My Bittersweet Phantasy

Sega has quite a few series under its belt, but today I'm not talking about Sonic, or even Shenmue. Instead, I'll be talking about Phantasy Star, which was an RPG available on the Sega Master System. Subsequent releases went along on the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive. When the Dreamcast came out, Sega also released Phantasy Star Online (PSO) episode I. This was back in 2000. Now I have never played any of those games, but I was incredibly fond of the GameCube version of PSO which was a port of sorts of the Dreamcast game, but also included an entirely new, second chapter, in episode II.

I can't really remember how I came upon this game: I believe it might have been because of an ex-boyfriend of my sister's. In any case, this game was awesome, specifically for its ability to allow 4-player split-screen co-op. The way it handled the multiplayer was amazing as well. It's not like you just start a co-op campaign and whenever you wanted to continue you had to have everyone there. Nope, in PSO each character was created individually and you can start new games with existing characters at any time. 

The combat itself was pretty simple as well. There were a few different classes that each excelled at an individual talent—melee, ranged, or magic—but anyone could use any weapon, so it was merely a starting point really. You could do normal or strong attacks, and then the magic was used as a separate ability. Like I said it was simple.

PSO was supposed to be a console MMO, but to be honest it was a pretty barebones one, at least in regards to the world, which was rather small. If you were to compare the world of PSO to any modern MMO it would be no contest. This wasn't too much of an issue however since the main draw, at least for me, was collecting equipment!

I remember there was this website we used to go to and it was all about PSO. One of the features the site had was item drop rates. We used to try to find the sickest equipment, and there were some pretty cool ones if memory serves. Most of the cooler ones required your character to be a pretty high level, and would only be dropped by creatures in higher difficulties. We would all travel around in a group, and allow the person looking for the equipment to kill the specific enemy they needed, but sometimes the drop rate was under 1% so you would have to kill 100 of a specific enemy type, minimum.

As you can imagine, this turned the entire game into a pretty huge grind, but I don't think any of us really minded. Everything is more fun in a group, and I can't even begin to tell you how joyous it was to finally see the drop you spent so long hunting for in your grasp. The only reason I really stopped playing PSO was because my GameCube’s memory card got corrupted, and I lost my 200+ hour character...it was a sad day.

All-in-all I had a lot of fun with PSO, despite the bitter end. Over the years there have been new releases in the PSO spin-off series, but I haven't tried any of them unfortunately since for the most part, they only get released in Japan.