Did anyone play Phantasy Star Online?
I remember being young and going over to one of our neighbor's house to watch him play Phantasy Star Online (PSO) on his Dreamcast with other people over the Internet which blew my mind as a kid. I also remember getting my parents to rent a copy of PSO for Gamecube to play it some, but since we had to return it, I didn't get very far or get to experience much of it. Though the memory of it being awesome never went away.
When I was in high school, one of my best friends at the time loved the Gamecube version and played it a ton with his dad and brother growing up. He found a private server to play the PC version, Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst, which includes both episodes 1 and 2 along with the PC only episode 4. ["Where is episode 3?" you might ask, that was released as a card game that was also set after the events of episodes 1, 2, and 4] and asked me if I wanted to play with him and his brother. We ended up playing together, usually once or twice a week, depending on our schedules. Sometimes we would play all evening and just chat while grinding and leveling up our characters. I think I ended up getting to level 50 out of a maximum of 200. I could easily have seen myself continuing to play for years as a way to keep up with that friend if we had stayed in touch.
That game has sat in the back of my head for years, I'd occasionally think about it, and have the urge to play it, but never would since I usually have other stuff going on, and I couldn't remember what server my character was on or my login information. I recently saw some videos about it on YouTube, since it was the 25th anniversary that has got me looking in to it again. I think later in the year I may look in to setting it up to play on my Android phone.
PSO has an interesting place in video game history, and something I didn't know until watching a retrospective was that the Monster Hunter series took inspiration from PSO.
There were follow-up games made, like Phantasy Star Universe, and Phantasy Star Online 2, but I only played PSO2 for a brief period when it was Japanese only, and I kept having my translation patches breaking every few days due to updates and never went back to revisit it after it was released in the West.
It made me curious if any Tilders played it back in the day or still play it now?
Do you have any fond memories of the game, or stories you might want to share?
Did you play or enjoy any of the follow-up games to the original PSO?
I actually played alot of PSO 1 & 2 on Nintendo Gamecube. Never online though. I love it :D But were probably bad at it as I was very young :)
I’ve never played an MMO (apart from some ancient MUDs and MUSHes eons ago)… the genre just isn’t really my type of thing. But as an old Dreamcast-head I always had some curiosity about PSO because of how viable it apparently was when played offline. This is unusual for MMOs, no?
PSO itself is unusual for an MMO. Since it lacks an open-world and is structured around instanced missions, some would describe it more as an MMO-lite; in fact, you could say it's the pioneer of that set of games considering its age.
I've seen Monster Hunter being described as Capcom's take on PSO, since their structure is extremely similar (and those games are also very playable offline), and you can see the same strands of DNA in lots of modern MMO-lites such as Warframe.
I know there were a ton of games that I played as a kid and wonder how I beat them since I had no idea what was actually going on or how the systems worked.
Of course.
Played a ton on GameCube with friends offline and online (I even had the Ethernet adapter just for pso!) and again on PC with blue burst. I also played PSO2 for years on the jp servers but ever since the "New Genesis" reboot it's completely dead to me. It's a shame that happened RIGHT after the official English release.
And y'know PSO2 was fun, but the original PSO's visual and audio style are unmatched. Absolutely gorgeous imo. When the steam deck first came out a few years back, I got back into the original and played on Ephinea: https://ephinea.pioneer2.net/ . I had a blast and people were friendly, but once I reached the max difficulty all of the sudden I encountered a LOT more players that demanded I play a certain way so I lost interest. It's still going strong afaik.
What a lovely game, though. That forest music was formative in my teenage years.
Oh, and shout out to the original PSO game on the DS, that was actually pretty good even though I didn't play it for nearly as long.
I didn't stay too long on PSO2 nad had moved on to other games. I saw the gameplay recently and wasn't that interested in giving it a try again. I might one day to try PSU since it is somewhat similar to PSO, but I'm not sure when that would be.
I saw a video on the PSO game on DS, and will probably give it a try on an emulator at some point. I'd love to track down a physical cartridge, but that may take some time where i Live now.
The forst music is the music that always comes to mind since it is the music I heard the most while I played.
I actually own both the Dreamcast and GameCube (GC) versions. I played the former a lot back in college with a roommate. While no local multiplayer we traded off quite often while the other was in class or at work.
The latter caused me to make a completely useless purchase together with it. One of the accessories you could buy was a Broadband Adapter for the GC, which if I recall was only ever used by maybe 3 games total. I never did use it, but I played the hell out PSO regardless. Here I had a crew that we would do local multiplayer, which was always a blast.
My go-to character was a Force Hume that performed a lot of massive spells for crowd control at a distance, but always carried around a sword for those moments they got too close.
Now you just reminded me of Red Ring Rico, the famous in-game hunter whose logs you find strewn around the world which tells a rather sad story of how their journey went. I should go back and pop that game in to see how well it has aged.
I definitely missed out on PSO Ep. 3. It was back when card-based games were all the rage. It turned me off, but I never did give it a fair shake. I think I should try it if I ever come across a stray copy in the wild.
I wanted to get that adapter when I saw it, but since my parents didn't buy me the game and wouldn't have let me use it to play online anyway, I didn't get it. I always wanted the giant. keyboard GameCube controller as well!
I played a RAMar and dabbled in a few other classes.
You might enjoy this YouTuber's channel, he dives in to PSO characters, I've been slowly watching his videos: https://youtube.com/@skysnotthelimit
I mentioned in another comment, but the Return to Ragol ROM hack might be something you'd be interested in checking out. It adds some QoL to the GameCube version of the game.
I played it on Dreamcast. Would work really hard through the day, then go home, have a quick dinner, jump online to do some quests with my work mates! There was no Discord/FaceTime /WhatsApp so we would send SMS and make quick mobile voice to arrange things. One of my online user names is the one I thought up for PSO. I wanted to use my real name, but my team mate encouraged me to think up something more futuristic sounding! Good times.
If I had some extra money to get a physical console, I'd want to pick up a Dreamcast. I've always wondered what an alternate timeline would be like if Sega had gone all on in the Dreamcast and continued on in the console market instead of becoming a publisher for games.
That sounds like an awesome time! I remember coordinating what game we would play before heading home from school.
Hell yes.
I made a friend in the 7th grade who had it for Dreamcast. Later he got a GameCube and we basically only used it for PSO and Super Smash Melee. We did a fair amount of 4 player co-op which enticed other friends to get GameCubes and pretty soon it seemed like my whole friend group had max level android hunters with musashis and whatnot. I only had a ps1 but it was fine.
Years later in college or maybe after, I found out Blue Burst existed and played it by myself for awhile just for a dose of nostalgia and comfort. Obviously you know the game is incredibly repetitive and I got bored pretty quickly by myself.
I also played PSO2 a fair bit a few years ago when sega first brought it to Xbox, but I only had one friend to play it with and he had never been into the old games and also I just can't stand MMOs since I was like 15.
We must have played thousands of hours on the GameCube and I still have fond memories of that time but I'm not in touch with any of those friends anymore.
Thanks for sharing! I loved playing couch co-op games as a kid and with friends in college. I only played a bit of PSO in split screen with my brother and when my friend showed me his family's original characters. It seems like such a fun game to play in that mode.
I mentioned in another comment that I saw the Return to Ragol ROM hack that makes the PSO for Gamecube version a more single player/local experience by removing the section ID and making some other changes (I believe increased drop rates). That might be worth checking out if you felt like revisiting the game sometime on Dolphin.
That does sound interesting. It's probably been 15 years since that brief stint with Blue Burst. Unfortunately my past experiences with Dolphin haven't gone so well, mostly trying to emulate Super Smash Melee, but that has been a number of years as well. I'll look into it.
Thanks for this post. It has brought back some good memories. It really was an incredible game.
The first time I became aware of the Phantasy Star franchise was back in 2003, when my dad surprised me with a GameCube copy of Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II. We didn't have the broadband adapter or dial-up modem required for online play, so we were stuck with the offline experience.
Because of that, the game quickly turned into a grind. Without the EXP boosts from online play, we spent countless hours fighting the same handful of enemy groups just to stand a chance against the bosses. At the time, we didn't really mind; kids with plenty of free time rarely do, but in hindsight, that endless repetition definitely soured my feelings toward MMORPGs as an adult.
We must have poured dozens of hours into it, yet we never made it past the Mines in Episode I. Episode II was even more brutal; the first stage felt like hitting a brick wall, with enemies that massively outstatted our fragile party.
I always played as a RAmar, a balanced all-rounder class with solid accuracy and some basic techniques for emergency healing and support. My friends usually picked HU builds for melee combat or other RA classes for gunplay. None of us dared to try the FO classes; juggling TP management and fragile defenses seemed too daunting for beginners. Ironically, I'd later learn that FOrce characters were just as capable as any other class when played right.
What truly stuck with me, though, was the game's atmosphere. The futuristic soundtrack perfectly captured an optimistic, adventurous vision of the online frontier. The hubworld theme from Episode I, for instance, still gives me that same sense of wonder.
Even so, that early grind left me hesitant to dive into MMORPGs for years; nearly two decades, in fact. Maybe one day I'll dust off Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II again and finally give it another go, once I've set up the right gear to connect to a fanmade server.
Thanks for sharing! I can see that experience souring MMOs moving forward, did you ever find yourself getting in to any later or even trying them?
I'm in a rush but wanted to mention the ROM hack I found out about called Return to Ragol which tunes the GameCube PSO experience to be more single player friendly if you ever wanted to revisit it.
I never really got it, to be honest. I was a big fan of the Phantasy star games, and when I heard about the Online games bringing them back, I was excited, but I didn't own a Dreamcast, and even if I did have one our family was an early adopter to broadband so we wouldn't have been able to get the Dreamcast online (I know there was a BBA but to this day I have yet to see one in real life - besides, parents wouldn't pay extra for a second internet service that took the phone lines). Years later I got Phantasy Star Universe for PS2 and the gameplay was incredibly dull that I couldn't fathom sludging through its predecessor.
I've played PSO2 and while I enjoyed it way more than pretty much every MMO I've ever played, I don't really have any friends I play online games with so I didn't play it for too long.
The original PSO definitely has some clunkiness to it, but I'd say it would be worth giving a try if you had some time to give it a go. There are private servers that have increased the XP rate and drop rate of items, and I saw that someone had created a ROM hack for the Gamecube version of the game named Return to Ragol that is intended for a single-player experience. Though this one have a more extensive setup compared to playing on one of the private servers: https://www.reddit.com/r/PSO/comments/1dluqgv/return_to_ragol_is_here/
I was a colossal fan of the Phantasy Star universe from the Genesis days, so mixed with all of the excitement and hype around the Dreamcast itself, the announcement of PSO was really special for me.
I got it and a 56k connection on day one and spent 250 hours over 3 months (an insane thought at the time) playing it inside and out with other fans.
I even met Phantasy Star fanfic writers (the community was big at the time) from time to time.
It was a really special experience for me, and at 16 years old when my die hard passion for games was waning.
When Sega announced that the Dreamcast was being discontinued, I played a sad song from an early PS game and actually had a good cry.
It was the day the music died for me, but also a moment to move on and grow up.
Oh this game had a vibe to it that I find speaks to me in a way that's hard to describe. I first played the Xbox version when it was live, then I log into Blue Burst on every so often and bathe in some nostalgia.
And for what it's worth, PSO is still alive and has an incredible number of people still playing it on private servers. It's not uncommon to see north of 200 active players.
I completely agree with you on the vibe for this game, even though I didn't play it a ton, I'll still occasionally put the soundtrack on in the background while I work. I'll probably be visiting Ephinea when I get some time to play again. I've looked at that server every now and then, it's awesome to see it maintain a solid player base after all these years.
When I played with my friend, I believe we played on schthack, but I can't remember any information I have on the account.
I played a LOT of PSO2 on the Japanese servers some years ago. My first memory of it was discovering it on a small coop game review YouTube channel some time after its initial release. I was really enchanted by it for a bit : having been obsessed with Kingdom Hearts let's plays for a while but having no way to play the actual games since I only owned PlayStation consoles, I really wanted to play something like it. It looked so fun and cool! Plus it was free, looked gorgeous, and let you change classes at any time! Sadly, the Arks-Layer translation patch project either didn't exist at the time or kid me just didn't have the know-how to find it, and I forgot about it quickly.
Then years later, during the Episode 5 period, I randomly discovered it again through a conversation with a kind stranger on Discord, at which point the translation patch was stable (wouldn't break every update), mostly complete and regularly updated. So I booted it up, gave it a try... and got hooked. I think I played over a thousand hours in the first few months and then kept playing regularly (my subjective perspective of regularly, anyway) for at least a year or two. I had the fortune of meeting some decent folk who invited me into their team and helped me through much of the experience, which made a massive difference.
I've never really played PSO1 (something I was thinking of correcting with PSOBB). I am aware PSO2 is quite different from what players wanted out of a proper sequel to it; but I loved it. The combat is fluid and satisfying and fun in a way that I've not seen replicated in other games. I spent most of my time playing a jet boots-only Bouncer/Fighter and I'd sometimes go into high-level free zones I needed nothing from just to go and dance around and kick some big guys for hours at a time. The content is also quite decent, with some really spectacular bosses like the various Dark Falz that you got to do often at any level through Emergency Quests, and decent variety over all. And of course, the fashion is incredible! Some of the best character customization out there.
The game is flawed in a bunch of areas, of course; a lot of content turned irrelevant by ever growing power levels, and questionable balance, particularly with advanced classes (Hero, Phantom, the star-themed one they added later). I also never had much interest in the episodic story, which I hardly ever interacted with. The biggest thing that bothered me in the game were the systems relating to gear, affixing in particular. The grind associated with getting six copies of the same high-star weapon, then a bunch of weapons with the specific affixes you want, the complexity of the system itself that required so much planning and understanding, the pressure to not fuck something up since it was not easy to fix a botched affix, all that to get a good weapon or unit that would then become obsolete a month later. I distinctly remember spending god knows how long planning and grinding over weeks, fighting my own executive dysfunction, to get myself a fully affixed pair of 14-star Atra boots only for a friend to immediately inform me I could have gotten better if I had done X and Y thing. It felt unwinnable.
I gradually played less and less over time as my interest went to other things, and I pretty much quit entirely around the middle of Episode 6; a bit before they added that new star-themed class I mentioned. I never played the global release, but I did go back to the game for a little bit when New Genesis was released and Arks-Layer put out a proxy for overseas players. I didn't stick to NGS for long as my favourite class and weapon type were not in it... and nor was any content whatsoever. Maybe it's gotten better now.
I do miss the game sometimes. I've played other games that filled the same niche, notably Final Fantasy XIV, but they didn't have its awesome combat flow, and I met some cool people on it. Besides, I thought it was really cool to be in a community dedicated to playing a game despite how the developer really didn't care to let them play; even with SEGA's passive-aggressive stance on overseas players on its JP servers, people still went crazy lengths to play this game just out of passion for the franchise. That's cool as hell. There's several logistic problems in the way of it, but I want to go back some day, even if only for a while, and maybe taking a group with me.