Phantasy Star Online was one of the most fun gaming experiences of my life and made me a Sega Dreamcast defender for life.
As you get older, if you’re a certain type of person, you and most likely everyone in your generation will reach the correct numbers of years past the prime of something you love that makes you want to look back and get a piece of what you once had. The collectible market is based on this concept. We used to call it a midlife crisis when we were more honest about it.
Often this leads us to the beginnings and origins of what we love and for PSO fans, not merely Phantasy Star proper, it’s probably this trial edition released for the aforementioned Dreamcast in Japan.
The “O” in PSO is important. There is no doubt that Phantasy Star had a legacy of several games before going online and are very well-liked RPG with a science fantasy backdrop that I think screams familiar to anyone who knows what JRPGS are.
PSO represented a fairly dramatic shift as it is more of a hack/slash combat-orientated game but it was more significant to me because it was online on a console.
This was the era of online gaming where if you were logged in people couldn’t call your house because even if you would answer and give up the mic to your roommate you were using the phone line. I recall the thrill of logging on and seeing if our buddy Bojangles was on and he acquired extra Egg Blasters for me and my roommate.
It seems odd we’d purchase things to remind us of such times, even more, to offer visual evidence of our actions.
