Game Stooge

REVIEW: Phantasy Star Zero (DS)

• Scribbled on December 21st, 2009 by Jordan Lund
• Filed in Nintendo DS, RPG, Reviews

Since 1988, there have been three groups of Phantasy Star games released. The original set, Phantasy Star I through IV, were traditional top-down Japanese RPGs. The Phantasy Star Online games launched in 2000 and brought the franchise into a 3D environment. Phantasy Star Universe, in 2006, added a more robust story mode and a complicated system for item creation and management. It’s a statement of the strength of the series that it has lasted 20 years, across 11 hardware platforms. I cannot calculate how many hundreds upon hundreds of hours I plugged into this series of games over the last two decades.

Getting two new Phantasy Star games this year, for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, was supposed to be a treat – and it was until the DS version actually came out.

Phantasy Star 0 (which I will abbreviate as PSZ to avoid confusion with PSO/PSU – Phantasy Star Online/Universe) carves out a new path for itself, using a story mode similar to PSU. With a completely new setting and characters, it could have been interesting. Unfortunately everything about the game feels cut down to meet the limitations of the DS.

The character creation screen (attached) has about 1/2 to 1/3rd as many options as any PS game since it jumped to the 3D era. Your character races are limited as well, having the traditional Human, Newman and Cast and eliminating the Beast race introduced in PSU. The game also loses the higher end mixed classes as well limiting players to simply Force, Ranger and Hunter. All told between the 3 races, 2 genders and 3 classes there are 14 different starting characters to choose from. (Casts can’t be Forces and Newmen can’t be Rangers.)

Graphically, the game features anime style cut scenes that are very well done and reminiscent of the classic Lunar series for Sega CD and Playstation 1. In fact, Toshiyuki Kubooka did the character designs for both games. The in game graphics, though, are a jagged, muddy mess. Imagine what PSO would have looked like on the Sega Saturn. That’s PSZ. This could have been forgiven if the gameplay were decent, but there are huge problems with that as well.

Playing a game in 3D on consoles is very much dependent on an analog stick and the Phantasy Star games are no different. Unfortunately, the DS does not have one and the difficulty in control becomes apparent instantly. It’s hard to navigate the town much less line up attacks properly on enemies. Adding to the difficulty is the cramped layout of the controls on the DS. In a traditional PS game you use three of the four face buttons for actions or items and by squeezing the right hand trigger you can access another three. You can also re-center the camera and lock on to enemies with the left trigger. In combat, many times this means holding both triggers, manipulating the D-pad and using 3 of the 4 face buttons all at the same time.

Technically, this is possible on the DS. Technically. If your hands are above a certain size however, it’s very hard to hold down the triggers and access all of the face buttons easily. After about an hour, I actually had hand cramps, something that hasn’t happened to me in a game in years. It would have been easy to fix, either allowing the user to swap the right and left trigger functions or turn the right trigger into a toggle, one click for on and one for off. Neither of those choices are available.

Several play mechanics are also broken in the game. When your character dies – and this happens often at early levels – you are teleported back to town with 1 hit point. In prior games this would put you in the town hospital and they would revive you automatically, and the heaviest penalty would be that all accumulated money and your active weapon were left on the field for you to retrieve. Unfortunately, in PSZ there’s no hospital in the town to heal you, so you have to either use items and buy more, use a technique to heal (Casts can’t do this) and use items to restore your PP or wait for your PP to recover naturally.

When you return to the field, you pick up where you left off. If you died in a boss fight, then you return immediately to the boss fight, only with fewer items than you had before because you had to heal in the town and you don’t have the opportunity to replenish by going through the level up to the boss fight. The only way I’ve found around this is to quit the active quest and level up separately and re-attempting.

Another example of how little thought was put into this game are the map markers. When adventuring around the world is grouped up of small “rooms” and the doors to each are locked until you clear all the beasties. The game puts markers on each door to let you know which rooms you have cleared and which are still to be done, so you can’t lose your way and accidentally back track. Makes perfect sense, except that rooms you’ve cleared are marked with green icons and rooms you haven’t cleared are gray. Now, forgetting the computer logic of the last 30 years where “grayed out” means “you don’t have to do that”, I would be OK transposing colors in my head and following the gray path instead of the green path – until you look at the map on the bottom screen and realize they’re using green and red to show unlocked and locked doors.

The map itself is an exercise in laziness. In prior games you could open a full map and see the maze of rooms or caves you’ve traversed so far. Doing so in PSZ gives you a grid of blocks where each block represents a room you’ve been in and colored markers on the lines between each block represent the doors. You will have absolutely no idea of the shape of each room or how each interrelates to one another.

As with prior games, PSZ does not pause while you’re in the menu system. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a big deal – previously you could still move around and evade attacks while the menus were open. Not so in PSZ. In their infinite wisdom, Sega decided to freeze your character in place as soon as you open the menu window, which means if you attempt to do this in combat you will get killed. This makes it very hard to use items not assigned to the face buttons or to swap out functions once one has been emptied. The easiest solution to this problem would have been to allow players to continue moving the character with the D-Pad and use the menu system with a stylus on the bottom screen. This work-around took me all of about, oh, 20 seconds to think up. Apparently, the designers couldn’t be bothered to put that level of thought into the game.

In the end, Phantasy Star Zero is plagued with the limits of the Nintendo DS and suffers from bad conception and design. The story is nice, the anime cut scenes are nice and that’s why I give it one star instead of absolutely zero. Hopefully we will get a version that’s actually playable on a more advanced system sometime in the future. Until then, though, if you need a portable Phantasy Star fix, stick with the current PSP version or Phantasy Star Portable 2 which is already available in Japan and due stateside sometime next year. It would seem the Japanese audience feels similarly. Phantasy Star Portable sold over 300,000 copies in it’s first week of release, Portable 2 sold nearly that many. Phantasy Star Zero? Less than 90,000.