I remember doing 4 player couch co-op with my friends. I played this a lot. Leveled up a melee swinging Hunter (I think I only reached level 50 or something like that) and helped carry and power level my friends. I never had the broad band adapter for the GC so I never got to play this online. My only experience in the multiplayer realm was the couch co-op. The game does have a semi-active private server across the different consoles and I'm legitimately curious to check them out. Though the tedium around setting that up has prevented me so far. Not to mention the repetitive and simple game play. There is complexity in the game, but the moment to moment combat is simple regardless.

I tried having friends over recently for 4-player couch co-op and unsurprisingly it seemed like I was the only one engaged with it. So alas I had to continue solo. Not as satisfying because playing with friends makes any game, no matter how tedious and bad, more enjoyable. I think even the simple game play of this game would reinforce that. Where I could imagine people just logging on and chatting after school. Catching up, then maybe try to tackle the Dragon. Certainly is an interesting time in the early online gaming landscape. This game was innovative. You had significantly better action RPGs well before this game and even Everquest released well before it. So while this certainly didn't hold up to the standards of the best Online RPGs of it's time, this was the first foray for a lot of gamers. PCs were not as ubiquitous (my family had one, but it was cheap. Mostly there for my parents to write word docs or check emails) and in general more expensive than consoles. I had played Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot and Diablo 1 and 2 (all of which are objectively better games) before this, but I could only play those games at a friends' houses since my parents didn't have a PC up to snuff nor would they have paid for an online subscription anyways. So this was my first real multiplayer RPG (san online of course lol but I still had couch co-op) I could play at home. And at that age I of course loved Star Wars, so being able to swing around a light saber to slay a Dragon was fucking awesome, even if rudimentary.

The gameplay certainly hasn't aged like a fine wine. Early on you are very weak and will get pimp slapped to the ground over and over again by the basic enemies. Eventually, after getting better armor and raising your defense stat, you can get slapped without tumbling like a house of cards. But then you enter the next biome and alas the pimp slapping begins anew. The game has a constant sense of linear progression with moments of power spikes (finding a rare weapon) but that linear progression is VERY slow. I mean VERY slow. Beating the game once, you may end up close to level 20. Then you can unlock "Hard" mode, where you probably will need to grind for a bit to be able to beat the last boss. The max level is 200... I have no idea what the minimal amount of time is to reach that but I would guess well over 200 hours...

There isn't an efficient way to grind offline. Online apparently has a few quests the devs released to explicitly help you level. There are some quests that will spawn a lot of enemies which are good, but regardless your only option is to kill a metric fuck-ton of enemies. You are trying to make the entire planet extinct. The best strategy seems to be to rush to "Very hard" mode as soon as possible and grind there. The catch being that Dark Falz has an attack that will gate keep you from killing him because it can one-shot you unless your HP is high enough... From Hard Mode onward, final bosses (for Episode 1 and 2) will start gaining new phases. Dark Falz' phase 2 starts off with an undodgeable slash. Then he has a combo later where he flies out of your reach and casts a spell you cannot dodge that can also potentially one shot you... the only solution to this mechanic is having enough health to survive it... then have enough healing items to survive this attack multiple times while dealing enough damage to kill him... I suppose you could have a shit ton of "Scape Dolls" (they revive you after you die, but are used up in the process) but they are both rare and expensive.

I played as a Force because they aren't really gear dependent and have great AOE. The main downside is you also have very low HP. Thus making surviving these un-dodgeable powerful attacks a bigger headache. This game is all about grinding. What's a little frustrating about playing a Force is how you need to purchase higher level versions of your spells to power them up. While it's nice that spells get stronger both by you leveling up and by you finding/using higher level versions, what sucks is how rare high level versions of spells are... It's all driven by RNG which further perpetuates just how absurdly rare higher level spells are to acquire. Grind you must.

After hitting a wall on Dark Falz on Hard Mode I decided to try Episode 2 on Hard mode. I didn't really remember much about Episode 2, mostly because I played Episode 1 the most. There is a good reason for that... Episode 2 is a big spike in difficulty compared to Episode 1. Some of this difficulty is good. The first two biomes you encounter contain only enemies from the first Episode but mixed together in new ways. This makes previous enemies feel fresh given they are paired with enemies that were previously in different biomes. This does result in a less balanced and more challenging experience. In particular because drop rates felt very low, and the items that dropped also felt lower tiered despite the increased difficulty. I actually was constantly losing money trying to progress because the items and money I got while killing things was far less than the resources I had to spend to kill them. Thus I was constantly losing money. The bosses in these first two biomes are effectively re-worked versions of the first two bosses from Episode 1 but substantially harder. The new Dragon can paralyze you which is terrible for a caster because it means I can't heal until I cleanse the status effect! They are also very tanky and I almost ran out of resources. Both from healing and damaging.

So Episode 2 felt like a battle of attrition. I did slowly progress through though and eventually got to the final boss. Sadly, he had a mechanic in phase 2 that made me give up. For elemental damage, he randomly picks one that he isn't resistant to. Thus you are forced to figure out which element he is weak to and only use that. He switches which element this is in the fight as well. While that might not sound bad, one of the elements is called "Grants" (which I guess is holy?) and I still haven't found Grants even at level 1! It only drops in Episode 2 and Ruins 3 (the last level before Dark Falz). So while I think it's possible I could have killed this boss, I would have to get lucky that he never chose Grants as his weakness and I still couldn't get hit because he had an attack that could 1 shot me... But... I was now strong enough to kill Dark Falz! Sort of. I had to switch out my armor buff to give myself a little more HP... then I finally had enough HP to survive his un-dodgeable attacks and kill him! Very Hard unlocked and I'm level 42. I'm taking a break for now. One good thing about PSO is the gameplay is so rudimentary you can walk away for months or a year and not really be that lost getting back. In episode 1 there are only 4 biomes that you always need to progress through linearly to reach the boss. Once you hit hard mode, good items can start to drop. In addition, the amount of experience you get exponentially increases each time you go up in difficulty. Hence why you want to rush to Very Hard to significantly decrease the grind while also getting access to better loot tables.

I think the main plot in Episode 1 is worth experiencing. It may not be as grand or complex as a Final Fantasy game or as thought provoking as some of the best classic CRPGs, but it's still fun and interesting. It can have a tone that's all over the place though. For example, one quest you need to escort a fat girl to a location so she can lose weight for her wedding dress. I'm not saying this is a sensitive and progressive portrayal or anything but it was so ridiculously absurd it was hard not to appreciate it. There are other silly quests too, such as someone wanting you to go deep into a mine to buy cakes... for whatever reason deep in a hostile mine these triplet sisters decided to open a bakery lol Then in contrast to these silly quests, there are more interesting events that happen. Such as an android's missing master you help her search for. Or a little girls butler who has gone missing. Then the whole mystery of what happened to the first colony which is left pretty vague even in the end. You do realize they are all 100% dead though. It's decently well written and kept me engaged to see it to the end. Again it's nothing ground breaking or thought provoking but I'm a sucker for pulpy sci-fi and this did scratch that itch.

Episode 2 isn't great, mostly due to it's very poor balancing. But it did push the engine of the game to it's limits and easily features the most interesting enemy and environmental designs. If I return to PSO I will almost certainly skip Episode 2 though. You basically need to be very over leveled to enjoy it. It's nice to include a more challenging experience, I just don't think they accomplished difficulty in a satisfying way. Enemies have inflated health pools, do a ton of damage and can be awkward to fight in tight spaces.

I kind of hinted at some complexity in the game. That mostly revolves around some things that happen under the hood. Such as defense stats/levels vs enemy attacks to determine if you fall over like a house of cards. Then there's the entire MAG system. It's a complex mess that I won't even try to explain. There are lots of feeding charts. A ton of different Mags and a lot of variables that you need to juggle to get a specific MAG. I don't think it's a bad system but it's certainly archaic and not intuitive. It's also tedious. Every few minutes you can feed your mag. Thus you need to be constantly mindful of when you can feed your MAG to efficiently level it up. This is tedious and not fun. Not to mention further depletes your resources since you need to feed them to your MAG. The MAG does buff your strength which makes engaging with the mechanic very beneficial but nonetheless still very tedious.

Overall, this was a fun journey down memory lane. I might check out the online community down the road and see if that's fun but for now I need a break from the grind.