Phantasy Star Portable Review

March 5, 2009 - The Phantasy Star series has been around for many years and has traversed a broad number of consoles. While the original Phantasy Star games were more traditional RPGs, recent iterations of the franchise have turned towards the online multiplayer landscape --most notably with the release of Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast -- almost ten years ago. Now, Phantasy Star Portable is available on the PSP and once again bestows players with ample amounts of laser swords, elf ears, sentient robots and all sorts of anime-styled goodness. Unfortunately, Phantasy Star Portable doesn't return to the legendary roots of Phantasy Star Online but rather borrows more heavily from the less-than-perfect Phantasy Star Universe. But before you Phantasy Star enthusiasts go running off to the corner, I'll tell you that Phantasy Star Portable is still fun despite its problems. If only the game had returned to its surreal, nearly melancholic roots, we'd have had a brilliant UMD to throw into our systems.

Character creation: an otaku's dreamscape.

Phantasy Star Portable is divided into two sections: Story Mode and Multi Mode. While you were forced to play as set characters in the story mode of Phantasy Star Universe, Portable allows you to share a created character across both the single-player and multiplayer offerings, which is a very welcome feature indeed. Regardless of which mode you start off with, you'll begin the game by creating a character and selecting his or her race, class and physical features. The character creation system of Portable is very nice. I've always enjoyed the character designs of the recent Phantasy Star games, and Portable is no exception. The story of Portable takes place sometime after the events of Universe, where a mysterious terrorist is wreaking havoc on the GUARDIANS space station (yes, there's quite a bit of Caps Lock going on in this game). Throughout the story, you're in charge of guiding your new CAST partner, Vivienne, through various GUARDIANS missions with the intention of stopping the threatening life force called SEED. I've seen worse stories in games before, but Phantasy Star Portable's plot really isn't its best selling point. In fact, the game's entire presentation feels extremely cheap. Not only are all the game's towns and shops reduced to background art and menu navigation, but the entire story (save a few extremely rare cutscenes) is told through talking cardboard cutout dialogue. I tend to forgive this JRPG stereotype as it's usually an excuse to admire the game's character art, but Portable can't even do that. Instead, everything is told through still shots of the 3D character models posing. The result couldn't feel any cheaper. It's a shame, really, that a passable story had to suffer under such lackluster displays.



But gamers interested in Phantasy Star Portable won't be playing it for the story. They'll be playing it for the joy of level-grinding, collecting items, finding rare goodies and... level-grinding. Portable, like its recent predecessors, is a dungeon-crawler in which the primary gameplay component involves wandering from room to room in big, open environments, killing monsters and snagging some sweet loot. Combat in Phantasy Star Portable plays out in real-time and you have full 3D control over your character. Although your only real interaction with the world around you is limited to attacking with your selected weapon or pushing buttons to open doors, Portable still works well on this dungeon-crawling level. What I liked about Phantasy Star Portable's combat system was the inclusion of the Action Palette, which allows you to assign a handful of weapons and items to a pop-up menu you control with the Circle button. This feature is extremely handy, as attempting to navigate the game's full set of menus with monsters leaping all over you is excruciatingly difficult (as it should be).

Also commendable is the diversity of the available weapons, which includes a cool-looking assortment of short-range and long-range devices. Whether you start off as a Hunter, Ranger or a Force, there's sure to be a weapon for you and these items really change how you approach battle. Playing as a Ranger for most of the story, I became intensely familiar with the game's selection of guns, which include handguns, shotguns, laser cannons, grenade launchers, machineguns and more. Fighting a monster with a gun is very different than fighting one with a sword, so having weapons control the flow of battle is a strong point of the experience. In fact, the overall diversity of the weapons and customization of Phantasy Star Portable makes all the level-grinding worthwhile. I found myself really encouraged to keep hunting for the fabled "S" class gear, which made blowing up boxes in order to find loot strangely satisfying, despite how stale the mechanic has grown.

Danger in every room.

I also appreciated how, for those players weary of button-mashing away, there were many timing-related nuances to the combat system to keep things interesting. For example, while performing a combo with a short-range weapon, timing the next button press in the combo powers up the subsequent strike. Alternatively, learning the timing of your rate of fire (when using a projectile weapon) can help immensely, allowing you to empty more rounds at a faster pace than just mashing the Square button repeatedly. Although I had fun playing the game on my own, I think most gamers will opt for the multiplayer option, which gives you free reign over an expanding pool of missions to play to your heart's content. Working as a team is always more rewarding than finishing a mission by yourself, so I encourage players to find at least one friend interested in playing the game with you before you invest. During my Ad Hoc testing (sadly, there's no Infastructure at the moment), two-player sessions ran nicely with little hint of slowdown. Add on a third person, however, and things can get bumpy, especially for the one hosting the session. Worse still is four-player, which runs at almost unplayable speeds for the host. As we were testing, I was complaining about the horrendous lag to my coworkers, only to find that they were having smooth-as-silk games without a problem. Very odd, indeed. It's extremely unfortunate that the four-player support is so problematic, but at least two players can enjoy the game without a problem. If you'd still prefer to play on your own though, allow me to offer you a few words of warning: the AI in the Story Mode is atrocious. Honestly. Never have I seen such incompetent, incapable party members like the AI-controlled riffraff of Phantasy Star Portable. These poor souls get stuck on walls, die every few seconds without bothering to heal and completely ignore nearby enemies while I handled them myself. I can forgive the somewhat inattentive qualities of the AI, but I was amazed at how many times an AI party member would take countless hits and not even attempt to dodge or counter attack. I started to wonder if the developers even planned any AI patterns at all. Or at least, intelligent ones.

Here's a tip: add "laser" to anything and it becomes way cooler.

Lastly, I had some serious qualms with the lock-on system. It definitely needs improvements, as you can't really circle-strafe around enemies when using a firearm and the camera is always jerking around and fighting you during heated battles. You can certainly adapt to it, but it'll take time.