Phantasy Star topic cause last one died

The action variety in PSO comes mostly from equipment and spell casting in the case of Forces.

If you're a human or a newman, you get space magic techniques (which will never be as good as a dedicated Force's). If you're an android, you get to lay down traps. Special attacks, as defined by the game, are tied to the weapon, and are just your normal attack animation with some special ability tied to it, like a much harder-hitting attack at the cost of HP / TP / your wallet. The good shit, like dropping down pillars of divine judgement, is tied to specific weapons that you'll end up farming for twenty years before the thing drops for someone else in your party, which kinda sucks.

I'd say it's possible to enjoy the game as someone completely green, but it takes a certain mindset to do it. Playing with friends would help; I honestly wouldn't have gotten through the game on the DC if it weren't for my friends.

But I never use stuff like spells or traps in games.
Is it not designed for melee characters at all?

There is actually a bit of depth to combat in the simple design of this 3 hit combo system. If you want to play physically with foes you got to learn how to approach mobs so they don't swarm you for one and when it is useful to strike (or just set off freeze traps).

I mean enemy AI while overall simple as well has some cool things about it. Some foes will try to teleport behind you if you fire at them from a distance, some will just go invisible from a distance, a majority will attempt to run your ass over, jump on you, fling a nuke your way, maybe all of the above as well.

For close melees characters have:
-sabers, katana, fist cuffs, claws for hitting one foe really hard and all but a couple suck end game granted one of those is very good
-twin sided sabers, daggers, twin swords for hitting one foe more than 3 times and in general tearing that foe a new one cause these hitting 5-6 times is just way better than 3 times that the sabers and stuff have.
-spears/great swords for hitting a group of foes to control the mobs from swarming you some up close.

For long range combat characters have:
-guns and rifles for taking out a target from far away safely.
-machine guns for turning a target into swiss cheese, one of the single most useful weapons is in here and cheap
-shot guns for ripping apart a group of foes to control them from a distance before they can even get to you. And Ranger only.
-throwing weapons for hitting a group of foes at a semi safe distance some of the games best weapons are in here

The game favors guns and fighting from a distance overall but having a good stick or two for backup is expected. Magic isn't really in favor when the majority of foes weak to something still resist 90% of the full damage from it.

Granted it has its uses: in that good luck doing damage w/o a good shifta and zalure set up on most of the game. A good razonde is the one thing saving your ass most of the time from a group of flowers flinging their death spit at you and stops sudden sneak attacks from stuff like Zu charges or beam cannons. Rabarta is your teams back up freeze status. Grants can snipe powerful foes from a safe distance. Gifoie keeps up a nice long lasting damage shield around the area stopping some foes from getting their 1st attack when coming into the field and doing predamage before anyone else can on a majority of enemies. Proper spell flinging in general can in a pinch stun lock some mobs and kill them slow w/o risk if needed as well.

Is there any other way to keep Nei alive aside from the inventory glitch, or using Shir to steal a Moon Dew before Nei dies?

oh and I just tried the moon dew thing and its not like i remember, nei still died even if i kill neifirst, damnit

Melee in end game gets crazy if you have the right weapon choices. Also, each special weapon has a special attack such as Paralyze, freeze, 1hit ko death, charge money for more damage, drain hp/tp for more damage, or 1/4th enemy hp. As I throw in every thread Sylph's Ultima server. Look at his weapon list and pause it.
The types of weapons for HU (melee people) are short range high damage single hit - mechguns (last swan, psycho raven[master raven], charge vulcans, charge raygun)
Medium range partisans, swords etc for spread damage multiple enemies. Very high attack power, but only hits once per combo, rarely used for a weapon's special.
Long range weapons - j-cutters s-rank weapon to paralyze multi mobs, or an s-rank gun to drop boss defense.
CASTs (robots like HUcast/HUcaseal) use freeze traps to insta freeze a group. Raygun shot when spawning a trap is instant. Swap to another wep and kill mobs.
Ignore that music, and weapon swapping doesn't have to be that autistic.

I played Ephinea and made a hardcore character to lvl 90 a month ago. I stopped playing though because I finally got a Dark Flow on Ultima server. Playing other games right now though. PSO1 is very fun up to lvl 90, you learn things about your character/mag feed, wep/armor progression. Only takes like 10 hours on Ephinea to get to 90 probably, if you play with others.
Changing difficulty is also a refresher for you. 1-20 Normal, 20-40 Hard, 40-80 Very Hard.

If you play the remake of PS2 on PS2 you can keep Nei alive, the method of doing it is stupid but you can.

PSO1 is so boring from 1-80 though after you've done it a few times. Don't see how 1-90 is fun when the meat of PSO is in ultimate mode

1-80 is fun when you haven't done that in 2+ years, or ever. All I got to say.

Never said it wasn't fun once. Just that having to repeat it a few times can be very annoying.

Which non-online games are worth playing and what is the best way to play them?

PSO is better online. Offline has less features, but still tons of stuff and hunting. Ep 4 is only online and has a new expanded world. I'm guna try PS2-4 though on genesis emulator sometime.

The game was not mediocre at release it was fucking unchanged from the beta. It was released as an unfinished product and they have not yet bothered to acceptably addressed the basic issues of proceduraly generated levels, poor choices in weapon variety, gunblades being fucking worthless when they could have been cool as shit, no official English support which literally could be solved by simply setting up an NA and EU download server so people can download and update the game without having to use torrenting or download from japan or just removing the japanese catpcha.

...

Oh boy.

To clarify; console versions of PSO have an Offline mode, but the 'Blue Burst' PC version (with the exclusive Episode 4) requires a constant connection.
If choosing Offline mode, the Single-Player and Multiplayer options affect available quests and how difficult the enemies are (in PSO:BB, you have to create a room in the Online lobby and set it to Single-Player mode).
You can get through the entire Normal difficulty areas in Single-Player without grinding, in any version of the game, as long as you do most of the Hunter's Guild quests.
Consider multiplayer / Online modes if you want to have fun at the higher difficulties.

Reminder constantly ask questions if you're a new player in PSO2 before the game decides to dick you like in mag feeding.

Just tell people that if you want a new mag you have to pay money.

Or you can fix it with bajilion of excubes.
Which isn't really a problem since you can now buy 10* weps without premium.

Teach me, user-senpai.

max attack quests

You mean Towards the Future over and over.

yeah that too

I see Heroes everywhere. I remember back when everyone went for Braver.

The 5th anniversary demographics showed that braver was the most popular class (though that data was from before hero), and for some reason, tons of people gravitate toward braver when they first start the game. I guess we'll see a huge skew toward hero in the 6th anniversary data.

I only went braver so I could use katana style weapons to make my Natsuki based character.

Hero is literally beefy Braver.
I wonder why he uses sword instead of katanas at all, since most of his sword moves are reused katana animations.

Because edgy iaido katanas + newmens with their special snowflake desu eyes being default poster kids for Br made the entire thing instantly more appealing to the general otaku and weeabo crowds, whereas previously PSO2 more or less advertised itself as proper PSO1 sequel successor and was only moderately popular.

And here is the specimen.

Phantasy Star 3 is rightly considered the black sheep of the series, but damn if the tragic story behind Miun didn't pull on my heart strings. Poor bot.

Both braver and hero are pretty simple to play in comparison to most other classes. However while braver has rarely been the most efficient hero not only is easy to play but far and away the strongest class too.

It's the best one in the series.
It's just casual babies can't into minimalist story telling and hardcore dungeon crawling.

Rupika a cute.

Um, pretty sure PS1 and PS2 have harder dungeons than 3. Than again its been a while since I played it and I've never got to the end of it as well.

My main issue was that the UI was a fucking mess, and it was disappointing/boring to see that the enemies were poorly animated - which, up till then, animated enemy attacks were part of PS's shtick.

The story isn't nearly as good as the other games, and doesn't have much to do with Phantasy Star until much later. It's almost like the old Star Ocean bait & switch where they tell it's a sci-fi, but then you spend 3/4's of the game on a medieval planet. Well, maybe not that bad, but it takes a bit to get to the good stuff.

For all it's problems though, PSIII really did have one of the best soundtracks and could have had a really great visual aesthetic if Toyo Ozaki's art designs had been allowed to shine through. Maybe they just didn't lend themselves well to pixelart, but I hope that if they ever do a PSIII remake (and the game desperately needs one) that the visual style is drawn much more closely to her(?) sailor-moon-ish artwork.

time to re-install PSO I guess. I hope I remember my Ephinea account details, I think I stopped playing sometime last year

Damn. I just love this game. I've never played a more fulfulling MMO.
The four-man room party system was partly because of technology constraints, but it made you feel much, much more involved with the story and with each other.
Some might say the chat speech bubbles obscured the screen (especially with the lower resolutions back then) but it made you feel more involved with chatting with your party.
What can I say? A great game. A lot of problems, but considering it was in almost entirely uncharted territory (creating such n unorthodox console MMO) but the positives far outweight the negatives.

A fun endgame, but also a fun middlegame too as you engage the story to level up your character and collect rare items.

as someone playing PSO2 since closed beta in 2012 I can tell you that it is a really fun game … as long as you like the core combat gameplay, because that's really all there is to the game

negatives:

1. Do not mess up your Mag, build a pure one; raise only your primary damage stat (S-ATK, R-ATK or T-ATK). Apparently, Bouncers and Bravers need DEX, but those classes are stupid and I don't play them.
2. No matter what you do, Hero will always outclass you in terms of damage. That might change with the upcoming patches, however.
2a. To unlock Hero, you have to get a Strike, Ranged and Tech class to 75 (normal cap).
3. Always partake in EQs. Don't worry, two to three heroes are enough to carry the whole group.
4. When in doubt, choose Hu as subclass, max out the Fury Stance subtree and get Automate Halfline and Massive Hunter. Safest build there is, for physical classes, that is.
5. As soon as you can, run Extreme Quests and Marathon Quests to fulfill Klotho's client orders; that alone will net you ~1m Meseta per week.
5a. That's not really that much, but will help pay your item grinding bill.
5b. Get some friends for higher level content.
5c. Heroes don't need friends.
6. Dudu is love, Dudu is life. He grinds your items. Grinding anything below 12* isn't really necessary because you will replace it too quickly, but depending on what you find, you might want to grind an NT weapon to +10 to unlock their potential. Grinding weapons of the same type gives a bonus; weapons dropped by Emperappies may have an ability that greatly increases their grind value.
7. It is impossible to have enough Excubes.
7a. Unless you use them for grinding, always exchange 10*/11* weapons for Excubes at the Recycle Shop. They even put that one into the main menu.
7b. Class Excubes can be gained by "leveling up" as the respective class at level cap, only. Welcome to hell.
7c. After you get your 13*, main use case for Excubes is to buy enhancers for affixing abilities.
8. Get good at affixing abilities: fulldive.nu/2015/01/06/pso2-affixing-101/
9. As soon as you can, get your Collection Files. Grab one that strikes your fancy.
9a. At least one item will require doing EQs on XH. Some of them require a 75/75 character.
9b. Buying the required items does NOT count.
10. Io is best girl.

Bonus: Get the smartphone game (PSO2es). There's a translation for the most important aspects of it, as well. Also takes care of downloading the installer, since it's region locked.
Aside from being able to level a second class at the same time (optimally, your in-game sub class), you can boost one of your files and perform a quick search for items/materials once per day for free.

Leech detected!

how do you even lose a buster quest

You forget to tick expert and get real lucky.

Level 80 BQ is pretty intense.

Helps that it isn't an MMO.

I'm trying to log into PSO2 after many years and I keep getting 'Server Connection Timed Out'. Has anyone seen this before and how did they fix it?

Take your dweebagoon shit to >>>/a/
Reported

Its a videogame,fuck off nigger

Okay worked it out. Somehow I was missing 1000 files. Now to remember password.

Holy crap, I still have my 7-11 Mafia uniform. What happened to you guys? Still playing?

7-11 is still there, not sure how many people you played with are there, but it's still there. Leave playerID here or in /vg/ zombie thread and some manager will if they actually fucking notice that we have a thread here get you.

Here you go matey!

Am downloading PSO2 now, had some nice advice is there any more advice? How committed to making a waifu should I be or is it easy to change your appearance and change it up often?
Do I need to plan a build out from the beginning or is there some kind of free respec options?

The not fucking up mag is the 1st and most important advice, even though you can fix it, it's PitA. Also choose one ATK type, not DEX, feed it weapon type that gives ++atk +dex -def and then feed it furniture with -atk –dex +def so that only one attack levels up while other stats stay at 0.
You can change appearance free with salon/este passes that you get 1-2 a month minimum + from events so even people who change appearance somewhat often have more than enough of those. There is a free respec pass but you're given one when class balance changes happen and those are infrequent, though with appearance of Hero and it completely fucking up the class meta as well as overnerfs RIP BBow so SEGA plans multiple balance changes thus we might get more respecs soon. Also you get one respec per character and with 3 free character slots it's 3 free respecs every balance patch. As for build, you can ask team for basic one with mandatory skills until you understand the class better.

As for other free stuff - the game has good read best f2p system, where p2w players regularly sell shit on market so f2p players can get almost anything cash shop related other than standard convenience stuff like larger inventory 'n shit which you don't really need it's not PoE/hoarding simulator.

Ship 02 is the unofficial English server right? Is there any incentives for filling the free character slots with alts like a shared storage?
I'm not sure what you mean by asking team for a build, is it like a guild or a chat thing?
Thanks for the help I appreciate it

by default you have shared storage
but there is also a character storage that is about 200 slots.

Yep, I think it's about 50% non-moon.
That's what I use them for. You get 300 personal storage per character + 50 inventory to fill with shit in addition to 200-500 free shared storage.
Yep, 7-11 Mafia. If you want to go solo then ask here or in zombie thread in /vg/ though half of link in OP there are outdated. Most builds/classes have core skills are often similar but usually there are slight differences, so you just go with can't go wrong core skills and decide later. Also many classes/weapons have very different playstyles so if something is too slow/easy don't judge until you hit at least SH difficulty/boring try other weapon/class.

Thanks lads, I'll check out the 7-11 mafia tomorrow when the download is done

The game is definitely very enjoyable even today. It was exploring uncharted territory back then as console MMOs had not been seriously tried, and having an internet connection was not terribly common in the 90's.
As a result, it's very different from modern MMOs in many ways, most good, some neutral and bad.

The game will start slowly but it picks up drastically toward mid-endgame. Definitely worth your time

I'd say don't bother with affixing at all until you 75'd your main class combo and is really ready to settle on some gear combination, because sega CONSTANTLY shits out new weapons and units, sometimes buffing old ones.
And since basic affixing doesn't really affect your performance at the end game while advanced affixing costs shitton of time/money you don't want to invest in some weapon or armor set to just discard it a month later.

Alright here's my shit