This game. This fucking game. I loved everything about it. I still do. I wish it was still popular...

>Peak PSO
>Half the fun was jumping into random games and spending all night meeting and chatting with new people while you did tedious grinding or rare hunting

>PSO private servers / PSO2
>Everyone just plays in password locked solo games

What went wrong? Did just the novelty of playing with and meeting people over the internet wear off?

>tfw you didn't play PSO until Sega killed it and private servers became a thing

Running through the game with my friend was a blast, though.

If there was a game almost exactly like PSO but with a more exciting/stylish combat system which rewarded more than just situational awareness, I'd cum nonstop for a week.

Pretty much every Free2Play MMO is a clone of PSO to some degree, take your pick

People jump into my PSO2 rooms every now and then. Maybe leave a comment that you don't mind? It's rude to just barge in in Japan.

I play in locked rooms because I just want a quick nostalgia trip.

If I met people again I'd be forced into it for at least a few months.

I don't really have the time for that anymore.

I paid pso on the official xbox. I remember some guy have me a hacked rifle for my character the first day i logged on. Good times nice community.

Project D was fun while it lasted but the dev couldn't handle maintaining the game alone and it died.

Nothing has ever felt like PSO since, though.

Not even PSO2.

And I know this isn't nostalgia because I can play a game that claims to be like PSO and then go actually play PSO and there's a noticeable difference.

PSO2 has other issues though, the mission structure means that any mission is over within 20 minutes, it's not like spending a night going all the way from Caves to Ruins with some cool dudes you just met

I'm sad I never got to experience it in it's prime. PSU was good with friends even if it got super shafted on updates, the firebreak event was the shit. Wish psp2 was still alive that resolved most of the complaints I had with PSU.

Like other Sega games coughSonic PSO's brilliance was in its simplicity, attempts to add on to and complicate the formula have just diluted the main experience down.

I guess what I really want is PSO May Cry. RA classes can behave like Sam "Exploding Knees" Gideon or something, and FO can be I don't know what yet but something more exciting than spamming Rafoie from the backline.

I remember my uncle would play Phantasy Star Online a lot. When we travelled to holiday resorts for family reunions, he would find a way of sneaking his Dreamcast out and playing it at night. He also ran away once with his Dreamcast when his parents threatened to destroy it.

I received his Dreamcast with a stack of games and PSO when he bought a 360 with Phantasy Star Universe. Mad man also took Japanese lessons just for PSO2.

jesters are love, yoyos are life.

PSO2 still hasn't gotten a western release and western players are still forced to play on the Japanese servers and hope to god not to get banned if found by a mod.

People have been asking for it to be brought over here for years yet Sega is still bullheaded and keeps making other shitty ports and sonic games instead.

You can start any quest you want without leaving the campship, and you can exit to lobby without destroying your party. Teaming up with others for more than one quest is never an issue.

Is PSO really that good? I never got the chance to play it as a kid. Does it emulate well?

So is it worth getting this game for the GameCube and playing it alone? I don't mind not having others and I can just play with someone I know anyway.

I want to go back to sharing lobbies with I&II and III. That was the good old day.

I met a lot of great people playing the PSO games. Some people I met in PSO got married, they paid for me to play PSO ver. 2 with them.

Later on, someone showed me how to play Ep I and II without having to pay for it.

I rarely even encountered people who would steal dropped items. The only shit people I encountered were the ones using the NOL hack in ver. 2 to corrupt people's characters.

Would it be worth it to crank PSO 2?

I would not recommend it unless you have a GC BBA. Just play PSOBB on one of the private servers.

PSO2 at it's core just isn't as good as the older games, and that's with putting hundreds of hours into it. Between the lazy copy paste dungeons, bloated quests, and E missions being the only worthwhile thing for leveling pretty much killed it for me. And that's only some of the issues.

PSOBB is Abandonware on the PC, just go find a private server you like and they'll have all the files.

Its a very simple game and it centers entirely around grinding, so be prepared.

you CAN emulate it, but it really doesn't live up to the fun just playing by yourself. its for sure got an MMO feel were interacting with other people and grinding together is half the fun.

I'm aware of that, but it just breaks up the flow of everything. I like PSO2 but it just has too much random stuff breaking up the pure gameplay. You can't just go in and start killing monsters as deep as you can while hoping a rare one pops. Even the "Free Field Exploration" mode has very small maps. Not to mention, PSO had a nearly impossible level cap, in PSO2 there is very little motivation to just kill stuff casually once you are capped.

Alright then, I'll probably give it a pass then. Thanks anons.

Aht Urghan was the fucking pinnacle of this game. All downhill from there

There's no reason to do anything that isn't an EQ in PSO2.

>Playing Schtack server
>They literally deleted everyone's shit and rolled it all back to 0
>I had like 10 P.wands, GMs, DCs, and 2 Rainbows

I legit want to murder the server dev for doing this. First and last time I ever play on a fan made server

PSO2 will never happen because it's a licensing nightmare at this point. Every week they add in some new tie in shit from and anime, manga, idol groups, and so on. That shit out numbers the game's own content now.

>Just remove all that shit then
That's a ton of items they would have to remove. Another issue is that most these things have events tied to them. These events would probably get cut from our version which would cause a whine apocalypse after the 5th time it happens. This would also double their workload since they would have to work on 2 separate updates every week.

There's also the theory of it's the last "pure" Japanese game left, and they don't want to port it over out of pure xenophobia. If you want to believe this, go ahead.

It would have been fine if they ported it over in the first year or so. But now it's way too late to even consider it.

Aht Urgahn was my favorite endgame but I do wish they had figured out to buff skillchains back into being useful.

And hey WotG wasn't great, but before the level cap increase at least it didn't actively make the game any worse. Campaign was a fun alternative to idling.

My whole high school experience is a drunken haze because of that game.
Good times.

Isn't the guy who runs it a known sperg that DDOSes other pservers when his player count drops?

This is basically what I've wanted from video games all along

Fucking christ.

I think part of what makes PSO work is that it's pretty simple. You have to pay attention enough for it to engage you but you can space out enough that you don't get fatigued.

My friend just hit lvl 200 on that game. He still plays it online with a ton of people on PC. They had a little party for him even.
Still happy I got my GC copy of it

Tell your friend not to value his gear too much, they'll just delete it all eventually

3 was fun as fuck, if it had only come out a few years later when online gaming really took off on consoles it could have been a lot more successful.

only server worth playing on is ephinea

And? At least he can say he reached it. He's pretty happy about it

This. The glory days of MMO gaming.

Explain yourself.

The problem with 3 was that it came out when people just wanted Episode 3 of PSO...not a card game. As its own game, it wasn't bad. But it could have used a lot of refining.

>summer event
>not as many passworded games
>will never be deleted

>I guess what I really want is PSO May Cry.
So basically PSO2 then. Got it.

>will never be deleted
Sounds like Schthack in its prime.

Does it only have a summer event?

Because UltimaPSOBB has events nearly year round and they never delete anything.

But, I guess anything is better than shithack.

You're right about that, PSO was amazing for extended, chill dungeon crawling, but I have the itch for something more actiony.

ya there's events all the time, was just listing off the one happening right now

there's also like zero cheaters/hackers/etc and the admins and mods are super nice.

Haven't played in years, did schthack go down hill?
I know they were having trouble keeping hackers/dupers under control but otherwise things seemed alright.

>can pick your own section ID

Fucking sold.

They're commonly referred to as "shithack" on other pservers and the admin allegedly attacks these other pservers to remove competition.

>this thread giving me the itch again
I had some fun last time I played until my friend was retarded and got us banned from the private server we were on.

What server and what did he do?

>inb4 hacked in a red ring

I had fun playing it with my bro, but it SUCKED that the game never saved your progress unless you played SP. Fuck that. Never could beat it because we would have to start from Forest every fucking time.

The better sequel, PSU

Episode 3 had a fun core system, but the game was SLOW AS SHIT HOLY FUCK. Also

DICE
MOVE
SET
ACTION
DEFENSE
DRAW

Got old after a while.

He tried to cheat engine while the game was running.
A few days before we were talking about old games we played and when I brought PSO up he acted interested. I tried to talk him out of it because I know he absolutely hates any game with grinding but he insisted.

He always tries to cheat in any RPG or game with grinding if possible, multiplayer or singleplayer. Although he gets furious if he sees a cheater in an FPS.

I never play any of those games with him anymore, no matter how much he begs.

Weapons just being stats, the actual act of getting rare weapons, and game content being limited by the PS2 were such downers.
I still put like a month of my life into the game, but holy fuck were it's flaw so painful.

To me it was way better, there was more variety and content in everything. I played on 360 and jp pc and enjoyed every year it was up, never cancelled my account once on 360. RIP 2006-2012

Most rare weapons in PSO are just normal weapons with a higher number and a preset element.

PSOs best weapon is charge vulcans and then a multi hit weapon like a needle or sword with situational things like a frozen shooter or hell gun or j cutter. The PA system was brilliantly done and let you focus on a class completely to learn it inside out as well as offering lots of replayablity

Yeah but the ones that had unique effects were memorable, for me its spread needle.
But also then you had that once you got that rare it's yours, no problem.
PSU you not only needed to get the plan, but then the materials
Then your fucking droid had to not break it.
THEN your fucking droid had to not fuck up the element %.

Also US PC/PS2 had some hackers dupe the fuck out of meseta once and the GMs didn't do a good enough job cleaning it up, so prices were hella inflated sadly.

As I said, I still had overall a good time and I wish PSO2 had follow its footsteps and just fixed what was broken.

Fuck my droid, it broke the rarest set of double blades twice(around the time the de rol le reskin for falz came out)

I hop on Ephinea from time to time. I wish I could get passed the captcha for PSO2 though. I'd play that shit like crazy.

The spread needle is situational, an arrest or demons needle is better and charge arms is better for pure damage. Youre also forgetting that hit and good %s were needed to make a rare in pso worth using. Hit makes or breaks some weapons

Most of psu was collecting materials. Then after an event when there was crafting bonuses thats when you mass synth.

>us pc/ps2

The absolute worst version to play, zero population and died 2 years before 360 and japan

I wonder what will be done first: this games english patch or psu clementine

Soul Calibur
Bloody Roar
Advance Wars
Bomberman

Yeah things were dying around that de rol le reskin for the aforementioned meseta hack+they were sooooooo slow on updates.

>Would it be worth it to crank PSO 2?

The more you liked pso the more you would hate pso2. This is from someone who played since open beta with 1k hours and quit during a somewhat recent event (yamato ship).

PSO,PSP2i and PSZ were the best games of the online pso series.

PSP2i was fucking great too but playing in JP was too much for me.

I've played Zero enough to know that it was garbage.

Except without the GM's selling items and broken customs

They're gathering testers right now before the next public phase.

twitter.com/PSUClementine/status/779067060236214272

Nah, pso, psu, and psp2i are the best. If you played psp2 enough, 2i really isn't that hard to get into. Someone translated the entire script for the new story as well as all items and menus and another team is making a full english patch for it, even the DLC with all the awesome max attacks and other missions

Time Splitters
Metal Arms: Glitch In The System

It had some good music
youtube.com/watch?v=jeN6anFp5zU

I saw that, hopefully it goes smoothly. It was stable last time it was up but not enough was complete, but theyve made some big progress since then

Also this pic is awesome

I wish I could play MW2 without hackers.

You can play world at war and blops without hackers, they're BC on xbox one which means an influx of new players

tfw PSO was amazing, I remember some hacker blew my mind with a bunch of hacked items and navs and shit, even a Sonic Team badge that I used a couple times to get noobs to give me their stuff.

Then they made PSO2 some bullshit waifu sim

Love PSO. Even the DS version fucking rocked.

but if I had to choose, I'd be selfish and resurrect this with voice chat support .

I used to spend hours playing what I assumed were Japanese soccer moms (according to their mii's). So many tiny gems, lost in time ...

Monster Hunter, you pleb.

I'd love to sit in the casino again. Fuck I'd be happy to help make new content if the server ever got to that point.

I enjoyed psp2 but fucking dropped it as soon as I realized that certain rares couldn't be traded. Stupid as shit who thought that was a good idea?

The casino was up and available back when it was online. If you have any programming or game knowledge of how the game calculated weapon and PA %s against enemy stats, names, descriptions, grinding at different ranks etc then please feel free to to volunteer on the forum. I provided some data for some hunter PAs a while back because it was my main class. So...volunteer if you know some shit!

Sadly I'm still a tadpole at programming, but I'm pretty alright at making models, haven't done many effects though.
It's getting there though, one suicidal thought inducing step at a time.

The thing that killed the psp games to me was the chain system. That completely destroyed the hunter class and slowed the game down drastically. I didn't really like the pp system either but the dodge and block was cool. Shame about everything else

Why not just beat the piss easy dungeons solo first?

Too bad its insanely overpriced in ebay and shit

PSO 1 on DC was my fucking jam. I remember faking sick just to play once my parents left home. Many nights quickly turned into mornings. Couldn't play much during the day since we had one phone line and no broadband.

>right before official server death
>get dreamcast GameShark
>choose my favorite fonewearl character
>rush lobbies, basically shitting meseta as I run
>spamming lewd chat images with players

Still have my DC keyboard too. Brings back memories when I see it.

>dissing psz

(You)

I like Zero but really it was just a miniature version of PSO... And since any toaster laptop can run PSO, it felt kind of redundant

ha fuck i was browsing through the front page and i tought those were one of my (you)'s

fuck ya got me, good trolling sir

Is the Plus version worth the extra dough?

It just has a couple extra offline quests that were previously online only. You should be playing the PC version on a private server for free anyway

Yes, but I have friends I'd like to play couch co-op with.

Its not like theirs a better alternative
>play it on an emulator and you can only show off all the cool shit you find to yourself not to mention you can just hack in whatever the fuck you want so its less of an achievement and people wont bat an eye when you show it to them.
>play it on a private server and you can show your cool shit off but live with reality that one day the server will go down and you'll lose it all.

Hackers and griefers made people be too wary of strangers in PSO. Especially when the NOL exploit came out that could ruin your saved game by no fault of your own.

Then the fuckers made a Codebreaker code to let you break into password protected rooms.

if this was on ephinea PSO, you can backup your character data at any time.

so in the event that ephinea does ever shut down, you can just host your own server and use that same character data.

Was he emotionally crushed when it turned out PSU was a turd that Sega Japan were adamant on ruining for non-JP players?

PSU >>>> PSO

The only thing pso has over it is music

The only other changes to the Plus version besides what was mentioned was tighter security against online hackers (didn't change much anyway). So might as well just get the normal version.

>people still talk about PSO
>nobody talks about PSU

Enjoy that White Beast spam.

>one day the server will go down

Fucking when? The most popular pservers have been going for almost a decade now.

Is that supposed to be worse than TTF?

>mfw put hours into emulating this and randomly my gamecube controller starting only inputting the vertical axis on the l-stick

This, Pso2 over here is Sega's biggest fuck up and looking everything Ep4 brought is proof that they drove themselves into complete desperation to keep folks playing because japan's population isn't enough to keep that game afloat as well as give them time to come up with actual updates with huge impact. I think we will finally get it after they truly finish driving it to the ground with ep4

The only reason people talk about pso is because its the only one they played/nostalgia. Probably more nintendo kids shitting up another sega franchise, like they did with sonic. There was much more variety and things to do in PSU and the events were incredible

Yeah.....that's what happens when the server sees 0 content updates for fucking months.
God fucking damn it. I heard 360 was better but just....fuck man.

I certainly wouldn't mind a worldwide release of a PSO3, assuming that they do it well.

Reminder that the latest release of every Phantasy Star game is always the lowest point in the entire franchise that has finally killed the amazing series and from which the series will never recover.

>modern Sega

user...

>cast tricked into doing all the work
>cast looking for vast riches in boxes filled with garbage and 2mes at a time

Casts are truly the dumbest fuckers in the PSO universe.

>I think we will finally get it after they truly finish driving it to the ground with ep4
Not when dressing up your waifu is the only reason to play.

Its actually true with pso2 though, since psu and its sequels as well its characters were good

GunZ man,
also bf 2142 and bf2 are free now

It was true with PSU at the time as well. Hell, it was true with episodes 1-3 of PSO2 until episode 4 came out, since now they have a very interesting story and memorable characters that episode 4 ruined.

Alright, thanks.

I have followed every point of pso2s story and can't say I ever found it good or interesting. For me, PSU started slow but it was to establish the universe and characters. The online stories and later the stories in the PSP games provided great conclusions

>last real Phantasy Star was in 1994

Low point was reached long ago, it just keeps digging itself deeper.

Me and my friend played the shit out of the game by ourselves. Made it to 140 legit. Could never beat Ruins Ultimate boss. My main was a HuCAST and his main was a female Hunter.

I had a Fonwarl? that was OP as fuck and level 130. My first character was the male Force user because they describe him as the hardest and weakest character to use.

It was hilarious how we found out about this game.

>have a friend from school that knows more about video games than me
>shows me PSO and Tales of Symphonia
>tell my best friend about it when I see him again
>he says he literally just bought the game at gamestop because the cashier recommended it that same day

Was fucking mind blowing.

Those games sucked, real talk, no one played them

speak for yourself faggot

EVERYONE BACK THE FUCK UP!
BEST ID COMING THROUGH
why can't I hold all these booma claws

There's no best ID you fag.

But there are definitely worst IDs.

>name my MC my irl name
>ID is Pinkal
>for a HuCAST
>find techniques and magic shit all the time
>can't use any of it

JUST

Are we talking about how we discovered PSO now?

>play SA2
>wtf are these cubes on the moon????
>google
>what the fuck is a Phantasy Star

yellow, purple, skyly, redria, greenil are top tier

bluefull, whitll are medium

oran, pinkal, virdia are garbage

Skyly and Purplenum are tied for me
>sky has SJS
>real agito
>zanba
>easy red sword
>easy chainsawd
>s-reds arms so you can kick FOcucks to the curb
>monkey king bar and black king bar
>purp has psycho wand
>demonic fork
>that really it
every other id got cucked hardcore, literally nothing could compare to skyly

I was always somehow redria.

then you found good armor, units, and guns with the ocassional sword here and there. congrats

Does anyone here have a cool team on any of the private pso servers I can join and hang out on?

Redria might have been the GOAT ID.

It's not as good weapon-wise as other IDs, but you were the only ID who could get the best armor and units.

You could get drops that nobody else could and trade it off for all the other shit you needed.

I do but unfrotunately I dont play with Cred Forums people because 90% of the time they're gay, underage, or furries

I have no idea how I put so much time into this game as a kid. I played it again recently and was bored within a few hours. The 8 different stages and 10 different kinds of enemies get really dull really quickly.

PSZ was nothing like PSO. It had most of the negatives of PSU when people would stop complaining about anime (which it also had) for a second and nothing that made PSO good. From weapons being just ATP sticks and photons arts implemented way worse than in PSU, to classes having zero variety outside of their role and no weapon balance, and even to idiotic story and "soulless" (objectively) locations. You couldn't even talk to random players, since you either hook up via FCs, or are limited to a single shitty run with nothing but 10 preset phrases.

Man, that's too bad. I'm pretty laid back and fun but I can understand the caution. Anyway I can show ya I'm not?

Yeah it was pretty nice. I think the only time I didn't was my HuForce who was greenil I believe?
been probably 4 years honestly.

Lucky for you
I'm only into traps
Inv pls

Sorry but no. Just play on ephinea, youll find a team to play with fast there, the community is small and thus dependdent on each other

Youre worse than a fag