I guess Major Nelson hates Phantasy Star (probably a Final Fantasy fanboy) because he didn't say anything about Phantasy Star Universe being on Games on Demand.
It's up there now. Sega's MMO can be downloaded directly to your Xbox 360, and you can add the free Ambition of the Illuminus content as well as the new Guardians Advance content to make more Phantasy Star action than your little mind can handle. The price? Only $19.99 for the download. You won't need any fancy membership to play, though you'll need a subscription to play online.
Dale North is Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief, a founding editor, and specialist in Japanese gaming. An accomplished musician, Dale was reporting from Japan during the earthquakes of 2011. Luckily, he got the fuck out alive and is home in America now with his wife and beloved corgi, Einstein. Dale is also a co-founder of Destructoid's sister anime site
Japanator. Likes Corgis, Sega Saturn, PSP, iPhone, Photographic tools.
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Contest:
6:30 PM on 08.04.2010 | 
@Dale - Phantasy Star Universe is no and never was an MMORPG. Its just a Diablo clone, a peer-to-peer RPG. MMOs don't let players host games, peer-to-peer games do. Guild Wars and Monster Hunter are also not MMOs. They do not play host to persistent worlds and player-driven economies that continue when you log off, those worlds just disappear.
If I log off WoW or FFXI, the world and its economies still continue progressing.
Also, I find it odd this game would be "On Demand" as the servers went down for PSU ages ago. The single player was shit and the online mulitplayer not much better.
Phantasy Star Portable 2 is a vast improvment on all the universe games, so if you have a PSP, I'd just wait for that. Unless you're a Monster Hunter fan, in which you still have a better game in the current and next version on PSP and Wii.
It was also released for PC.
The servers are still up for the 360 version.
Yeah, I think i coudl go for a Phantasy Star 5. That might feel good.
@ TSP
Well, thanks! I do believe I'll keep my face out of that space then!
@The Silent Protagonist
Do your research. As a atrocious as PSU was it has it's own economy after you logged off. You created a room/store wherein you could keep your goods as well as set items out to sell without you needing to be online like some older MMOs.
Multiplayer RPGs and MMORPGs are different things. It's not about being traditional or not. It's about the definition of the term because they represent different experiences. Diablo and WoW have a lot of similarities, but, at the end of the day, they are different subgenres of the RPG (multiplayer RPG and MMORPG respectively). The primary differences are these: the number of characters that can be in a world at once and the persistence of said world. It may seem like splitting hairs, but, in a MMORPG, the persistence of the world is a central aspect to the entire game. Meanwhile, in multiplayer RPGs, the multiplayer component is typically a cooperative addon to a very similar single player experience. For MMORPGs, it doesn't even make sense to speak of a single player experience, as said experience would miss the entire heart of the game.
From wiki: "Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a genre of computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world.
As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a character (often in a fantasy world) and take control over many of that character's actions.[1] MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player RPGs by the number of players, and by the game's persistent world, usually hosted by the game's publisher, which continues to exist and evolve while the player is away from the game"
However, from what I've read, PSU may be considered an MMORPG because I guess the worlds do have a persistent quality. TBH, I haven't played any of the PS games, as noted above, since the original 4 games back on the SMS and Genesis, so I can't actually to speak to whether or not PSU is an MMORPG or not. However, that does not change the fact that MMORPGs and multiplayer RPGs are simply different.
Don't forget that 75% of the demo players are there to buy,scam, and sell porn at the starter station. And Sega-appointed player mods run around whining at everyone to stop or they will have to take down the severs ever week for over a year.