Review: Phantasy Star Portable

I’ve often wondered what process game designers go through when putting a concept together, whether they go though a linear thought process or whether, like so many cynical online comics would have us believe, they throw a collection of cool buzzwords together and make that. Let’s assume the latter and have a go shall we.

Space, Anime, Girls, Guns, Monsters and Bikinis

Yup, that would pretty much explain where Phantasy Star Portable comes from and it’s sounding pretty good so far. Though the Phantasy Star series has been around since the good ole days of the Dreamcast, Phantasy Star Portable gave me my first experience with this series allowing me to approach it with a fresh pair of eyes. No previous hang-ups to carry forward and no rose tinted glasses from days gone by.

The storyline, such as it is, for Portable seems to carry on from the previous titles, certainly there are references to a history that isn’t fully explained. You start the game by creating a character, and at this point my hopes were high. The character creation screens are well done the system has depth and gives you real scope to create your own character, one that doesn’t feel like just a slightly tailored preset. There are several races to choose from ranging from humans to beasts, before you choose the class you wish to play. All the stereotypical classes are present from those specialising in Melee attacks to those preferring magical and ranged attacks. So far, so RPG and so good.

Stop shouting at me

As you launch into the game it becomes clear that you have just completed some form of basic training and are now a fully fledged member of the space marine style outfit known as GUARDIANS (yes the capitalisation is intentional and gets extremely annoying through the game). You are quickly introduced to Vivienne, a newly created Cast (essentially a pretty advanced humanoid robot) who will be your partner. Your first few missions, although story related, are really the standard getting to know your controls type missions.

Kill, Rinse, Repeat

Your first missions have pretty straightforward objectives, progress through a series of rooms where you kill everything in site, pick up the key that drops and open the door to the next area. Do this a couple of times and you will walk into a room with a big bad boss monster who you will dutifully obliterate and thus complete the mission. This is pretty straight forward standard stuff, but unfortunately it’s also the only stuff, that right there is what you will now be doing for the rest of the game, nothing changes.

Repetitive play style is forgivable when it’s done well, unfortunately here it isn’t. I found the combat an interesting mixture of far too easy and at the same time far too difficult. The difficulty, unfortunately, had nothing to do with the intentional complexities of the AI, but instead the more interesting and engaging fights between the player and the camera, or the entirely pointless lock-on system. Locking onto a target simply means that a red circle appears over their body, the camera doesn’t snap to them in any useful way and it can’t be used as an aide to strafing.

Killing them isn’t a problem, if only you could see them

Hang on, I know what your thinking – this is just me whining because they haven’t given me an auto aim, well no, I can live without auto aim but when you add the fact that camera control is done by using the same input as for movement, so to manoeuvre the camera in anything less than a wildly unpredictable 90 degree snap, requires you to stop moving. Are you stating to see my frustration now? No? Still dubious, okay….let’s now add in the fact that a number of bosses are airborne and fly rapidly in circles at the edge of your vision.

When you do finally manage to get the camera under control, combat itself basically boils down to bashing one button. As the game progresses you are encouraged to look at timing in order to string combos and increase you damage but the truth is mashing one button does just fine, and fiddly timing of the combos just gets annoying.

Nice house, shame about the flat interior

The saving grace here is that the environments in which you are fighting do look good. When out on a mission you will find yourself in full 3d environments with good colour and texture. Some of the areas are a little dark which can always be a little frustrating on a portable system designed to be played on the move. I usually do my PSP gaming on the train and there were times this was difficult to see. In direct contrast to the well rendered 3d environments of missions are the bland and boring 2d environments used everywhere else. Whether at the GUARDIAN HQ (I told you it gets annoying) or out on other worlds, all navigation is done by moving from dot to dot on a map. All conversations are depicted using cardboard cut-outs of the main characters in fixed poses, engaging it isn’t and the temptation to simply skip through them is hard to resist.

I found Phantasy Star Portable to be nothing other than a disappointment, it has redeeming features but too many flaws to make it enjoyable. In every area of the game is something that is either difficult to work with, frustrating or feels cheap and unfinished. What I had hoped to be a lively and engaging experience became a grind with no pay off. Re-running and repeating missions in order to get better and better gear only appeals to me if I have an engagement and investment in the game, it just wasn’t there.