This is a crosspost of a regular segment posted on SegaXtreme.net. Join in on the conversation on the SegaXtreme forums.
The SegaXtreme Game of the Month for December 2024 is Phantasy Star Online: The Aleron Ives EP. This is a fan-made modified version of the original Phantasy Star Online for the SEGA Dreamcast with a companion modified version of the original PC release of Phantasy Star Online. Among some of the other changes, this version allows you to automatically connect to the fan-run Sylverant PSO server, the primary PSO server for non-Blue Burst players. It also features some stat, item drop re-balancing, and enhanced ultimate mode difficulty to improve the Dreamcast PSO experience. It comes in a CDI format for burning to play on stock Dreamcast units with improved load times, too.
Aleron Ives runs PSO Palace, a Phantasy Star Online fan site focused on the Dreamcast, Gamecube, Xbox, and PC releases (not Blue Burst) that can be played on Sylverant. Additional thanks to ShinobiWan Z from the Sylverant Discord for providing in-game screenshots.
PSO is an MMORPG originally released on the Dreamcast in 2000. Dropping the storyline concluded in Phantasy Star IV, PSO opens with exposition on the Pioneer colonization project. Planet Coral, for reasons explained more thoroughly in the Phantasy Star Zero prequel, has become unlivable, and the Coral government has organized two colony ships called Pioneer to settle on the habitable planet Ragol. Pioneer 1 lands, sets up a colony dome, and signals for Pioneer 2 to begin the large wave of colonization. When Pioneer 2 arrives 7 years later, a massive explosion wipes out the Pioneer 1 colonists, and the Pioneer 2 government begins sending down mercenary explorers from the Hunter’s Guild to determine the situation on the planet.
The game is a slow-paced dungeon crawl through four main areas, with some bonus content in two additional dungeons via a PVP battle mode. These two additional dungeons get expanded later on into full-fledged PVE dungeons in episode II.
The primary game loop is very similar to the Diablo series. You use a slow-paced, ostensibly real-time combat system to take out hordes of enemies by yourself or with a small group of friends. A large arsenal of weapons and armor drops at random, with minor stat-enhancing modifications, for you to sort through to keep some items and sell the rest.
Additionally, you have a small techno-organic creature known as a MAG that can be fed consumable items for additional state increases — helpful for reaching required stat minimum for high grade equipment. MAGs also can trigger special actions known as Photon Blasts once you have received or dealt enough physical damage. This is more relevant to physical attackers than other builds.
After you’ve beaten the final boss in a given difficulty, you unlock the next difficulty, which allows you to go through all the quests and dungeons again with stronger enemies and better rewards. On Ultimate difficulty, you even get a change in scenery and enemy skins.
Player characters can be a Hunter (melee attacker), Ranger (shoots guns), or a Force (magic user). Similarly, there are three races. Humans (good at everything, kinda), CASTs (robots who can’t use techniques), and Newmans (half-elf, half-furry, likes magic, hates Seinfeld). This, along with a gender binary, gives the various combinations that determine your stat growth, potential equipment loadout, and access to techniques. Not all combinations are available (no CASTs can be forces, for example.)
The game leaves you with three choices per job for a total of nine classes. The combination gets abbreviated into a class name. A FOnewearl is a Force (FO) Newman (new) who is female (earl.) It makes sense at the character creation screen. Just use a HUmar if you don’t know what to do, or a RAmar if you want to help people feed their MAGs.
The controls are simple. The analog stick moves you around in third person, and left trigger recenters the camera — which, for some reason, seems to affect your attack accuracy. You set up a button action palette, with an alternative palette accessible via trigger, giving you six quick actions that cover three forms of physical attack, item usage, and whatever techniques (read: magic) you want to map for quick use.
The top button of the four-button rhombus layout is used for symbol chat, originally billed as a convenient language-neutral method of communicating basic game-relevant information. In practice, symbol chat is primarily used for various artistic interpretation of sex- or drug-related imagery that can be approximated with some basic shapes.
Of more practical use is the quick menu accessed with trigger and the top button, giving you three menus to quickly swap weapons, use items, and cast techniques without having to map them on an action palette. You learn to use this functionality a lot in the Caves.
Dungeons have two to three zones each, terminating in a boss arena. The dungeons have a static level geometry with some variations in the layout to force you to open doors, kill enemies, and traverse each dungeon zone before finding the teleporter to the next zone or the boss.
Each boss is designed with unique mechanics and spectacles to raise the stakes after a 45-minute slog through some very samey enemy formations. Bosses award elevated item drops and a big chunk of experience once they’ve been felled. Just make sure you aren’t dead when the boss death animation starts, or you’ll lose out.
Outside of the teamed instances are the lobbies. In modern times, there are rarely more than a dozen or so people on except for certain events. So once you’ve finished downloading the quests and applying the quality-of-life patches, select Altimira lobby to join. There, you can chat to organize a dungeon party, or get enough people to lobby 15 for a game of Chu Chu Rocket soccer.
Be aware that in online mode, some dungeons may not be completable without help from others, so stick to offline mode if your goal is to finish the story by yourself or complete Hunters Guild quests.
Be sure to look up Sylverant’s server commands to type into lobby chat to take advantage of certain features, like character backups and server-side drop tables.
As mentioned before, this is a slow-paced game. It shares this trait with some of its contemporaries, like Everquest and Runescape. While there is a degree of positioning and strategy when fighting bosses with others, much of the game boils down to the three-hit chain melee attack, or cast-retreat-cast rhythm, even at higher difficulty levels. In this way, the game rapidly becomes familiar, but it doesn’t seem to overstay its welcome. The comfort provided by the graphical aesthetics, music, and Skinner box mechanics make it strangely comfortable, even trance-inducing. You will rarely feel excited playing PSO. Once you figure out the dance you play with each enemy type, you end up with a relaxing experience, even while fighting multiple Hildebears.
A review on PSO almost feels redundant to this crowd 24 years after its release. If you have been away since the official server days, come back and see how much the fans have upkept and added to the experience. Support Sylverant, run by Blue Crab, by contributing to the Patreon to keep the PSO servers running another quarter century. Run Toward the Future with whoever is online for some easy levels. Complete Central Fire Dome Swirl to grab your SEGA console MAG.
The Dreamcast is still thinking, and PSO is just as good as you remember it. And if you’re starting fresh, the community is more than willing to help with your character build to get you up to speed.
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