My friend got PSU for the Xbox 360, and I tried it and liked it enough to buy it for the PC. Got it brand new for like 5$ on ebay (along with the sequel whenever that came out), and I still have both in great condition. I
thoroughly beat both of the story modes and even played offline mode a lot, but I never cared to play online when the official Sega server was alive. I sort of forgot about it for years and only recently got a renewed interest in it after playing Clementine a lot.
I appreciate the amount of effort put into everything. The story is a lot more vivid and involving than PSO (at least when you're playing as Ethan in PSU, not so much when you're Laia's sidekick in AotI). There's a ton of music, some
great, some
offensively bad. The combat is improved in many ways; there's manual first-person aiming, a lock-on and strafing system, unique special combo attacks to every weapon type (Photon Arts), etc. The sheer variety in weapons and spells is particularly cool.
However PSU isn't without its faults. It might have a much more engaging story, but the story itself is kind of meh and the protagonist of PSU (Ethan Waber) is insufferable. AotI's story is significantly worse. You basically play as a fly on the wall to Laia Martinez's story. And PSU actually had closure at the end, AotI's conclusion was irredeemably shitty. That being, there is no fucking conclusion, go play online to see what happens next. Which is doubly shitty considering, you know, the servers are closed. Did I mention there's no rare drops like in PSO, and you have to craft fucking everything? Oh yeah, and it has the
worst grinding system of just about any Phantasy Star game too.
On Clementine: Horribly unfinished but I've been kind of enjoying myself. Installing it is a pain in the ass, I have to use a 3rd party program to get my controller to work, and if I want to play in borderless window full screen 1080p I need a specialized exe and another program to work. Oh, and doing the latter breaks the minimap. BUT, despite all that, it's still took my attention away from Ephinea for the past few days. Crafting isn't implemented and a lot of areas and quests don't work, so you have to buy all of your weapons and armor from shops. And getting meseta is a fucking pain in the ass. I cannot stress this enough. If you're like me, and you like to try out different weapons and Types (PSU's class system) it requires a lot of time and patience. Also the shitty grinding system isn't implemented yet, so I am honestly amazed how far you can make it with ungrinded weapons.
:edit: Added picture from Clementine. Bee is radically different in PSU. I like the arm and the leg parts, still undecided on the chest. Maybe people like the robo-boobs, idk. The color options aren't as good as I remember it being, so I can't make bee's outfit as yellow as I'd like.
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