I Waited 18 Years for the Phantasy Star Online 2 Beta

In the summer of 2000 (if my memory is correct), I got to play a special 4-player local version of Phantasy Star Online at Sega’s E3 booth. I was still very young, early in my career, and the thrill of going to E3 was alive and well in me. (It still is to some degree, but it’s also complicated.) Getting to see PSO, however, was one of the most exciting moments of that show. I’d never been a PC gamer, so when I’d seen the birth of MMORPGs happen over on that platform, I’d been jealous. Having never really had the chance to play one, though, all my knowledge of what it’d be like to run around a world filled with other human players was still mostly from my imagination.

I know that, to a lot of people, the original PSO was never truly an MMORPG, because it wasn’t technically in the “massively” category. You never could have told me that that was the case, however. Seeing the avatars of other real human beings running around Pioneer 2, grouping up for adventures, trading items, showing off their new Symbol Chats, or just lounging around together felt like an evolution in video games that I almost couldn’t believe. I lost hundreds of hours of my life to the game across a selection of characters—but mostly with my little HUnewearl Ayu Landale—helped in part by having both the Dreamcast keyboard and the illusive DC Broadband Adapter.

I’d end up going to do a short exchange program in Japan shortly before Ver. 2 came out, and when I returned to the States, and to PSO, the game already felt different. While it was still the same game at its heart, the community just wasn’t the same, we now had to pay subscription fees, and you were starting to see some serious hacks threaten the peace the game used to exist under. I’d then end up going back to Japan to go to school full time, and during that period, PSO—and the Dreamcast itself—would come to an end.

In the years to follow, I’d make multiple attempts to recapture that experience I’d had back with the original PSO. Many of my friends had moved on to Xbox, so once I picked one up, we got some fun out of the version of the game that came to Microsoft’s console. There were the DC PSO fan servers, which I’m thankful for, but most of the people I’d played with had now moved on. I tried my hardest to get into Phantasy Star Universe, but those games just never felt right with me for some reason. I did end up liking the Phantasy Star Portable series, but it obviously could never be what the original PSO was. Phantasy Stat Zero was cute, and neat for what it was, but… yeah.

I first played Phantasy Star Online 2 back at Tokyo Game Show 2011. Trying to jump into a game that deep in a booth at a trade show where you’ll get maybe 15~20 minutes with it (if you’re lucky) isn’t the best scenario, so it was hard for me to get a full grasp on how I felt about this long-awaited “true” sequel. That’s okay, I thought: it’ll launch in Japan, and then hit the US in like a year or so, and I’ll play it then.

Whoops.

I still remember the emails from Sega of America, telling me (as media) that the PSO English beta would be coming soon—years and years and years ago. Everything seemed on track. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Mentions of the English release started vanishing. SOA went silent about the game. And we waited. And waited. And waited. At first, I was frustrated. Then, amused. Then angry. Then, just sad. I, like so many others, simply gave up on the game. I still had no proper gaming PC, so trying to go that route with the fan translations wasn’t possible. I thought about maybe trying the Japanese Vita version, but I needed my Vita for work reasons, so swapping profiles back and forth constantly didn’t sound fun. As much as I had loved the original PSO, Sega had put me in a position where it was feeling really hard to care anymore.

And then, E3 2019 hit, and like many, I sat in stunned silence as the Phantasy Star Online 2 promo video played during the Xbox press conference. Given just how much time had passed, it almost seemed like a joke at first, because there was no way Sega would be bringing us the game this late, was there? But, they actually were. It was real.

Going into the weekend closed beta, I tried very hard to keep my expectations in check. It’s a free-to-play game, and I’ve seen franchises I’ve loved bastardized with F2P garbage far too many times now. It’s a game that’s almost 8 years old now, which is ancient in terms of “live service” projects. I’d heard very mixed opinions from people I know about how PSO2 had turned out. And, as the old saying goes, you can never go home again—and I knew that it would be very possible that I’d jump in, realize those glory days of PSO were just gone for good, and leave even more heartbroken.

I sat there Friday night, trying over and over to get in, wondering what was going on, making jokes about Sega still thinking we didn’t want the game—yet also feeling a small wave of excitement start to build inside of me. I finally got in, and while recreating Ayu for a whole new generation of PSO, suddenly realized I was meeting an old friend again that I’d really missed. The game proper kicked off, I started to make my way around the gate and shopping area, and it all just hit me like a ton of bricks. So many memories, so much passion, such strong emotions I’d long put away, they all came flooding back. Everything about the experience was so far removed from those older days, from the controller, to the system, to the underlying technologies, to the kind of TV I used, to so many other things—but on a mental and emotional level, I was back in my younger self, there in front of a VGA monitor at 2AM in the morning, doing “just one more” run in the mines as the real world faded away around her.

Part of me is now scared to play more of PSO2, because I’m afraid of getting deeper into the game and having something happen that makes the nostalgia all fall apart. I’m equally afraid the game might be amazing, and I’ll get addicted again at a point when my real life doesn’t afford such addictions. For now, though, I’m incredibly excited, and feeling things as a gamer that I haven’t felt in years.

Maybe you really can’t go home again, but at least for a few the hours that I played over the weekend, I was home—and I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much I’d missed being there.