Real talk, though, Phantasy Star Online has such a clever solution for telling the main story in a multiplayer game without breaking up the flow of the game, and I'm sad that all the future games in the series did away with that and made the entire story locked behind a singleplayer mode with cutscenes. Which, uh, wasn't helped by all the later Phantasy Star games having impressively dogshit stories that were a slog to get through.
It's also kind of a shame that they dropped the way attacks in PSO worked. The choice between faster, more accurate attacks and stronger, slower, less accurate attacks was simple but effective, and the rhythm of the attacks really helped amplify how chunky and satisfying each hit was. They did eventually implement Just Attacks in PSU and on, but it's not really the same.
For all it's problems, PSO did so much right, and it feels like later Phantasy Star games learned nothing from it beyond "sci-fantasy space Diablo good".