There’s no way we’re living in the future of Phantasy Star Online, you cry — there’s no talking robots with laser swords and nobody’s scrambling for floating red boxes while wearing properly silly costumes.
Perhaps we’re not actually living in the future of Phantasy Star Online, then. But we are living in the timeline where the vision of 2000-era Sonic Team became the blueprint for just about everything.
Yet ask folk about PSO and you’ll hear something about how you spelt ‘fantasy’ wrong, or how that’s ‘the one where everyone’s got spiky hair and rides big yellow birds’. Indeed, we live in a timeline where everybody’s played a spiritual successor to Phantasy Star Online , but few could tell you exactly what the damn thing is.
Let’s fix that by taking a look back at what PSO actually did that was so gosh-darn fantastic, and why it never quite made it into common video game parlance.
Let’s go back to the future.