Phantasy Star Portable Review

Is the latest game in Sega's respected RPG series a shining star or a black hole?

Well, it depends on your outlook and what an RPG means to you. If you value a great story, well-developed characters, stunning graphics, immersive, good animations, online play, controllable party members, interesting environments, and fun enemies to fight, then turn away now.

If, however, you like grind-fests with lots of combat options and local co-op play, then you're in repetitive heaven.

I could end it there, but I've a feeling my editor might have a quibble over a sub-100 word review, so I'd better elaborate.

Phorget about it

Although I've never played any of the other Phantasy Star games, Sega had me in mind with this PSP game, summing up the entire relevant history in a very short opening cutscene.


Basically, this is how it goes: an evil force called SEED invades our galaxy; several previously warring species band together; SEED is destroyed: The End. Kudos to the developers (the Sonic Team) for keeping it simple and not overwhelming the player on their first sitting.

Ah yes, Sonic Team. When they're not messing about with the hedgehog, they're named off making the Phantasy Star series and generally do a good job. Not having played the others I can't confirm it myself, but supposedly the stories are all well-regarded and were good rivals for the Nintendo-only Final Fantasy series back in the day.

Unfortunately, Portable will not be getting the same respect. The story is predictable, simple, and merely serves one purpose; getting you to random places for you to kill things.

The game is basically (research being done) Phantasy Star Online melded with Phantasy Star Universe, that is apart from the fact that problems from those games being removed to be replaced with others. PSP (see what they did there?) is an MMO at heart. You can create a character in the single-player, then bring it into the multiplayer for you and your friends to have a good ol' scrap.

This all sounds great, except for the fact that there's no online play. This is a game that thrives on multiplayer, but insists you have mates with PSPs in close proximity, copies of the game, and a spare few hours handy. Just finding one of those is hard enough for most people. In Japan this may not be a problem, but here it's almost impossible.


Phar too unlikely

As far as specific problems in the single-player, one of the first you're likely to notice is the game world. In most RPGs you can wander about towns and countryside between missions and battles, talking to characters, doing shopping, and learning more about the world.

Well, you can do that here; there's just no wandering involved. The only moments where you'll be able to control your character are in the missions; everything else is represented by static screens. Scrolling the map and everything other RPG's do is definitely possible, but it's just performed with a greater degree of detachment. The game also discourages exploration, which is one of things I love about the genre.

This smacks of either development laziness or hardware limitation, and I lean towards the former. It means the missions are only a couple of clicks away and not a massive hike like in other games, but when we can't even see the world we're saving we stop caring about it. The characters aren't too bad, they're sometimes amusing, and they're all voiced (eat that Square and your cost-cut voice-acting), but get them in-mission and you start hating them.

Honestly Sonic Team, I know this was intended as an MMO originally, but did the AI partners have to suck quite so much? Apart from getting stuck on scenery, they are quite content to let you do all the work during battles. They only attack the enemy you're attacking, and sometimes don't bother at all. They sometimes use their healing powers, and then other times forget they have them, leaving you to die. They are, in short, the worst AI-controlled NPCs I have ever seen.

To make matters worse, you have absolutely no power over what they do. You can't issue orders, give them items, improve their weapons, see what powers they have, or kill them. Even death is just a minor inconvenience for them, as they're back in a few seconds. The same can't be said of the main character, who I managed to get killed in the training mission because no-one told me how to heal (and my AI partners forgot to help me).


Phor ph***s sake!

A lot of the game involves learning things yourself. Don't expect much from the tutorials, which gracefully explain the bleedin' obvious ("to go to the conference room, highlight 'Conference Room' and press 'Use'") but don't go into any depth about the places where you can get killed.

For example, the Circle button's Palette quick-inventory is a wonderful system that's extremely useful for selecting weapons and items, but I had no idea what any of it meant or how to get to the item sub-menu at the start. I had to find out it existed before I could work out how to use it. Even then, the utterly ridiculous item names proved no help whatsoever, with the Palette showing no difference between Monomate and Diamate, nor any of the other inexplicable items. Give us some clue that these are the crucial healing items, please!

Just to get my blood boiling more, PSP also follows Bloody Stupid JRPG Rules, like barriers you can't jump over or walk around. Then when you've killed all the enemies in a given area, a key magically appears right next to the barrier, which we then have to pick up and use. Why can't the barrier just open? Why do we need to bother with the key at all? The barrier only goes up to our knees; just jump over it!

Oh, and enemies literally appear out of nowhere right in front of you and then disappear as soon as you kill them. The battles themselves consist mostly of hammering Square or Triangle until an enemy dies, then carry on about twenty more times on exactly the same type of enemy until they are all dead. Granted, there's quite a variety of opponents, but they're repeated far too often.

This is a grind-fest alright, with the only reward being to face more enemies and perhaps an epic boss fight or two. To be fair, said bosses are pretty epic, with gigantic dragons or worms, but if you don't like just hammering buttons until everything is dead, then this isn't for you. This is a lot more hack-and-slash than RPG, just a hack-and-slash with an inventory. Diablo is the obvious comparison, but it's nowhere near that interesting.


There's some fun to be had here, with good character interaction and battles which are fun if you like that sort of thing, but Phantasy Star and most RPG veterans will be bored after a couple of missions and almost everyone else will be angry at the lack of online play.

I did enjoy myself a couple of times in the single-player (once I learned what everything did), but the constant repetition and frustrating allies quickly wore my patience down.

5/10

Chris Capel