Phantasy Star Universe (Xbox 360)
Phantasy Star Online was always going to be a tough act to follow, the first massively-multiplayer online role-playing game on home consoles leaving some large boots to fill after becoming a beloved and well-supported introduction to the genre for many players. Understandably, a follow-up couldn’t be as massive right out of the gate, but Phantasy Star Universe feels less like a follow-up to a smash hit and more a meandering action game that isn’t sure if it wants to better focus on a standalone story or online play, and with online servers long dead, it only starts to reap the results of this indecision even more as social elements can’t as easily obscure the fundamental issues baked into this action role-playing game.
Phantasy Star Universe takes place in the Gurhal System, a set of three inhabited planets having recently settled a long war brought about by the segmentation of humanity into new species. In addition to standard humans, technological advancements and gene modification have lead to the creation of CAST androids, elf-like Newmans, and animal hybrids known as Beasts, each one essentially the dominant race on a planet save for the humans who primarily live in the GUARDIANS space station. While the four races all cooperate enough to form an allied army and a peace-keeping force known as the GUARDIANS, one day an unknown alien species known as the SEED attack, monsters appearing all over the system and often with little warning. Unfortunately, while there is initially a mystery surrounding what the SEED are, the answers you’ll receive along the journey are generic and a bit unsatisfying, your main adversary seemingly existing mostly to provide fodder for the missions you undertake. That doesn’t mean the game is lacking a true character as an antagonist, but the sinister CAST known as Magashi is not only rather underdeveloped, but the game even seems to undermine the threat he poses as he eventually loses his political clout and just becomes a character to fight repeatedly in the story’s back half.
The game’s single-player story mode is split into twelve chapters that are presented like episodes of a television show. Chapters start with a recycled intro scene and conclude with a preview of what will come in the next episode, sometimes not even allowing mysteries to hang too long by spoiling the answers in a preview. The main character of the structured story is Ethan Waber, a young man who joins the GUARDIANS after the first SEED attack and spends much of his training and early time with the group learning more about the SEED and fighting against them. Ethan is, unfortunately, voiced terribly, Nick Tagas putting in the worst performance found in the game despite playing the most pivotal role. The rest of the cast isn’t always voiced the best and the game certainly has some issues with line spacing, characters sometimes speaking over each other to make things hard to comprehend and at other times failing to properly interrupt each other when they are meant to. Ethan, despite being the main character, seems unable to shift his emotion in the space of a scene thanks to Tagas’s performance, sounding wooden at times and at other times giving stilted line deliveries that fail to sound organic. There are certainly some lifeless and awkward performances elsewhere, but Ethan’s voice makes it hard to like a character who already feels like he doesn’t do much to stand out from a cocky hero archetype.
As you undertake missions you will have other people joining your party and standing in your way, and while Ethan unfortunately gets the most spotlight despite being bland and basic, the game actually does some decent work with the Newman named Karen Erra. The mystery behind her past and her having more complicated thoughts and opinions give you something somewhat interesting to follow when she’s around, and there are some other simple but acceptable character arcs to follow like the player trying to teach the CAST Lou the value of life or a small Beast named Tonnio trying to convince an old friend to leave a group of rogues. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t want to put in the legwork really writing these out, Ethan not making much of a case to Lou on why she shouldn’t be coldly logical and yet that character arc continues on like he had broken through to her. By at least making some simple understandable stories for the side characters though you can at least develop a small sense of camaraderie with them, but rather than forming an emotional bond with them you’ll probably just be pleased to see when certain characters come along for a mission rather than others.
The mission system is used to add structure to all the modes of Phantasy Star Universe, the player able to spend time in a small batch of cities before heading out to complete a specific objective in a wild space filled with monsters or enemy soldiers. In the story, Ethan is the only character you control directly, the player able to equip him with a range of weapons that unfortunately aren’t going to heavily vary your combat options. Using something like a large sword, pair of daggers, or a single blade will change the swing speed so you can form preferences in that regard, but you really are mostly going to rely on the very basic combo for a weapon to dish out most of your damage. You can get specialized weapons though, a variety of guns giving you a long range option you can switch to and staves allow you to utilize magic TECHNICs. You can swap between weapons you have set to suit the situation, but most of them will still just have one generic attack and then a special attack called a Photon Art you can set. You hammer one button over and over and then mix in that special move and that will be how one should approach most fights, and unfortunately you draw from a resource called PP for more interesting moves. For most weapons it recovers rather slowly and is meant to limit how often you use a stronger skill, but for the guns it is used every time you fire and specializing in firearms can be a drag initially when you’re frequently running out and having no good way to recover it frequently. Missions will often involve plenty of monsters you need to take out so this combat style gets dull incredibly quickly despite some effort having gone into varying up the dangers monsters present.
The game isn’t lacking in ideas for what enemies can do to present different threats, but the problem arises from the face that you aren’t going to have many options for replying to this diversity. Giving monsters breath attacks, charges, and a wide range of movement styles and attacks with different reach sounds effective, but all you can do really is walk away and then move back into keep on whaling on the foe. Perhaps the fights would feel less tedious if not for some of the less enjoyable ways the game stretches out battles. Flying foes can sometimes only be targeted by going into first person and shooting a gun at surprisingly close range, but teleportation is a nuisance wherever it arises and a lot of bosses only really put up a fight because they keep teleporting or flying out of reach meaning you have to rely on small windows of opportunity to dish out damage. Dragging things out even more is the fact that attacks can sometimes do no damage, this caused by an interaction of stats although you’ll be happy when your defense or evasion from your gear and leveling up pay off with more negated damage. Unfortunately, so routinely seeing the number 0 pop up in the real-time fights just makes it feel like wasted time since it doesn’t impact your strategy in any way. The battle system is simply too shallow, and while the areas you explore often try to have hidden goodies and little gimmicks like needing to find hidden SEED pods or engaging with teleporters, they also have gates that can only be opened after clearing out certain groups of baddies so you are forced to slog through frequent battles that can’t draw out meaningful alterations to your approach.
It does not help that the characters who assist you can be quite dumb. The AI will sometimes stand by and watch you attack an enemy who is right next to them, your healers have odd prioritization for when to cast such magic, and characters can literally get lost when walking straight lines as they starting running into walls and refuse to follow. In fact, one reason you might get attached to a character like Tonnio isn’t his feisty personality but the fact that he actually seems reliable in a fight compared to the bumbling allies who sometimes fail to register they’re even in a battle. There is an Extra Mode you unlock after playing a few chapters of the story where you can instead adventure independent of the main plot, the player even allowed to create their own character and start from scratch undertaking missions. A lot of systems like the item synthesis system for making advanced gear is clearly meant more for this mode and the now defunct online multiplayer, but even though you can pursue more advanced character classes with deeper specializations in specific weaponry through these modes, they can’t overcome the poor relationship between a player’s attack options and the structure of the combat.
Some well composed music can at least be a little evocative and the different planets at least feel distinct despite reusing mission areas rather quickly. Unfortunately, even the online mode sounds like it still hit into the same bugbears regarding tedious and empty combat and even a limited amount of activities to participate in. Mission design is often just about killing your way to a destination where a boss awaits, and when the story mode does do things to disrupt that it will just throw in brief moments like riding a weird ostrich creature or driving a tank that do not ask much of you and are over swiftly. Phantasy Star Universe never seems to stray too far from mashing two buttons to battle and so it’s hard to get invested in any of the experiences the game offers.
THE VERDICT: A space epic turned banal by rudimentary combat and weak characters, Phantasy Star Universe is hard to push through since it rarely can get its engine going long enough to realize its concepts. The weapon system provides some options but your skills are limited to ensure it never achieves interesting depth, and while enemies come in many different shapes, their unique attacks can’t draw much more out of you and so the game often weakly utilizes teleportation to ensure enemy longevity over true difficulty. The story mode is a slog not helped by poor voice acting and characters and playing as your own character in Extra Mode only strips things down to something even more basic, Phantasy Star Universe not putting in the work to make engrossing mechanics or a captivating plot.
And so, I give Phantasy Star Universe for Xbox 360…
A TERRIBLE rating. Adding some importance to movement and positioning in a fight at least means the combat in Phantasy Star Universe isn’t totally lifeless, but having you move around a bit before doing basic attack chains isn’t enough to salvage a system that fails to encourage strategy. The palette you can assign weapons and items to can be quickly accessed in a fight and feels like it has a lot of potential, perhaps if the game demanded more weapon diversity rather than restricting it with things like PP and class specializations it could have better designed around flexibility. Instead, you’re expected to smack around foes and walk off for a bit when they wind up an attack for the most part, and with the only breaks from this being shallow gimmick sections like the tank or boring tasks like scanning the area for SEED pods, it becomes hard to identify any moments that really provide a thrill. The mechanical problems are universal across Phantasy Star Universe’s modes, but the story mode makes some specific stumbles that undermine its generic action story. Poor voice performances, partners who struggle to help in battle, and a weak story structure make it hard to commit to seeing the adventure to its end, the game seeming more concerned with setting things up for generic heroics rather than constructing heartfelt moments or fleshing out characters with potential. Even the deliberate silliness fails to provide a break from the weak story-telling, the delivery off, punchlines are uncreative, and the mood not lightening much as you can’t even extract a laugh before you head off to more tedious monster killing.
Phantasy Star Universe is repetitive and failed to put its limited imagination in the right spots. The player just can’t wield enough interesting options at once and cultivating their chosen tools only locks them into more simplistic battle options since you’ll inevitably not be able to swap in weapons as often as the type of gear you find or create leads to power gaps. With fights already a slog thanks to enemies invalidating damage so often, it stings that the monsters that could have served a better action RPG well are instead fodder for bland button mashing combos. An MMORPG is almost always going to involve some grind and repetition, but satisfying rewards, involved boss battles, and a compelling narrative are usually there to invigorate such games, and Phantasy Star Universe seemed to think it didn’t need any of these, leading to a messy experience that is hard to get invested in.