Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus

[Super_Hss]

Where does the florescent bulb board drop?

[Silvergun X]

I'm coming on tonight. ^_^

[Super_Hss]

and does anyone know where the Hajirod boards drop?

thanks

[Riskbreaker]

IGN gave this a bad review http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/744/744378p2.html

Hmmmm its a hard one. They are bang on the money with some points and way of the mark on others.

There is no point comparing PSU to the likes of WoW and FFXI as its meant to be played in different way. PSU is formed so that you can easily jump in and out of the online mode without it requiring a huge investment of your time. PSU allows you jump directly to the area you want to fight in, find some party members and head right in. And even though you may feel like you need to upgrade your weapons and armor in order to be more effective, you'll never feel like you need to invest time acquiring a certain bit of equipment or artifact in order to procede. The game probably sits closer to Guild War and Monster Hunter in this respect.

The comments about the graphics are pointless, I know the fact that the game was largely designed around the PS2 has limited what they're able to do on the Xbox 360 and PS2. But the PSO experience was all about the simplistic, clean and colourful graphics.

And the sound, well it sounds like PSO, you'll like either like the music or you won't but commenting that it gets repetitive is a bit thick. Any game where you have to replay the same areas time and again will suffer from this, which includes any other MMORPG you care to compare this against. At any rate there isn't anything so offensive on the ears that you'll want to block it out. In fact chances are alot of the time you won't be paying attention to it.

But they are bang on the money about the content. Be warned as the game is at the moment, you are playing PSU Beta Plus. How much a fan of the series you are will affect your tolerance of this, but even though I'm a huge fan of the PSO games I'm more than a bit miffed at Sega. There are a couple of missions available that weren't there in the Beta and thats all. It really is quite sickening that they have held back content like this and its the epitomy of the "content that should have been there in the first place debate". At the end of the day, everything is on the disk, but Sega aren't letting you play it and are asking ?6.99 a month for the priviledge.

Sure you had to work hard to unlock access to areas in PSO but at least you could access those areas. And of course, for PSO access was free. Here it doesn't matter what you do, there are places you can't access until Sega say so...... oh and by the way, that'll be ?7 a month please.

We're not talking about them holding off downloadable quests here, its the equivalent of EA asking you to pay a subscription fee to unlock half a game a month after you bought it. Quite frankly I find it disgusting and some people at Sega should be shot for this decision.

Hopefully they will patch this prior to the EU release and are holding off because the servers are linked. We all had better hope they aren't waiting until the JP release.

To add insult to injury if you play the online mode to completion, you're gonna see aload of stuff you can't access yet, nice move Sega real nice. And the offline mode can be hammered with relative ease. Fortunately one saving grace is that the offline mode is split into episodes. So your best bet is to play through as many areas online as possible and then only play the episodes of the story line until you can see a preview for the next episode that contains content you've yet to see. This way you can see the story progress without ruining the wow factor of the online games.

And there is no story, no rhyme or reason, for your successive questing. The game even lacks the very basic Guild and Prinicipal quests that made up PSO's very simple story, but which in their own way, drew you through the first run through of the game.

Ultimately though, I can't help but feel Sega have dropped the ball with this. PSO was about you being the hero. My best memory of PSO was the first time I defeated Falz to be greated with a screen shot of my character and my three comrades performing victory poses with the message "Congratulations you are the hero's" or something of a similar ilk at the bottom of the screen. The game was all about you online and off, even though the story was simplistic, it was about your quest to find out what happened to Red Ring Rico and save Pioneer 2. The Principal of the ship spoke to you to get things solved, Bernie, Sue and Ash came to you for help, the sub missions were all relevant to you. It was even better when they added some side missions to the Gamecube version which referred to the time gap between that and Episode 3 where your character was responsible for training and inspiring characters in that game.

But in PSU, Ethan, is the hero. You're just on the side lines and no matter what you do, or what Sega allow you to do for that matter, you'll never come away with the same feeling in this game knowing that your story plays second fiddle to Ethan's. Even though its a nice little story, I can't help but think it that the effort should have been spent making sure our time in this world should have been the best experience Sega could offer.

I can't help but feel that their own Nazi efforts in trying to keep this game under tabs will kill this series off. But thats another story and I've ranted enough

How you handle this game basically boils down to how much you loved PSO, or if you haven't played PSO, your experiences of similar instanced online games such as Diablo 2, Guild Wars and Monster Hunter.

I have a love/hate relationship with it and am holding on in the hope that some decent content isn't too far off. Some good team mates from this forum are keeping this a pleasant experience, but if Sega don't sort this out I won't be on it for long.

Sorry for the rant people

[dogsout]

if Sega don't sort this out I won't be on it for long.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

[Riskbreaker]

I didn't know you cared

I'll be on long enough to lvl a new character a little when the EU players arrive and carry on levelling my newman, but if they don't patch soon, 4 weeks of repeating the same stuff is going to get old real quick.

If I'm gonna pay these basts a sub, I want a reason to pay it and that excludes access to content that should have been there on day one. But for the time being, that at the very least, will do.

[Silvergun X]

Well, i'm with you on that. Definately.

They've given the Japanese the new content. Where's ours?!

[Riskbreaker]

Where does the florescent bulb board drop?

The SEED boss at the end of the second linear line mission on the Colony dropped mine when I was about lvl 8

[dogsout]

That's me for the night. Man am I gonna feel like crap in the morning. I didn't do much at all, spent/wasted most of my money on clothes and got my PM to lvl 73. Soon I'll be a master melee synther.

Oh yeah and I got a makeover.

[dataDave]

I was looking at the make-overs... I should have gone with the Kazuya Mishima hair with steel forehead protector when I changed to Ranger but I didn't think... oh well, I'll save that for the advanced jobs.

I need 15 Nanocarbon as I'm going to attempt to synth a Cresline armour. 37% chance of success. :/

Need lvl40 so I can solo most of the B missions for massive gil.

[djtickle]

Need lvl40 so I can solo most of the B missions for massive gil.

Gil - Fallows has FFXI on the mind ^^

[dogsout]

Gil!? Madness. I've got a Cresline, buying the 15 nanocarbons would cost you 30K- 35K on their own. I've seen the Cresline knocking about player shops for 20K.

[SUMIRE]

I think Gears of War will kill Phantasy Star Universe dead unfortunately.

To be honest, I really like the game after palying the offline story mode. I just dont think there are that many hardcore PSO fans on XBOX that will like it, or be willing to cough up the extra money just to play a game that has less content than the offline mode....at the moment anyway.

[Riskbreaker]

Its meseta Fallows, meseta

I was looking at the make-overs... I should have gone with the Kazuya Mishima hair with steel forehead protector when I changed to Ranger but I didn't think... oh well, I'll save that for the advanced jobs.

If there is one thing about this game I love, its pimping out your character, but everything is so damn expensive. How can an item of clothing be more expensive than a B grade weapon board?

Haven't tried changing hairstyles yet though, do you get to keep the ones you've bought, or do you have to fork out 5k everytime you want to change?

[Pirotic]

I didn't know you cared

I'll be on long enough to lvl a new character a little when the EU players arrive and carry on levelling my newman, but if they don't patch soon, 4 weeks of repeating the same stuff is going to get old real quick.

If I'm gonna pay these basts a sub, I want a reason to pay it and that excludes access to content that should have been there on day one. But for the time being, that at the very least, will do.

The killer with PSU is that the Playstation 2 is the key platform, and as it doesn't use the hard-disk they can only really unlock whats already on the disk or offer what, 8mb of downloadable content max. They are already working on an expansion pack which comes on a new disk, so I wouldn't hold your breath for a lot of 'new' content, they'll just drip feed what's already on the disk and maybe add a couple of new weapons as downloadable content.

My moneys on SEGA shutting down the 360 servers within a year.