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Phantasy Star Portable 2

Phantasy Star Portable 2

Sophie is one of many that never seemed to get enough of playing the Phantasy Star-games online. Now she's thrown herself into Phantasy Star Portable 2 for the PSP...

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Ever since the Dreamcast-days I've had a weak spot for Phantasy Star Online. I'm not sure how many hours I spent feeding my mag, searching for fun weapons and going on adventures with my three best online buddies. Sure it was repetitive and of course you knew all the levels and all the enemies by heart, but it didn't matter. Phantasy Star Online was a game that I truly enjoyed playing.

Ever since then, it's been going a bit up and down for the Phantasy Star-games. The Phantasy Star Online-games for Gamecube were nice, while Phantasy Star Universe for Playstation 2 and Xbox 360 never managed to capture the charm in the same way. There's been a few handheld versions, where Phantasy Star 0 for the Nintendo DS was a lot of fun while Phantasy Star Portable wasn't all that - mostly since the online features had been lost.

Phantasy Star Portable 2

These days, Phantasy Star equals good online play, and if the online part is missing or lacking the game automatically becomes boring. A lot of this has to do with the fact that Sega has moved away from what Phantasy Star used to be, with good stories and characters filled with personality, and for a long time it's all been about social gaming. You couldn't play Phantasy Star Portable online, yet it was built around those missing features with a superficial story and game mechanics not suited for offline play. It became a bit of a culture shock, because if you can't play it online you have to treat it like an ordinary roleplaying game, for which it was all too shallow.

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Phantasy Star Portable 2, on the other hand, has the online support its predecessor lacked when it was released for PSP. It raises the game to new heights, because there's no way I can say that the singleplayer's story mode is either Oscars-material or especially fun. It's much more fun to find awesome weapons, finish missions and meet up with up to three other players and spend hours together. A big bonus is that you don't need a monthly subscription to play online either, something that many earlier Phantasy Star-games demanded.

Phantasy Star Portable 2

While I'm showering praise on the online part of Phantasy Star Portable 2, it's also a sad fact that the network code is far from optimized. I've had trouble getting the game to flow seamlessly and I've often been hit by lagproblems. A bit too often my friends manage to tear an enemy apart before I get a single hit in, or they have problems keeping up as we run from room to room. Sometimes it gets a bit tricky to keep the group together, which is a must during boss fights. The menus aren't as easy to use as one would hope either, with all the nestled options. If you haven't mapped a dimate to a button because you've only met monomates [No, we're not sure what that means either. -Ed.] it takes a bit too long to get everything right.

The offline storymode is the best way to grind if you don't feel like joining other players, even if it's boring. The story is incredible simple, where you're taken care of by a freelancing military group made up of all the classic roleplaying stereotypes. Mysterious abilities, a looming threat and general despair do their best to spice things up, but it's all so predictable it's hard to really care. A nice detail is that you can import your character from Phantasy Star Portable, even if you have to leave all your weapons and your levels behind and start from scratch again.

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For those who liked the online based Phantasy Star-games, Phantasy Star Portable 2 delivers. Sure there are issues with the menus, the offline mode is terribly boring and the network code isn't really optimized - Phantasy Star Portable 2 still manages to do what Phantasy Star Online did so well; it brings out the most obsessive collecting frenzy in its players.

07 Gamereactor UK
7 / 10
+
Infinite hours of play, fun to play with others, character import
-
Boring offline, annoying menus, bad network code
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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