At the least you can play all the pre-Online games on PC, in fact on Steam they are literally 99 cents lol.Īnd it's clear Online not only influenced it's own series but other games too. It's just so interesting how this series legacy goes all the way back to 1987 and again the series has retained elements from those original games, but it's clear Phantasy Star Online, released in 2000 really ended up defining the series to this day. PSO Episode 1 and 2 (/Blue Burst) > Portable 2/Infinity > Portable 1 > PSO2 > Universe/AOTI > New Genesis I'd have to rate them as such from best to worst, though I like all of them, worts and all. But NGS stuff is it's own can of worms.Īs someone who has played almost every PSO game post-Online. Though I suppose one could argue it didn't go far enough and you still end up spending most of your time in small 'combat areas' rather than really doing stuff in the open world.
New Genesis to an extent is probably the biggest shake up if just because it's an 'open world' game rather than the more smaller environments of the previous games.
But outside the story, the format of the series was established. Now Online was fairly light on story, and overall they did reign things back a little bit, Episode 3, Universe, and so on all do have far more story than Online ever did.
