Rawr.

[Junon]

I cuncur with the above poster when it comes to the customization and photon arts. Really... the game's story even refers to inner harmony between the races (for the most part), so adding in race-dependant clothing and such would be pretty stupid considering the story itself.

Just turn the Frame Skip down to 1 if you have it set to 0, and don't use 1024x768, use 800x600. Those two issues I find have the biggest effect on how smoothly the game runs... increasing my resolution causes the game to crawl on my Lappy, and setting the frame skip to 0 causes it to crawl a fair bit too. Resolution has by far the biggest impact on how smoothly the game runs, and frame skip is the second most demanding. I can barely see the difference between resolutions anyways, so do yourself a favour and turn it down a little bit. The graphics are fine, you just need to not run it at the absolute maximum.

Why shouldnt I be able to run it in maximum? I have a PC that should be able to run it in full mode - thats why I spent alot of money purchasing a powerful PC afterall. Poor programming/Port of the game is no excuse. Although I have seen the post on the official PSU Boards that they will be looking to fix this issue, so for now disregard this comment.

Who cares? PSO has significantly worse graphics yet you still enjoy it. Games aren't about flashy graphics as long as the gameplay is fun. If graphics is all one cares about, why go for a game designed for the PS2? You saw how long it took for PSU to come out, did you honestly want to wait an extra year or two just so they could revamp all the graphical coding and textues and models just to give you more eye-candy? I know I wouldn't want to.

As for the CCA comment... the only area I could consider under-detailed was the Raffon Meadows... but it's the first area, so it doesn't really matter too much. The areas are gorgeous in their own right and realistic (that's important. ). Also... you've been playing PSO how long? A bias is bound to develop from that causing you to immediately turn your nose down at anything trying to upstage your old favourite... it's human nature.

Apolgies, I have perhaps not explained my point correctly. The graphics aren't bad, infact some of it is rather nice. But I mean I was a little dissapointed with the design of the levels. In my mention of CCA in Episode II, its the amount of detail that went into it that I loved, such as the water effects, how you went from inside the jungle to the top of the huge waterfall, the lush huge open beach and the view from the mountains etc... I have yet to see something as vissualy impressive on the whole as this in PSU. But mostly so far, I havent found the gameplay to be particularly "Fun" either.

Although I will admit, there are some areas which I have not visited, but from what I have seen so far, there hasn't been a particular place which has made me go "Wow!".

Also I will admit to perhaps suffering from nostalgia, having played PSO from the Dreamcast days, I still hold PSO in high regard as an online video game. I haven't thrown in the towel for PSU yet, I am just awaiting the patch, which should hopefully address some of my concerns.

The new menu for weapons and items is actually very very good... IF you have a gamepad... it's a bit of a nuicense since a keyboard only allows you to hold so many buttons at once. PSU cannot be fully experienced with a keyboard, it's just not meant to be. I don't like mouse controls anyways for a game like this, they're more clumsy than the keyboard. XD

One further comment about the menu... I find 6 slots to be too few for items, if there were 10 or so, I'd be satisfied... but other than that, I highly prefer the new menu over the old one since I'm much less likely to activate something I didn't want to, and when I bring up the menu I KNOW what's going to be there... on PSO it was kinda ify due to having to mess around in the menu while getting pummeled, and it was still a bit slow.

After I had first played PSU for about 5 minutes, I thought "Damn, I need a Gamepad". But why release a game on PC and not take full advantage of the peripherals that are available on it, namely; the mouse! I wish you could set Mates/Moon Atomizers to number 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 etc, as with PSO:BB. I'm sure I can get used to it with time. However, I still feel that it is very un-user-friendly. I think people coming into this game will have a much harder time getting to grips with the controls, than that of people who have played PSO in the past - They should have taken this into consideration when designing the game.

Definitely stuck on the "nostalgia". What your probably not used to hearing is beautiful, real, orchestrated music within a Phantasy Star soundtrack, instead of the synthesized stuff you're used to from PSO. The music itself is beautiful in every right, with each planet having a "personality" of sorts for its type of musical scores. The soundtrack shows obvious effort and is one of the best soundtracks I've heard in a long, long time. It's impressed me with every area I've gone into, and quite frankly, I find it miles better than the old PSO soundtrack.

As for the menus... Sega might've went just a wee bit too far with trying to compress all the in-game menu sizes. They're slightly clumsy, but are easy to get used to after a bit of playing. If I had one more button on my gamepad it'd be perfect though. It's just that sub-menu within the Character Data menu that I don't like very much.

In summary... try and push your PSO bias aside when picking up PSU... the game's different for a reason, and it is very enjoyable if you can toss aside your old preferences and biases. I may not have experienced online play yet, but my personal opinion on it is wait a bit. Online's rather far behind offline mode, so it'll be more fun when there's more to do.

The main cons of the game... the need for a constant internet connection even to play offline, that's just stupid, and it's not going to do any good other than making people angry... second, there's not enough offline play value. I had pretty well done everything after around 50 hours of offline play... that's not good, at all... the basic story of a lot of RPGs nowadays takes 50+ hours to finish without doing very many side-quests... Sega focused a bit too much on network mode and should've added a lot more on to the story and extra modes.

EDIT:

I don't know about you... but I'd rather not learn ridiculous button combinations just so I can dance and prance around like a lunatic waving a weapon in obscene combos. This is a Phantasy Star game... not Street Fighter with shiny weapons.

Not as such ridiculous combinations, and something as complex as Street Fighter. But perhaps, a happy medium. Such as being able to use 3 Photon Arts Per weapon and stringing those together in succession?

I dunno, perhaps I was hoping for too much from this game...? The issues I have with the game are mostly negligible, and can most likely be fixed through patching and updates. E.G; Graphics fix, more Photon Arts and more Clothes. But why should I have to wait for it to be fixed? The game should come ready, 100% completed - not to be worked on after release.

Also, without causing offense, I dont think you are able to fully comment on the playability of the game entirely, as you have not experienced online play - the main aspect of the game.

But, as I said earlier, I will be coming back again to PSU after the patch and try to experience the game in it's absolute entirety before I decide if I am going to play it long term or not.