There are quite a number of role playing games on the Playstation Portable, some are sublime, some are sub-par. Phantasy Star Portable takes a much beloved RPG franchise and brings it to the little screen. This Japanese style RPG is set far in the future, in a distant galaxy, where humans have created 3 other races that they peacefully co-exist with after many racially driven struggles. Threatening this happy little family is an alien infection known as the Seed that corrupts life to its purposes.

You begin the game as a newly trained recruit in a privatized police corps known as GUARDIANS and have to take on the Seed as it infects the space station and surrounding worlds in your planetary system.

Gameplay

The game starts out as a typical RPG having you pick between 4 races that follow the staple archetypes: humans (middle of the road), Casts (androids that are better suited to long range weapons), Beasts (genetically altered and suited to melee attacks) and the Neumans (genetically altered and suited to magical attacks). Once you have picked a race there are a  vast number of options to choose from while customizing the visual appearance of your character. While impressive this is deemed redundant by the poor visual quality of the game (please see Graphics section).

Initially there are three battle types to choose from which again follow the traditional RPG paradigm: the melee fighter, the long ranged weapon user and the magic user. What is interesting is that you can switch between battle types for a certain amount of the games’ currency and as you level up you can level up each battle type separately. This allows you to switch between different gameplay styles which increases variety. As you proceed further 3 different hybrid classes become available once you meet certain level requirements in the 3 battle classes. Specializing in different battle types opens up different combat abilities and weapon skills.

This does offer a great deal of flexibility and it would be rather interesting if the gameplay wasn’t so tedious. The quests are very repetitive and the game rewards grinding, grinding and more grinding. There is a lot of interesting loot available if you grind long enough to find it but grinding is rather dull and isn’t engaging enough to keep interest. Horrible party AI hurts gameplay significantly, where party members are not pro-active and wait to attack the enemy long after they should engage and party healers heal far too late. For example, I had engaged enemy creatures with my attacks and killed 3 of the 5 before the party AI joined the fray. Navigating the menu to buff weapons was overly complex and convoluted that the player is pulled out of the action completely. Phantasy Star Portable does have a hotkey/macro system known as the action palette that does help streamline gameplay but setting up this palette is a frustrating chore.

Many RPG’s have you explore cities/home areas to reach stores or trainers but Phantasy Star Portable has done away with this in favour of a rather aggravating and convoluted menu system superimposed over a background painting of the setting you are in. Instead of moving your character to a store you have to move the cursor around to various icons that represent the stores. This lessens immersion in the world and points toward low end production values
 
Graphics & Audio

Graphically Phantasy Star Portable is somewhat of a disappointment. The level designs are repetitive, textures are bland, colours are limited and the resolution on screen is very low giving the action a very grainy feel. At the beginning of the game you are encouraged to customize your character but due to the resolution all the effort put into creation is lost because the details are difficult to see. Low resolution also hurt the creature design as it is difficult to make out any significant features on them.
The in-game minimap suffers from horrible pop-in and is visibly behind the on screen action. Pop-in is very prevalent during gameplay as well. Some of the spell and blaster effects are colourful but rather simplistic. This game does not hold up at all to other RPG’s such as Final Fantasy: Crisis Core. On the plus side though, some of the animation are well done and fluid.
The story is presented via JRPG style paintings of the character with text overlaid on top of the art (there is voice acting but see the Audio section for more on that) which is well done but cinematics would have been much more immersive.

Conclusion

Overall, weak production values hurt a game that had a lot of potential. Hardcore RPG fans will find something to enjoy but won’t get overly excited about it, while the average gamer will find this game to be interesting at first and then the tedium will set in. Clearly, if you like RPGs this is worth a try but otherwise I would pass on this one.