Here it is...
http://www.segabits.com/?p=11444
Excuse me while I go for a mop to clean all my saliva on the floor...
Oh, there are screens as well!! Scroll near the bottom!
PSO's "limited movement and fighting options" is what gave the game its gravity and (as Tim likes to call it) "sticky friction" in terms of combat and strategy. Enemies moved at their slow pace, never stopping, until you came and hit them, which would make them flinch or sent them recoiling backwards a few paces. Likewise, the player could only move so fast, which they would trade in exchange for attacking. The gameplay was very delicately balanced around controlling the flow of enemies and disrupting their attacks, and each of your attacks were vastly more important because of the decision you had to make between using a quick attack that would flinch the enemy or a hard attack that would flinch the enemy and send them backwards but at the expense of slow startup and finishing time. Each class when played solo worked with this flow and when players played together, it was a beautiful symphony of cooperation.
Then in PSU/P, they tossed this all out the window and instead made all the players able to run around like mad, with every attack option being very mobile and huge in range with no consequence. Great swords had no difference to normal swords in terms of risk/reward because each of them swung around at high speeds plus the importance of weapons were further negated by the addition of Photon Arts which were just huge acrobatic attacks that would send enemies around you flying across the screen. Gunners were changed also so that they could shoot while running around, and they also shoved in a first person mode so you could shoot enemies that were flying around - which they used as an excuse to give every flying boss hugely irritating segments of them flying around forever and about 1 second of them being on the ground so that anyone without a gun could get one hit in before it went flying off again. Now this would be fine and dandy if the enemies were updated and changed around to counteract your array of skill, but instead of doing that, they kept them the same but took way their ability to flinch or get pushed back unless you were using a Photon Art.
Anyway, what all this mobile options and eliminating of risk/reward of every weapon did was that it made every melee completely homogenous/meaningless - you just rushed in, mashed photon arts if you were ever surrounded, and kill-a-thoned everything you saw. Every encounter had no gravity as enemies didn't flinch anymore unless you photon art-ed them, and made every battle really flimsy and non memorable. It really didn't help either that the initial PSU enemies were skin swaps of exactly 4 different enemy types and 3 bosses. PSU > P fixed some of the things around and got away with a lot of other really bad decisions (like initially guns used PP that you could only recharge by either waiting or using recovery items, meaning if you were gunning you'd have to carry around 12 guns because you'd run out of bullets in 1 minute and even then you were shit out of luck after using your expensive recovery items), but all the changes did was address how badly designed the battle system was without bothering to overhaul it all entirely.
Now, this would be fine and dandy with me for the most part if they went from PSU to PSP to PSO2 because I could've shrugged it off as no one from the original team is around or knows what they're doing but, BUT, the thing that bothers me the most is that inbetween Phantasy Star Portable 1 and 2, they made a DS prequel called Phantasy Star 0 which basically brought back every mechanic from PSO and fit it into a DS game. This game was actually good and addressed issues that the original PSO format had, such as giving each individual player their own drops that only they can see so that they don't have to fight over goods, and on top of that, they brought over some of these changes into Phantasy Star Portable 2. So here they have a game where the team making it knows what they're doing and does it well, but they shrug it off in favour of something that doesn't play as well but has sold better, which they assume means that's what the public wants. So I guess what I'm offended at most is that they not only could have made a proper PSO2 because there's obviously people around that can, but instead they're making what looks like to be a successor to PSU in terms of gameplay but skinning it as PSO because they've done everything they can to run PSU/Portable into the ground and now want to spit on the original I suppose.
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