Remember playing Phantasy Star Online back in the Dreamcast era when Sega brought addictive loot-mongering with friends across the country to consoles? Remember finally getting that rare loot drop after an epic battle, cultivating your mag, and wrestling with the camera? No? Well Phantasy Star Zero for the Nintendo DS, a hack-and-slash action role-playing game with loot drops galore, offers a remarkably faithful representation of what you missed out on--warts and all.
Animated and voice-acted cutscenes augment key events in the game, such as the thrashing you're about to receive from this dragon.
Phantasy Star Zero places you in the role of a "hunter," a for-hire warrior carrying out missions for the city in which you reside and generally protecting its denizens. You choose from one of three main races: humans, the elflike newmans, and the androidlike CASTs. Each race boasts proficiencies in different offensive and defensive areas. Once you confirm your race, you select further specialization in melee combat, ranged combat, and spell casting. With the town acting as your central hub where you can access different combat environments, you build up your character's abilities and inventory through the single-player story mode in preparation for good old-fashioned multiplayer loot runs.
In fact, you might be tempted to skip single-player altogether and jump right online because when you're playing alone, some of the game's problems are more noticeable. Missions take you across seven different environments, with some missions requiring you to revisit areas you've already seen. This isn't a problem in and of itself. However, even though the missions ask you to do different things--hunt down monsters, find plants, and escort citizens--the progression is the same every time. You'll call your band of merry hunters to arms, slog through randomly generated combat areas, collect randomly placed keycards to open gates, and ultimately fight a boss battle consisting of one huge enemy or several lesser enemies. If a mission dictates that you have to revisit an area, you end up fighting--you guessed it--the same boss monster(s) you already beat. Even when one late mission teases a little variety by asking you to track down imposters, you never actually interact with them; the only time you see them is during talking-head dialogue scenes.
Combat is decent for the most part, but if you're a discerning Phantasy Star veteran, you'll immediately notice--even with quicker weapons, such as daggers and short swords---that it feels more sluggish than in the past. You can pull off three-hit combinations with a mixture of weak and heavy attacks, but more often than not, even weak strikes come with a slight but noticeable windup. You also have to time your button presses within a very small window to successfully pull off a combo, though in general, the lesser enemies aren't too difficult to take down. The end result is approachable combat that does feel satisfying when you connect, but it lacks the fluidity of every action-oriented Phantasy Star before it, up to and including the recently released Phantasy Star Portable for the PSP.
If you're lucky, you'll snag a big sword like this. Or you can settle for a parasol.
Navigation doesn't feel as elegant as it could either, for a number of reasons. Most of the time, the camera is zoomed in a bit too closely to provide you an effective view of the battlefield: Enemies in your periphery are almost impossible to see. Turning to see enemies and objects of interest requires constant massaging of the L shoulder button to re-center your viewpoint. There's the option to hold down the X face button, which allows you to swivel the camera independent of your movement, but this is only really useful once you've cleared an area of enemies because your right thumb isn't available for combat commands. The camera does zoom out and up a little to make some boss battles easily manageable, but had this angle been used throughout the game, the clunky camera mechanics would be far less of an annoyance.
