably be banned is killing the desire.

Yeah, I don't want to get banned before Episode 5 is finished. Maybe when the PSO2 private english server is up.

The guy doing the translation is beta as fuck. He's 100% translated the entire game, he's been sitting on his thumbs for over a year doing a "QC pass" over it all and claims to be 70% double-triple-rechecking everything. He's recently asked for more help.

The programmer is constantly AWOL. Apparently everything is done, the typesetting, the menus have been totally redesigned, everything has the translations inserted with an easy system to re-insert any edits BUT there's a minor compression error that causes the game to crash when checksums don't add up on a given file, apparently it's only a couple files.

Reading the thread in question I found that the programmer vanished for a fucking YEAR. The translator kept making excuses for him "I saw him online playing EDF4.1 the other day so he's still alive". Finally the translator, as I mentioned above asked for help with finishing the last tiny little bugfix to make for releases, and he talked about making an incomplete release to the community so they could help him finish it, or he'd actually spend out of pocket to HIRE someone to finish it.

Then as soon as he posted a thread asking for help the programmer came back, so I'm expecting another year delay.

So yeah, it's the programmer faggot and you can definitely smell it.

user, your life has been horribly wasted. Video Games were always meant to be a social hobby, they started in Arcades, and came to the home with multiplayer, user. Remember when a console came with two controllers out of the box? There was a reason for that.

The feel of playign together, experiencing things as a group for the first time, finishing off Dark Falz for the first time, high fiving eachother then finding out there's a second episode, and a harder difficulty. Finding that first red box that -wasn't- a Photon Drop, and discovering the insane coolness of named weapons. The sadness of moving away. Friend came over the day before we left, with a Gamecube controller, it was the one I'd used since we started playing together. I still have it, right there, on my shelf, user.

Yeah story wise ep4 sort of feels meh beyond some new back story for rupika.

But come on man bull shit foes? Ep2 had far more bull shit foes.

And classes were sort of unbalanced as of 2 as well.

I remember being banned from LAN parties because a girl my friend liked (but never had the balls to make a move on and she thought he was a creep anyway) liked me instead. I just wanted to play video games. I also remember playing co-op and having friends completely fuck everything up and ruin the experience entirely, they also sucked so hard at multiplayer games it was pointless to play with them. No fond times, no good friends to miss.

I played pso ep 1&2 gamecube with my friends when I was 10 or 12. It was really fun, but they were madly underlevelled, I was the only one that played online and could do Ultimate mode. I showed them all the gear I had from hacked weps people dropped, I gave them all tsumikiri-J-Swords and you could do 3k+ damage easily. We only played once or twice together, but I do remember it fondly. I sold my pso ep1&2 to one of the same friends in highschool one day. He randomly asked me he'd buy it if I brought it to school. Hadn't talked to him in a few years so that was nice he remembered our gaming years back then, wonder what he's up to now. Here I am still stuck in nostalgia playing the same games I liked as a kid.

Guess you'll have to start from the beginning again and hope for a better spawn, user. Maybe next time you won't come out an emotionally stunted aspergers sufferer.
>>>/suicide/

I fucking hate this.
While people hate PSO2 translation team for memes, being constantly half-done and not giving a fuck, at least they shat out a functional translation that people can actually use.
Between this and Card Sagas Wars where devs didn't even release their sprites or code I fucking hate OCD perfectionists with all or nothing attitude.

It being 1/2 done is not good man. Some people do need a full translation in order to enjoy a game.

Not hating on the translation team…cause it was free n all.

But man I wasn't able to enjoy PSO2 with a 1/2 done thing.

Found myself lost overall. 1st event I played left me wondering wtf was going on, why was I riding a air bike shooting at Dark Falz on the moon!

One more try for the Ephinea team.

That's kinda self explanatory.
Trying to understand why are you fighting T-Rexes and Tanks and some flying chinese general and then board a robot and shoot at flying battleship throwing nukes at you is a lot harder.

Just pretend episode 4 content is a fever dream. Even for pso2's relatively low standards it's story is abysmal.

It's all translated nowadays if you really care anyway.

EP4 had the best story in the entire franchise up to this point.

...

So I just threw my save data for PSP2 into PPSSPP with my PSP2 ISO and it loaded up without any issue at all.

Does anyone play online anymore?

Servers have been dead for a while. Dunno if anyone plays via Coldbird's Pro-C online solution, though it wouldn't hurt to try.

Oh, I didn't know there was one. I was just thinking Hamachi or other virtual network; PPSSPP can play over LAN. I've run co-op Final Fantasy Tactics missions with my brother that way.

I don't know but ship 2 has most "gajin piggus"

The only thing consistently preventing me enjoying PSO2 is the whole items not being translated thing, unless they fixed that.

Every time I've checked back on the translation it's remained that they can't translate item names.

Also, the last time I came back there was the above mentioned fighting t-rex's and sentient semi-trucks and I decided I didn't want to play PSO2 anymore.

Item translation breaks every major updates and gets fixed in a day or two.
So if you always decided to check the game when those major updates happen you of course encountered broken item translations.
It's not that I'm advocating quality of the translation itself, but in terms of speedy updates and keeping up with sega's fuckery with files they are doing impressive fucking job considered all of this is unofficial and 100% free.