Phantasy Star Universe - Finished Offline

I just finished the offline mode for Phantasy Star Universe... 8
achievements, 1000 gamerpoints, 26 hours, 17 minutes and 25 seconds.

The levels aren't really challenging until the very end and even then
if you have a Light attributed weapon it's not all that hard. I was
thinking I'd have to grind for a while to get the cash to buy an
S-ranked weapon (starting at around 500,000 meseta) but I didn't have
to. A Light Duradnal was all it took.

A couple of complaints about the game... When you finish the goal for a
level it automatically takes you to a stats screen and gives you a
ranking... even if there are items on the ground you haven't picked up
yet. PSO got around this by forcing you to return to the guild counter
for your reward.

There aren't really enough variety of enemies. When they say there are
70 different enemies on the back of the box they really mean there are
only about 10 different enemies repeated 7 times with different skins.
The same tactics work on each of them. Yeah, I know, Sega has been
doing this since the orignal Phantasy Star, it doesn't make it any less
annoying.

Initially the game felt bigger than PSO for the simple reason that the
4 lobby areas you have to choose from (Guardian Colony and the 3
planets) are all huge. But the actual gaming areas I don't think are as
large or varied as in PSO. There really isn't anything that corresponds
to the caves or the mines. You essentially have Forest, Forest, Desert,
Ruins.

They've also eliminated the option of "doing a run". Where there was no
mission involved you'd simply go through Forest 1, Forest 2, fight the
dragon and go back to the ship. All of the free missions are more
mission than free. You can't simply roam about each planet, fight the
boss and go back to the ship. Although you can do the missions as many
times as you want (even the final mission is replayable through the
Game Clear save.

On the whole, I liked it. But it's not as good or as deep an RPG
experience as Enchanted Arms and I don't think it's as replayable as
the original PSO.

- Jordan

Kendrick Kerwin Chua wrote:

> I'll admit that these are available in the online or extra modes and may not actually
> show up as part of Waber's story.

Yeah, they're in Waber's story too... and you go through them 2 or 3
times. But they don't feel different enough from each other in the same
way that Mines and Caves are unique. Heck, Caves had variation from
level 1 to 2.

> See, this confuses me because doing a run is exactly the whole point of
> the online and extra modes. Online, the desert planet (Moatoab) is locked
> out until the admin team decides to make it available. But in extra mode,
> all three planets are available and you can pretty much journey anywhere
> and fight any boss. Different variations of the runs are available
> depending on what level you are.

The thing is it's all mission based. You don't have the option of just
going down to the planet and hitting the various areas. You can only
visit the planet under the constraint of an over-all mission. Yes, you
can choose C, B, A or S rank levels, but it's still just the equivalent
of doing "Black Paper" on the different difficulty levels.

- Jordan