PSP Review - 'Phantasy Star Portable'

Sega's Phantasy Star series has had a pretty interesting history. Premiering on the Sega Master System, the first game was an RPG set in a sci-fi world where the universe's fate depended on the actions of a party consisting of beings, each of a different species. With a story that was deeply engaging and emotional, Master System owners proudly flaunted it over their NES brethren, since it was something that no game on the competing system ever had. When the Sega Genesis debuted, so did the sequel, which carried the same type of combat and story depth into the 16-bit era. The next two games after the 16-bit debut, Phantasy Star III and Phantasy Star IV, were equally as good and brought about multiple endings to the series as well as a sense of finality to the game.

While the series lay dormant during the Sega Saturn era, it came back for the Sega Dreamcast but in a completely different form. Phantasy Star Online was the first RPG from a Japanese company to take the game online. It also ditched the traditional turn-based system in favor of a real-time system, and it completely did away with most of the story from the franchise, choosing to only keep intact the sci-fi setting and the worlds from the series. The change was a polarizing one. Some fans loved the direction that the game was heading toward, while others hated it and wished that the game would go back to its roots. After a brief stint on the Nintendo GameCube and Xbox as well as a sequel appearing on the Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 2, Phantasy Star Portable comes to the Sony PSP. The question for PSP owners is whether Sega's flagship RPG series fits in well with the other games on the system or feels out of place instead.

Phantasy Star Portable is a direct sequel of both Phantasy Star Universe and Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus. You play a recent graduate of the Guardians, a group of peacekeepers for the Gurhal System. On your initial mission, you get partnered up with the latest CAST (android) model named Vivienne and must investigate a disturbance in a fully automated plant, where the machines have gone out of control. By the end of the mission, you discover that this may have been the work of terrorists that are using biological weaponry, much like the SEED threat of the previous games. Your overall mission is to stop the terrorists and wipe out the threat once and for all.

For those who have played the recent Phantasy Star titles, this will instantly feel familiar to you. If not, this will feel a bit different from the other Japanese RPGs on the system. Instead of being a turn-based affair, the game takes a real-time action stance. Enemies are automatically seen and combat happens just like any other third-person action game. The action takes place in various outdoor environments and futuristic dungeons separated by doors or gates. For comparison purposes, the game is a lot like the Monster Hunter games, where you go and complete various quests to help the story progress.

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