Phantasy Star Zero: Some Early Impressions

For the last week or so I've been playing some Phantasy Star Zero, and it's a pretty fun little distraction. It has plenty of loot to hunt down, mags to grow, interesting characters, and it's really good for some pick up and play action. About the only thing that I really don't like about it is that the camera is kind of blah. I'm also terrible at using spears, but that's more me than the game.

Anyway, after playing for about seven hours, so far so good. I'm playing as a Newman right now, and their story is pretty neat. It means I have to talk a fair bit with Sarisa because we're in cahoots as we investigate the humans, and complete our people's mission. It seems a straightforward story so far, but the characters bring a lot to the table. They're darn charming. I've spent most of my time adventuring with Kai and Sarisa, and like them quite a bit. Kai is very easy going, with only a very subtle bit of cockiness to him. He seems the sort that would be fun to hang out with.  Meanwhile, Sarisa is very kind and just wants to do her best to contribute to the team. It's hard not to like her.

It's actually pretty hard
to find decent screenshots
for this game. >_<

I've spent a lot of my time just wandering around different zones as they're opened up, smacking around monsters and collecting loot. There have been a few useful items that I've found in my travels but most of them have either been used to feed my mag so it can grow big and strong, or sold off at the market for profit. It makes for a nice way to kill 15 or 20 minutes here and there while still being productive in the game. I can see this somewhat breaking the experience, though, because my character has leveled up quite a bit by doing this, and some of the recent bosses I've faced seemed a little on the easy side. I can't see this changing, though, unless I hold off on farming, but it's what I enjoy most about the game, so I'll need to somehow reconcile having easy bosses to accommodate the enjoyment I get from mindlessly smashing monsters.

In any case, I've enjoyed the game quite a bit up to this point. My character has a snazzy claw that she's using now to tear up monsters, and her mag is slowly getting stronger. I'll need to consult a guide to see how I want to go about evolving the thing, though. Right now it allows for a strong charge attack, but it looks like there a bunch of other interesting attacks available that could be worth exploring. In a lot of ways, it feels like I'm playing a portable PSO on the DS. Now if only the handheld supported WPA so that I could actually try the game online...

7th Dragon: Will We Ever See It in the West?

I first saw this game during a trip
to Japan a few years ago, and have
been fascinated with it ever since.

Sega is one of those companies that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads with some of the business decisions that it makes. I'm not going to start talking about all of them here because that would take a massive blog post unto itself, but I do want to look at some of their recent choices, or I guess lack of choices, in games that they've localized for the West. Really, I just want to rant a bit about how 7th Dragon has never seen a release outside of Japan because it seems like such a waste.

I know it's a bit of a niche game, but it's not like companies such as Atlus, XSEED, and NIS America haven't found ways to turn a profit on such games. Why can't Sega find a way to do the same? From what I've read, some publishers seem to think that the game was too challenging for a Western market. This seems silly, and like an excuse one would have heard in the early 90s as to why a game wasn't coming out here. There are plenty of people who like tough games here, so I find it difficult to believe that challenge would be an issue. According to Hardcore Gaming 101, there may also have been tensions between Kazuya Niinou and Atlus, which prevented Atlus from localizing the game for the West, which is a shame if it's true.

There was a futuristic sequel on the PSP that we never got either.

I'm not going to describe the game in detail here, there's a decent Wikipedia page discussing it, and an absolutely fantastic article describing the RPG at Hardcore Gaming 101, so check those sites out if you want to learn more about the game. I'll just say that it's a really snazzy overhead RPG with a bit of a who's who of JRPG developers involved with it (Kazuya Niinou of Etrian Odyssey fame, Reiko Kodama of Phantasy Star and Skies of Arcadia, and composer Yuzo Koshiro).

It's probably too late to hope for the DS game to come our way in anything other than a fan made English patch (probably the same for the PSP game), but with recent news that a new install is being shown in an upcoming Famitsu, it's gotten me thinking about the series again, and what a shame it is that it never came to the West. Sad Jejun is sad.