Several months after the SEED is locked away and all is thought well, things are again amiss in the Gurhal System. Humans, Newmans, Beasts and CASTs have been banded together since the invasion of the SEED but now new problems are occurring and it’s your job as a GUARDIAN, newly graduated, to begin investigating.
The thing you will undoubtedly notice first about Phantasy Star Portable is how nice it looks. From the opening animations to the menu and story it’s just a great looking game. Though once you get into the game itself there are some less-than-spectacular facets of the graphics.Certainly not in the static, beautifully drawn environments of the GUARDIAN Base but in the character drawings which somehow ended up with squared off features in their arms and hair, but only in the dialog scenes. During the actual gameplay all of the character models look quite good for the PSP.
Tutorials take you out of the game and make you focus on the interface which generally could have been done far better. In general the interface is easy enough to use so that you wouldn’t really need all of them, and there are a fair amount of them in the game.
Another great piece of Phantasy Star Portable is
the killer soundtrack. Sure the battle sounds are a little lacking but the music and overall feeling of the audio really fit into the game and add to the experience. Some of the battle sounds do get repetitive and eventually you’ll find yourself tuning them out altogether. But there is an amazing amount of voice work in this game and they did an excellent job of providing subtitles for it all. The great thing was that it uses your chosen character name in the subtitles and cleverly skips it in the voice overs without making it obvious.
The gameplay however, is lacking. Every single mission I’ve played so far has been go run through this ’dungeon’ and kill these creatures. The missions are broken up with long-winded ’chat sessions’ with other NPCs that were meant to propel the story forward but really just made me want to find the skip button as fast as possible. Really, an after missions chat with an NPC should not take ten minutes, it’s just a useless waste of time.
