This game barely fits even the criteria of ‘game was new to me in 2023’ but I had so much I wanted to say about my experience playing Phantasy Star Online this time around that I’m making this. First off, if you’re interested in trying the game out I cannot recommend the Ephinea private server ( https://ephinea.pioneer2.net/ ) enough. It comes with many community features and other small quality of life changes that make the act of playing the game pleasant without heavily changing the core experience.
PSO is one of my all time favorite games, there's nothing that can match it’s aesthetic, nothing that outdoes it's sort of science fiction look. The coolest looking characters with the coolest looking weapons fighting cool monsters while listening to an all timer soundtrack. Playing this again was just refreshing to me, it felt good to just play a game that's unafraid of being purely about the experience of grinding levels on a character. That's the point of the game, you just wanna level up and get stronger and find cool new thing to make yourself even stronger and cooler over and over until satisfied. After playing so much of this game as a kid entirely offline on my Gamecube, i cannot be thankful enough that there's been a strong and dedicated fan community keeping this game i love alive through fan made and maintained private servers. They are the true heroes.
Revisiting the game this time around has in particular made me discover just how cool and robust the auto chat messaging function is. It was something I either entirely ignored or just used as a means to avoid traps due to opening a menu will cause your character to keep running through traps instead of taking to a defensive walk state. This time however, I just started toying with it and discovered there's just so much to it. The auto messenger is surprisingly dynamic, it’ll react to other auto messages people sent before, floating appropriate responses to the top of the menu and react to where you are in the game. It just has such a wide variety of topics to pick from on and off topic from the game including stuff like hobbies and other real world chit chat subjects. Looking at this feature again in addition to thinking about this just simply incredible promotional video for the game ( https://youtu.be/dyEnJCgTZds?feature=shared ) really solidifies a sort of feeling the game had in feeling like they were really working on something that was going to be the future of games. In some ways they absolutely were, this game was a major influence for other online action RPGs like Monster Hunter and I always felt like Destiny took a lot of inspiration from it as well. The auto message feature (along with the simple symbol chat) just feel like they were coming from an era of ambition and wonder about just how big a game for ‘the whole world’ could be and trying to develop for that whole world.
I also had so much fun raising mags this time, even more than usual! I started raising multiple at a time and keeping notes on the proper way to raising my mag to be the special evolved form. I was so happy to find out just by chance that the player ID I had was the exact right one I needed to make a sato mag, my favorite, non gimmick mag design in the game. Just a funny little cat/fox guy with a huge tail, everybody loves sato! This time around I found myself continually wanting to just keep raising mags and trying out different good mag builds. Not even to really use them even, I’ll probably give them to friends or trade them off for goodies or whatever but it’s just a lot of fun to raise them. Mags being a way to start at level one feeling powerful from either being easily shared from another character has been one of my favorite things in this game. Its such a cool way to start a new character or player out feeling strong that now feels like you're cheating due to how common it is for games to entirely lock down player trading. PSO instead having trading be almost entirely unrestricted feels so cool and communally positive, you can just share cool items you found and don't need instead of being restricted to some intended player progression concept. I always wonder why stuff like mag raising or Sonic Adventure’s chao garden don’t show up in games more often, they’re always a feature that feel like they’re universally beloved and yet just feel like they don’t show up in games often.
The biggest thing I took away from revisiting one of my favorite games was Clown. I started playing this again because I just really needed to walk around Pioneer 2 for a drawing reference which then turned into me making a whole new character and quickly becoming enamored with the game all over again. I’ve never played as a FOnewearl (force class, Newman girl) before so I wanted to try something different and I named them Clown because simply that's what my brother and I thought they looked like when we were kids. I gave them big round glasses and after a short while I found myself falling in love with leveling Clown, the biggest doofus in Pioneer 2.
After that I decided to doodle Clown out of enjoying their design and needing a daily drawing for that day. It’s a really fun design! I love character with big goofy glasses, they’re super expressive and lend themselves well to someone who wear their emotions on their sleeves. So I just started drawing Clown a bunch and sort of nailing down a consistent design for them, what colors to use and some small general preferential modifications to the design from their original PSO design. So, for the first time I was successful in making an ‘original character’ I actually liked and wanted to draw in other things. I love Clown, everyone loves Clown, the people can’t get enough of that Clown! I should really draw more Clown…
This was especially significant to me because something that’s always been bothering me with my art is that I’m doing way too much fan art, I’m super worried my art has very little ‘me’ to them and everything I do is just recreations of someone else’s ideas. Then, on the other hand putting myself out in such a vulnerable way as to share completely original concepts has and still does scare me into paralysis. Clown has been important to me in sort of just sort of taking a baby step into this whole thing, something I really hope to push myself into more and more over time. I have some ideas on some stuff I want to try this year but ideas are cheap and action is scary so we’ll see if you’ll actually see some of it eventually.
I’m hoping that I will some day be able to more comfortably put myself out there with my art and I’m realizing that with the use of create a character functions in games has been the most consistent way for me to start to express myself in a way. Clown has been my most obvious example of this, but I’ve also been really fond of the character I made in Final Fantasy 14, a hrothgar that I made to look like an old man with a big bushy beard and also small golden round glasses. I feel like I’m at my best when I’m not entirely alone in creative stuff, I need bounce off of someone or something else, I’m funnier when I get to riff and joke with someone else. People who can entirely work off of their own intuitions are just so impressive to me, it’s like a super power I don’t know if I’ll ever have.
Hey, if you’re actually reading all this writing at this point, behind the ‘read more’ button, thank you. I figure most people are just gonna look at the picture and be on their way and for the most part that's the intention but its been really nice writing out my thoughts more and even hearing some people talk to me about it in turn. I’ve had a bit of a hard time starting to write this stuff but more and more after each of these posts I’ve become a bit more confident in organizing my thoughts and getting words out correctly. This is admittedly too much for someone to reasonably read about some silly 'favorite games list' so if you’ve cared enough to keep going to this point, thank you so much. You see that stuff up there? Wow! I’m actually saying self conscious thoughts and concerns about things I’ll maybe never fully address out loud! Feed that to your mag to give them some Defense and Magic points!
Revisiting PSO again has been a really positive experience for myself as both a means of reaffirming my lifelong love for this game as well as creating new reasons as to why I should feel passionate for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop loving this game and I hope I never a reason to stop. This game to me has some of the best aesthetic and visual identity in the entire medium, nothing will ever top its sense of place to me. I wish I could live somewhere as cool as Pioneer 2 and hang out with cool robots and space wizards all day talkin’ about what cool red boxes they found or how cute rag rappies are. I turned the game on again recently for drawing reference purposes and I totally want to play some more again.
