Introduction
Phantasy Star Universe is something of a sequel to our beloved Phantasy Star Online, with prettier graphics, and fleshed out combat and character systems. Sega and Sonic Team have stressed since its conception the offline part of PSU, but we're all here for the online goodness, so I'll get straight to that.
PC version specs:
Windows 2000 (SP4) or XP (SP2)
Pentium 4 1.6Ghz
256MB RAM
Something BETTER than a GeForce4 series/ATI RADEON 8500
10GB HDD space
Characters
Race
Each race starts with different stat builds, and then each gender has a certain flavor as well. The way the specialized races tend to pan out, as far as lending stats to certain classes looks something like this, with the order of proficiency being HU, RA, and then FO:
Newman: C B A
Cast: B A C
Beast: A C B
As always Humans tend to suck at every- I mean they're good for all around fun. Gender differentials are tiny, and fairly predictable: Guys have more HP, attack power, and accuracy, whereas the girls have higher defense, evasion, and mental strength. The actual stat builds fall into this spread:
HP: Health. It hits 0 and you fall down.
ATP: Attack Power. It makes things squish better.
TAP: Tech Attack Power. It makes things BURN better.
MST: Mental Strength. General spell effectiveness
EVA: Evasiveness. Self explanatory to a small degree.
DFP: Defensive Power. Makes you squish less.
END: Endurance. Nobody knows what the hell this is for.
Casts and Beasts have special loving to compensate for the fact their spellery is lacking. Beasts get a nifty little trick called Nanoblast, in which they turn into a were-form and go Super Star (from Mario) on stuff. There are four kinds of blast you can get, and each differs in color and ability:
Blue - Very short-lived invincibility
Red - Super attack power
Purple - Super defense
Yellow - Never miss, higher evasion
Casts, on the other hand, get the nifty SUV weapon. Supposedly they have no relation to the soccer mom's vehicle of choice, but they tend to be as big as one. They function like the Photon Blasts of old, in that you switch on, and launch a single Jesus attack on a target area that changes with the equipped weapon. SUVs are also obtained at level 20, and the different weapons are actually slot units, like the God/Powers and such.
Creation
So, you know what you want to do, but not what to look like? Well that can be a problem. PSU's character customization is indeed massive, with slider bars for all manner of proportions, face customization out the woo-hah, and even a voice selector that lets you pick a base voice and then change the pitch and resonance. It's very easy to make transvestites in PSU.
One thing a newcomer may notice with PSU, and something I surely cried myself to sleep about the few nights after I heard about it, is that all races share the same hairstyles. You've got 17 styles or thereabouts, but every male of every race has those 17. And every female has their 17. The exception is if you make a Cast with a metal head, but who does that? Clothing also has a similar fate.
The saving throw, however, are the clothing stores. Accessories in PSU, like in Gaia, are utterly useless from a functional standpoint, but they make you look niiiice. Pimpin' glasses, robes, cat ears, maid frills, scars and 'staches, you name it and it's probably on sale in a store. Not for very cheap, but it's there.
Class System
Just like in Victorian England, only with killer glo-sticks and hallucigens. PSU's class system is, at first glance and as far as the general populace has been shown, staggeringly restrictive.
Characters can pick and switch between the classes of Hunter, Ranger, and Force at will (for a fee, naturally). Your class level, like in Ragnarok, is seperate from your main level, for easy pimping of a job your race sucks at by nature. Job levels, as far as Sega has said, stop at 30, and so provided there's no seperate job total level limit, it should give everyone plenty of freedom to explore all three classes with a single character. UNless they give a retarded cap like 75 or 60. The hell is up with that?
The catch is that abilities are woefully restricted. Each class has their own special skill: Hunters have Photon Arts, which are like Weapon Skills, Rangers have special ammunition, and Forces use the Force. a.k.a. Techs.
Hunters cannot cast spells. No matter how twinked your Force job is, none of that Resta loving is coming from you while you carry a sword. And vice versa. Everyone can sample the Ranger's wares, but only to a limited degree. In the end, it all comes down to tearing things apart, and with increased inventory capacity (20 mates instead of 10) we wont need that resta so bad anyway!
Hunter notes: Hunters now serve the purpose of tanks. Truly, their damage is great, but their purpose is to keep the squishier-than-ever Forces out of harm's way. Most Photon Arts send enemies flying through the air, and a quick AoE Art will get the attention of everything in the room while the Force preps their 1337 spells.
Ranger notes: Rangers are sort of all purpose. They do damage, they kite mobs, they just have a damn good time. Rangers have the wonderful bonus of being able to freely move while firing, and having a 1st person aiming mode for precision shoots. Tired of not being able to auto-target that dragon's head? Do it manually.
Force notes: FOs kick a** this time around. From day one they rain down heavenly justice (with gusto!) doing damage even the hunters could only DREAM of. Every spell has some effect, which works almost every time (In videos from the Beta, Barta froze things 2/3 of the time). Foie spells give a Burn effect, now, too. Also a new element has been added, Deega, which is earth, and two no categories of spells were added to the existing blank - Gi - Ra - system.
Weapons
There are several new classes of weapons, and here's a list of what we know so far!
Saber/Dual Saber
Double Saber
Sword
Dagger/Dual Dagger
Fist
Claw
Axe
Handgun/Dual Handgun
Rifle
Mechgun/Dual Mechgun
Shot
Cannon
Laser
Cane
Rod
Wand
Longbow
Fan
Crossbow
There is a system of weapon mixing in PSU, where any one-handed weapon can be held with another one. Saber with a handgun? Dagger with a Wand? You got it. The trick is that for two of a kind, you have to have your skill with the single weapon up to a certain level.
Weapon Skills
After each successful romp in the woods in PSU, you get Class Points to go toward your present class. As this class levels, new types of weapons become available, and these weapons have proficiency of their own. And so do the skills associated with them.
Say for instance you have a Dagger with a Photon Art called Boomshakallakah. Well, as you use that Dagger, your skill will rise, to a max of 20. And as you use Boomshakallakah, your skill at using that art will go up too. The same applies to Techs, as well, except for one key difference: Force weapons can't actually melee.
All "skills" for weapons take PP, which replaces our loved TP from PSO. The difference is that PP comes prepackaged in weapons. A Saber from one store might come with 34 PP, and a Wand might come with like 1000. PP recharges for all weapons, but you're better off going to the healing cubes that work like Pioneer 2's hospital, or using a Fluid.
Hunter Weapons
Hunter weapons are what we all know and love. They come with meager PP stashes for Photon Arts, but they're meant for smashing, not dancing. Except daggers.
Ranger Weapons
Ranger weapons operate like guns in any other non-MMO. They don't have attack delay, and they fire on the fly. AND they take ammo. Ranger weapons' specialty is a special elemental ammo, which is a permanent fixture to their gun and doesn't take away PP, though normal shots do. In the case of mechguns, which are now "Hold-down-the-trigger-till-you-hear-the-click" automatic, this PP goes away scary fast.
Force Weapons
Force weapons operate more as a carrying case for magic than actual weapons. You attach your list of spells to it, and let fly with the magic, but there's no cane bopping to be found in PSU. Force weapons come with lots of PP naturally, and if you line up the elements (All Zonde spells for instance) you get a damage bonus!
Misc Gear
Grinding
You can grind weapons in PSU to make them stronger, give them more PP, and all that jazz, BUT there's a catch. If you go crazy with it, the weapon can break, and that's no fun.
Partner Machinery
These little guys deserve their own section, but I don't know quite enough about them yet. They're basically the mags of PSU, but they don't raise your stats. They sit around in your house and laze around while you're off getting splattered.
What they can do, however, is make lewt. If you can dig up "Boards", and feed them to the little buggers, they learn how to create new items. Also, once they evolve to a certain point, they take the form of a tiny RAcaseal and follow you around, so as to get splattered alongside you.
The World
Of which there are three:
Parum is the Humans' stomping ground. Pretty standard stuff, you've got plains, some forests, and lots of ruins.
Neudaiz is the Newmans' crib. Very Asian in style, very, very pretty and heavily forested.
Moatoob is where the Beasts get down and boogie. Pretty much a big desert.
The Guardians' Colony is like Pioneer 2, though you can go to the towns on the planets (of which there are several). By process of elimination, I consider this place to be the Casts' hizzouse, but really it's for everyone. And apparently so are the Casts crying
Exploration is done a lot like Guild Wars, in that everyone hangs out in the towns, forms their parties, and ventures off into the great unknown via missions. While you can't just hop in a teleport and go Forest2Falz in this, there are basic missions for areas that amount to just "Get from point a to Point "The Boss" so it's like doing the same thing as always with a monetary reward. Also, you can still solo. Each mission has a ranking from S (Highest) to... something (lowest).
Also, there are "rest stops" like in Guild Wars, that aren't so much towns as tiny little hubs where you can heal up, go get a soda, and complain about your party member who's been afk for a half hour.
Some worlds also feature VEHICLES. Neaudaiz features hoverbikes in a swampy area, and Moatoob has dinosaur chocobos and a big tank that everyone can ride in (and everyone gets a different turrent!).
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I'll add more as it becomes available. All of this information comes from www.pso-world.com, and I'm probably not allowed to post it, but if someone complains I'll take it down. Till then, I doubt they'll ever see it
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