Lost in Phantasy Star

2011 seems to be the year of Phantasy Star, apparently. I'm still playing cube-flavored Phantasy Star Online - Odin Taros is now level 43, and I've reached the Ruins on Hard - and I recently picked up Phantasy Star Portable for the PSP. (As an aside - why do publishers insist on making games with the same acronyms as the systems they are on? Phantasy Star Portable, Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow, Resident Evil Deadly Silence, etc. etc. etc. It's such a weird thing to do...)

But! Before I give you my initial impressions of PSPortable, I must tell you about Lost in Blue, an old (2005 vintage, actually!) DS game I picked up recently on the cheap. I can see why it was $7.99 - Konami didn't give too much of the budget over to graphics or sound, so what you have is a somewhat ugly, janky-looking game that sounds pretty bad.

The premise of the game is simple. Much like their 1999 Game Boy Color title Survival Kids, you are a young boy who has washed ashore on what appears to be a deserted island (I just started playing, so I have no idea if it's completely deserted or not) and you must gather items and kill wildlife and survive the wilderness. You do so by combining items together, and playing little minigames to use them. For example, once you've acquired a twig and some tree bark, you play a little minigame in which you alternately press L and R and blow into the microphone to start a fire. I find this pretty neat, although I imagine it will get incredibly tedious after a while if I have to light a fire every in game day, though.

So after finding a cave to sleep in for the night, I woke up and was able to cross the now calmed river to find a girl, washed ashore, passed out on the beach. I woke her up, gave her a coconut, and brought her to my warm, dry cave and nursed her back to health as best I could with my raw clams, seaweed, and fire. Okay, so neither one of us is in good shape. But I suspect as the game goes on I'll become more and more capable of surviving.

I think the game is aggressively mediocre so far, but that is likely because the concept is so great to me, and I had heard the execution was pretty subpar. I will try to play more of it, but of course, the timesink juggernaut Phantasy Star looms.

As far as I can tell, PSPortable is a portable rendition of Phantasy Star Universe. I have not played PSU, so I cannot verify this claim. But what I've played of PSPortable is quite interesting... The game is like a mix of Phantasy Star Zero and Phantasy Star Online. The graphics are quite good, actually - much better than PSZero - but the controls are very weird. You have the ability to switch between weapons on the fly by holding O and then using the D pad to select your weapon. You then use the square button to use the weapon (I can't tell if there are Regular and Strong attacks, like in PSO and PSZero - perhaps I'm dumb and didn't find the button? Who knows). You also can lock on to enemies, but you don't stay pointed at them - your character will strafe around the guy, but stay pointed straight ahead rather than focus on whatever you targeted. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong, though. It can't be good when something as basic as locking on is obtuse right off the bat, though. There also seems to be a little number in the corner that ticks down as you use your weapon, but slowly ticks back up when you don't. I'm not really sure what that does - is it weapon degradation? Is it the weapon temporarily getting weaker? I cannot tell.

Like Phantasy Star Zero, you go on Story missions with some CPU-controlled partners. So far, I think the CPU in PSPortable is much smarter than PSZero, because your guys actually alternate between attacking and healing pretty regularly and don't seem to walk into obvious enemy attacks. Granted, I haven't faced a boss yet, and that's the real test.

What story I've encountered so far is mind-numbingly boring, not that I expected any different (and really, who cares - you don't play these games for the stories anyway). I made a RAcast named Odin Taros, just like in Cube PSO, and he recently graduated Hunter School or some crap and is now going out on his first few missions. Like in PSZero, I pick between a few dialogue choices on the occasion when someone asks me a question, and just like in the DS game, my responses don't seem to matter very much.

Regardless, though - I dropped 2000 meseta (been playing too much Phantasy Star, I suppose - $20) on this game, so I'm going to put more time into it, as well as Lost in Blue if I can.