William Dojinn on 31/10/2008 at 14:33

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As someone who's sunk 200+ hours into Phantasy Star Online I believe I'm somewhat qualified to answer, only somewhat mind you as PSU adds other things into the mix which, by comparison, make PSO look even more simplistic (only four different areas, and each one heavily closed in).

With PSO it was less about the game play and more about having a quasi-twitch based battle system as well as three other goons to dungeon stomp with. Seriously, playing with a good team, or at least friends that keep things entertaining, makes a world of difference. the problem is, as with any other MMO, it takes too damned long to get anywhere you want to go, the rewards are kinda meh, and before schthack fixed the drop charts in blue burst, rewards, even mediocre ones, were all but nonexistent which forced people to hack simply to get a piece of kit that didn't suck.

the problem I have with MMO's is it generally takes hours to do anything worthwhile (granted I could do forest in short order, but its a short level. caves is a freaking nightmare, and don't even get me started on ruins...no wait, I hated caves even more because it had three parts, and just about every quest stuck you in caves 1, which copy/pasted the same blocks of rooms over and over again.). I generally don't have that time to kill level grinding, or weapon hunting (which is why I like it when you can craft really good weapons in game, though that presents the dreaded materials hunting problem...like getting uber rare materials, only to fail at the crafting itself, which destroys your materials ARG!)

Oh and I have a special burning pit of hate in my bowels for Asian developers that both try enforcing team game play by essentially nerfing a particular class to the point where they need a meat shield otherwise they die in two hits (Forces), and seem to not give two shits about how 'tarded the American servers are (case in point, Japanese exclusive quests on blueburst, exclusive equipment, updates, security fixes, actual GMs that police things). Look. I know there's generally more people in America than japan, and we each tend to try looking out for our own homes more than the neighbor's, but when you run a service, you better fucking treat everybody equally. Seriously, I simply waited till blue burst was free to play (was already free to download, thanks sega for saving everyone the hassle of having to buy a game that you need to keep buying just to play, really, that was actually a smart move).