Phantasy Star Portable is the second chapter in the series, it continues on from the end of Phantasy Star Universe on the PS2. Even though it continues on with some references to previous storylines, if you’re like me and have never played a Phantasy Star game before you can still pick it up and play without any confusion as to what’s going on.
Phantasy Star Portable has two modes, story or multiplayer but which ever you pick to begin with you will be met with the same screen, the character creation screen. This screen is where you first have to create and customise your character. The character you create can be used in both the story and multiplayer modes. The amount of customisation possible is overwhelming. Firstly you have to choose one of four species, human, CAST, Newman and Beast. Within each species you have to choose their occupation, hunter, ranger or force. After this you can customise your character how ever you want. Every thing you can think of is customisable, right down to the length of eyelashes and the pupil size. For those who like change later on you can change many of the features in the colony but some features are unchangeable such as the height.
The navigation of the game is not as expected after seeing other Phantasy Star games, gone is the free-roaming of the colony to talk to people; instead it has been replaced with a bird’s eye picture with selectable icons that represent the different people to interact with. This speeds up gameplay but seems like they didn’t put a lot of effort into making it.
The story mode has players doing various missions against the SEED but after a while these missions seem repetitive having you play through a number of levels then fighting a larger creature as a boss. The story seems well thought out and will keep you playing though. The cut scenes which complement the story on the other hand are not as good, and if you were expecting 3D lip-synched models talking then you will be greatly disappointed. The cut scenes consist of what is basically a cardboard cut-out of the character with words at the bottom corresponding to what they are saying. The mouth of the character doesn’t move, which is the least you could expect. To make up for this the game has full voice acting where each player also has talking as well as the text.
The multiplayer aspect is very similar to the story mode but has some additional exclusive missions. It allows you to link up with up to three friends and then you can complete various missions that are similar to the story missions, but often require co-operation between team mates. This worked reasonably well until there are four players and then the host may receive some slight slowdown while the other three players receive no slowdown whatsoever.
The thing most people will play this game for is the customisation and the amount of weapons and items to be found. This is what gives the game replayability as you will want to keep coming back to find all the best weapons and armour. Also you will want to level up as weapons become better at higher levels.
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