Phantasy Star Portable

April 13,2009 - While they’re built on often tired and repetitive formats, dungeon crawlers are still exceedingly popular amongst PC gamers who do nothing but grind, and grind… and grind.  Sega’s Phantasy Star is one of the few series still around that has that as the basis, and since it reached its pinnacle by going massively online with the Dreamcast, it’s been a fan favorite.  Now the game is available on the PSP, but without an online option, it’s hard to judge the game as anything but bare.

Phantasy Star Portable begins by unloading all sorts of customization options for the main character.  There is a wealth of races to choose, as well as different outfits and colors to make him or her.  None of this affects the overall plot, so players can be as creative as they want.  The story follows you as a mercenary for GUARDIANS as you find that a terrorist organization called SEED is wreaking havoc all across the universe.  It’s nothing horribly complicated, but seriously, in a game that’s all about grinding, the story really doesn’t matter all that much.

Aside from just combat and random chitchat, most of the good RPG’s have some form of exploration.  Phantasy Star Portable’s “exploration” is as bare as it gets.  Similar to a digital novel type of game, your method of traveling around big areas is through various menus.  For example, if you’re in your base complex, to get to the top floor, you simply choose that location on the menu.  While a lot of other good games follow that same formula, with the lack of meaty content there is in parts of the game when you aren’t grinding, it’s pretty disappointing.

As expected, all the enjoyment in the game comes from the game’s main missions, which always require you to hack and slash your way through various rooms filled with enemies and different kinds of loot.  Granted, to plenty of people, that may seem like enough, and there are all kinds of cool items in the game, but if all you’re doing is going floor by floor and rapidly pressing random trigger buttons, you’re simply not doing much.

To make matters worse, the lack of attention to the PSP’s ad-hoc functions make it hard to enjoy what was supposed to be a robust multiplayer component.  When playing with a friend, there’s hardly any slowdown, but when you’re playing with more than two people—the game is so slow and unresponsive that it all becomes a disaster.  Not only does the game suffer from lag (which is ridiculous considering you aren’t even under a wireless network), but the graphics become unnecessarily grainy, even on the newer model PSP’s.

Phantasy Star Portable’s graphics take a page out of the online games as well as Universe before it.  While the artwork and environments are actually pretty nice, the developers hardly put any effort into it in the non-battle sequences (again).  There is plenty of spoken dialog in the game, but the characters aren’t moving their mouths or showing any form of animation, so in other words, they’re just simple pieces of artwork being pasted onto the background.  The game’s sound is simply acceptable because it isn’t as bad as any other aspects of the game, but in terms of being bare, it fits in with the rest of the game.

The Phantasy Star series is one that has incredible potential on any handheld if done right.  Unfortunately, Sega’s second attempt at a Phantasy Star game on the PSP comes up well short of anybody’s expectations.  It’s unknown whether the lack of quality or depth comes from the lack of hardware power moving down from the Dreamcast to the PSP, or whether Sega has honestly just it.  Either way, while Phantasy Star Portable has its moments, it’s definitely not worth the full price of admission.

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