Following up with a SEGA music from last week, we’re moving right along to their lesser known IP, the Phantasy Star series. More specifically, the first online-connected entry in the long-running JRPG sci-fi franchise, Phantasy Star Online (PSO). Fans of this game from the Dreamcast and Gamecube era could probably immediately guess which track I’ll be introducing for this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic: the iconic title music, A Song for Eternal Story, by Hideaki Kobayashi and Fumie Kumatani.
Phantasy Star Online begins with a start of a new hope. With the home planet ravaged and inhospitable, your civilization journeys across space in an effort to discover a new planet to call home. When one of these colony-carrying spaceships, Pioneer 2, receives a message from Pioneer 1 of an excellent candidate they dub, “Ragol,” the former immediately beelines to the new destination. By the time they arrive, however, communication with Pioneer 1 — which up to this point has been regular with updates on their progress colonizing Ragol — suddenly ceases. Readings on the planet indicates a sudden large explosion occurred on the newly built city just before Pioneer 1 went silent. Suspicions high, the Pioneer 2 government asks for highly qualified soldiers, “Hunters,” to scout the planet and discover what dangers might lurk in this lush, unexplored land.
As a Diablo-inspired action-JRPG, Phantasy Star Online greatly diverges from past entries’ turn-based roots. A typical play session involves taking the following steps:
- Form a party of a maximum of four real players in Pioneer 2, which acts as the lobby.
- The leader of the party picks a quest from the quest counter. This prompts the game to procedurally generate a dungeon, themed under the environment the quest takes place in.
- All party members meet at the Ragol teleporter (after making preparations, of course) to start the dungeon-crawling adventure.
Combat in PSO is in real-time, where the player can customize their button inputs on what attack or spell to execute when pressed. The weapon the player equips dictates what action they can assign to their input pallet (weapons can be quick-swapped with a simple menu). Finally, the player’s class — chosen during the character creation screen — determines what weapons they can equip, thereby limiting what actions they can take. Given the game was originally designed with dial-up internet connection in mind, some technical limitations were enforced in the game that appear archaic to online games today. For example, players walk very slowly, and are unable to jump in PSO, making melee-heavy characters incapable of hitting flying enemies, and forcing them to rely on their gun-trotting or magic-wielding allies to handle the job.
Phantasy Star Online was originally released on Dreamcast, Gamecube, and PC. While official servers for the game has been put offline for quite a while now, the fan-supported PSO: Blue Burst Ultima Server is still online as of this writing. Of course, the other route is simply to check out the game’s free-to-play spiritual sequel, Phantasy Star Online 2, available on Xbox One and PC via Steam and Microsoft Store; which after 8 years since release, is still getting content updates as of this writing.
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