It's a... card game

When this game was first announced, many couldn’t believe that Sonic Team would do something like this. The state Sega are in, there is probably never going to be another Phantasy Star Online. And rather than make a third one, they chose to spend time making a spin off card game. To me and many PSO fans the news came as a complete waste of potential.
Oh course, it had the words “Phantasy Star Online” in the title, and in addition there is no extra online fees for existing players of Episode 2, so we all decided to buy it anyway, even if just to try it for a second. Upon hearing that the story was supposedly much more detailed than the previous two, we expected that the offline mode might be worth playing, even if we never really went online.

Gameplay

Now that Episode 3 has seen a US release and is in our hands, we can see what it really is. And boy, it’s nothing like we expected.
Despite the emphasis on cards, it’s really a strategy game, the cards merely being and add-on that increases the tactical depth. The game takes place on a (usually rectangular) board, divided up into squares. Players place their “cards” on the squares. Play as a hunter, though, and you can only have your character on the board, however if you choose to play as the Arkz then you can place monsters around the board as well.
Gameplay is now turn based, each side going through Dice, Set, Move, Action and Draw phases.
The in the dice phase, you roll dice to decide how many actions you can do in the Set, Move and Action phases. In the Set phase, you can equip weapons (Hunters) or summon monsters (Arkz). The move phase is pretty obvious, this is where you move your pieces around the board. And finally the action turn is when you can order your pieces to attack anything in range.
In the draw phase, you can throw away cards in your hand that you don’t want. This is where the games differs from normal strategy games slightly. Everything from equipable items, summon monsters, techniques, action cards that alter the properties of attacks, and assist cards that cause various effects, come in the form of cards. Players have a deck of 30 of them, which they can make from the cards that they have collected. However, they can only choose form 5 per turn, which are randomly dealt to their hand. It’s the players’ choice of cards which adds so much depth and tactics to the game, which would otherwise be extremely basic.

So, how does a turn based game play online? Amazingly, it actually plays well. Sonic Team have done the amazing thing of actually making a turn based game that is fun to play online. You might think that it would get annoying waiting for your opponent to make their move. However, during the action phase you still have to do something in that you need to choose which defence cards you will pick to try and stop your opponent’s attacks. And even when you’re waiting, it’s a great opportunity to stop playing and talk to your team-mate, which you can’t really do whilst playing due to the time limit.

Now, for the bad side of the game. It is a fun game, however like the other PSO games it also has many flaws, and unfortunately they run much deeper in this incarnation, so this is going to take a while.
Firstly, the offline story mode. It amazes me why ST even bothered to make this piece of trash. The game loses all of it’s charm when you are not playing with someone else as your ally. Battles with you as the only human participant just can’t cut it, and are often boring. Even worse are the battles that give you a CPU ally, how you have no control over, and makes no attempt to follow your tactics. It’s a complete dog to play through.
And what happened to the promised plot. I am totally serious when I say, there is more plot in Episode 1&2 than there is in Episode 3. 99% of it is just a text message before and after a fight. Rather than get a feel of a story, you're just told some mission objectives, which range from "patrol the area", "save thingamebob", and "I'm hungry, go find me something to eat".
Then, whatever the objectives, you're plonked down into a fight with an Arkz. Sometimes, say if you're supposed to be rescuing someone, that sort of makes sense, but even missions like "I'm hungry - go find a fish" or "help my son with his homework" end up plonking you down into a fight with Arkz. ("We are also looking for that fish!") The same thing happens every time. Then, after the fight, you get a text message saying well done, then that's it.
What little grasp of the plot you get is gathered by going around talking to NPCs, which is a complete pain in the behind because most of the time they just sprout pointless stuff. Whenever something big happens, or when the Hunters actually need to engage in conversation with the Arkz, or do something else that can't be explained with a text message, you get a quick comic strip pop up. Which sounds good until you actually see what it's like, and realise that in other games you'd get an FMV here or at least a cutscene in the game engine. It is just so cheap. Reading messages from Rico or Flowen in Episode 1&2 may have gotten a lot of stick, but at least it’s fair enough. You’re arriving on the scene of some great disaster, and are slowly uncovering what happened by going around and uncovering evidence. In Episode 3, things are happening right in front of you, or they would be but Sonic Team is too cheap to show you them.
And just like Episodes 1 and 2, there isn’t even an ending – just the end credits. Well, that’s a slight lie. I’ve only finished the Hunters campaign. I’ve not finished the Arkz. But, to be honest, I just don’t want to put myself through any more torture. I seriously doubt it will be any better, or have much of a better ending. If someone does, then feel free to correct me. But that person will have to have enormous patience just to see the whole thing through.

But, the online mode is great, right? Well, yeah, it’s fun. But, there are the usual host of balancing problems that effect any PSO game.
Firstly, if the players are about equally skilled, the game is mostly just a case of luck. Whoever gets to go first will have a big advantage over the other side. That’s not all – you don’t start the fight with any weapons equipped, or any creatures summoned, so you must spend your first turn or two setting up. Things cost from between one action point to seven action points to equip/summon, so if you only roll up one action point then you’re screwed. Also, because you can’t choose what cards you will be dealt, if you aren’t dealt anything that you can use you’re also screwed. Fights can be won or lost just because one side wasn’t ready because of some bad luck, then was wiped out by the other side who got good rolls and set up quickly. This effect also continues on during the rest of the fight – get a bad roll, and you’ve effectively lost a turn.
There are further balancing errors. Not all tactics and choices of characters are equal. For example, some characters have various special abilities, while some just settle for having high attack power. However, the special abilities are pretty worthless, and they suffer a great disadvantage to those characters that just have a high attack power.
It can sometimes be annoying as the Arkz, trying to rid Hunters of all their protection so that they can start to do damage. Similarly, Rampage attacks are quite overpowered, in that they can completely strip a Hunter of a lot of their items.
It’s also annoying that you are forced to move before you act. While that’s good for the most part, it means that Arkz can effectively trap hunters, just be repeatedly re-summoning creatures to box them in, because they can’t move in-between killing them off and before the Arkz replace them.
There are many other problems. It’s annoying that there’s no way to cancel commands you’ve just done when you’re in the middle of queuing them and you change your mind halfway through. It’s annoying that, if a creature dies before you pull off a move that you’ve queued on it, that move is lost and is not redirected to anything else in range, yet still takes the action points and cards used up on it. It’s annoying that on many cards, the descriptions of what they do are very vague and unclear, meaning that a card that it probably very useful, and a tactic that would work quite well, does not get used because the user can’t work out what exactly it does. All in all, this game is nice, but half baked.

Graphics
Also fair very badly. 99% of them are just reused from the previous games – some characters, weapons and stages are the same as they have been since the Dreamcast version, and even then they were a little substandard.
Not only is there little new, you also can’t go around exploring. All the half-hidden touches that Sonic Team usually adds to their worlds are out the window in this game.
The artwork on the cards – the only really new thing – is quite nice, but that’s it.

Sound
Sound effects fair pretty much the same as the graphics. For the most part, sound effects from the DC are reused.
Music fairs a lot better though. Sonic Team usually shine through with their music, and this is no exception – all the tracks are new, although many have a little bit of the old PSO themes mixed into them for the sake of familiarity. Oh yes, and the score is also really, really good. This is what FFX-2 should have done, really – it sounds amazing.

Overall
As long as you play it online, I think that overall this game does justify it’s existence, and it’s purchase. It can be surprisingly fun. However, you do have to ask, why just a card game?
It would have been so much better, if they’d done the card game as an aside, and then put some updates for Episode 1&2 on the disk as well. Even some bug fixes and the ability to switch between normal play and cards without turning off the GC and switching disk would have been appreciated. This game is fun, but such a waste.

Final Score:7/10
Reviewer’s Bias: Indifferent