The Shrine

I have absolutely no idea how I feel about this game. Looks a little old school, but has some polish over the previous PSO games.

PSO was a very good Diablo clone if there was actually variety in items, but I got burned on PSU (which totally sucked) so I'm not sure about what to think here. Sega's been trying to do a Diablo clone at least 10 times by now (PSO, PSU, Shining Tears, Neo, Exa, whatever, whatever) but apparently still haven't figured out how to do itemization.

I'm drooling over this shit.

It does look a little weak graphically, but maybe i would give it a whirl. I need a Diablo clone and D3 is taking its sweet time to come out. I never played any Phantasy Star game, though, so i might be a bad candidate to jump into the series.

Yeah, I get the distinct impression that they are targeting the group that pumped years of their lives (me) into the original PSO.

Looks like it could be fun. I am especially impressed with the boobie slider.. lol

The later PS and Shining games are all just straight up Diablo clones. You control this guy that destroys stuff and get random prefixed items from killing stuff. The character customization is probably the high point. It's one of two games where I didn't just create 'generate random character' (other is Champion Online). The biggest problem with the series is itemization as most of the time you're just futilely looking for the equivalent of King's Sword of Haste since most of the unique weapons (if they exist) are worthless. You don't need it but it sure takes out a lot of potential longevity. The latter PSO games are also increasingly gimmicky and just doesn't play as well as the original. I really hate the PSO expansion where everything freezes you so you got to play it like a button masher since mashing buttons reduces the freeze duration and you have to do it unless you want to die while frozen every single time.