Phantasy Star Online & Phantasy Star Online Version 2 are for a lot of Dreamcast fans, the crown jewel on the late console, even eclipsing Yu Suzuki’s flawed epic, Shenmue. Combining a solid, lengthy (and addictive) single player campaign with an innovative (and even more addictive) online mode, excellent visuals and plenty of loot to collect made the game an instant hit worldwide. While the superior Game Cube version polished up elements and added some new content, the Xbox version cut off solo offline play for those without Xbox Live accounts ( a VERY foolish move by either Sega, Microsoft or both companies that hurt the game’s sales). Anyway, here are omake wallpapers from the Dreamcast PSO (above) and PSO II (below) discs. I love the artwork in these wallpapers and almost wish Sonic Team had decided to make both titles with a ‘cel-shaded’ look instead of what we ended up with.
The good news about PSO is it’s going to live again soon enough as Phantasy Star Online 2, currently in development with a 2012 release date. However, it looks as if this one will be Windows PC only (grrrr…) and there’s no concrete news to date of a definite release outside Japan. SEGAAAAAAA!!! Don’t neglect your dedicated PSO fan base on other platforms (and other countries) so much!
Whoops. I forgot to run these screens with the trailer the other day, so here you go. The demo is out now, so go play it and groove on the weirdness and crazy action taking place. The funny thing about the demo is thanks to the score in one section, you can tell if someone’s playing it if they’re blasting their TV too loud. As I said already, I really HOPE people “get” what CyberConnect2 is doing here in terms of presentation, as the game breaks a few rules and sets up a few new ones that work for the story it’s telling…
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 