Phantasy Star Online’s original director from Sonic Team talks Diablo influences, cut features, and Christmas… - Polygon

With 2020 being the 20th anniversary of Sega’s Dreamcast role-playing game Phantasy Star Online, we’re looking back with a series of interviews featuring key team members who worked on the game.

Phantasy Star Online was his first game as a director.

In this interview, we learn about PSO’s ‘MAG’ system, how classic Saturn games like Burning Rangers played a part in preparing for the team’s work on PSO, how missiles launched by North Korea could have delayed the game’s release, and details on content cut from the final game.

We were trying to make an online game on the Saturn for a long time.

That’s when we first started exploring online gaming.

That was a game that I had created with online in mind but [in which the online part] didn’t make it past the planning stage.

Wow, Burning Rangers was originally planned as a four-player online game.

It seemed like it was for practical reasons but now you’re saying that it was also for spatial reasons.

I concurred and that’s how we made the game.

You might notice in PSO, it’s a lot like Diablo, where there are a lot of points that you can warp to.

I worked on the series — PSO, Phantasy Star Universe, and Phantasy Star Online 2 — almost up until the release of PSO2.

And now it’s been about another decade since leaving the series.

If I had known the complexities of creating and running an online game such as PSO, I probably would never have made it the way it turned out.

I don’t ever want to make something like that again.

PSO was a pioneering game and this was your first game as a director.

It would cause such a commotion that we would have to delay the launch, and we would have more time to work on the game.

We wanted to release it before the 21st century, so 2001, and I think it came out at the very end of 2000.

He would tell me, “We should do this,” or, “We should do that.” Some of his ideas were seemingly impossible, but we would struggle and make them happen, and that’s how PSO became the final game.

So I think that it’s thanks to Naka’s impossible orders that we were able to create something unique.

His concern was that the ideas were awesome and had to be included in the game so that the game would be great.

It wasn’t really fun, but it’s the way a genius works?

I think consequently that’s what made the game fun.

I think PSO benefited from his prior experience, just like with all of us?

Nobody on our team had worked on an online game, so one of the challenges was getting the team to understand what made online games fun?

I had a lot of people play the game, but a lot of them were turned off by the dark fantasy.

They would say, “it’s disturbing,” or, “I don’t get why it’s fun.” Trying to unify the team and getting them to understand the direction we wanted to take the game in was very difficult?

Was there a point where you saw people starting to get the appeal, like the satisfaction of seeing a rare item drop, where you felt the team really get into the game.

Some people like Setsumasa stayed around until 10 or 11 p.m.

He would connect Diablo to the network and play until morning, wake up to work, and then play again.

Some people would go home just to bathe, sleep a few hours, come back into the office to work, and then play Diablo at the office.

So our concept was, “Let’s make a Diablo game that would appeal to the Japanese audience.”.

Even though Diablo is a distinctly American game, PSO feels like a very distinctly Japanese game.

And yet, it’s not just palatable to Japanese gamers but to everyone.

I think Diablo is an amazing game, but it’s not a game that appeals to Japanese players.

That’s why we created PSO to be a cooperative role-playing game.

When you’re playing multiplayer, that’s when something magical happens, because the cooperative elements make it so much more fair and fun.

It was our first online game, so we had to make sure that it could be played as a single-player game.

A lot of people didn’t like that because you couldn’t play the single-player mode offline.

It was at a time when they wanted to make Xbox Live attractive, so I think they wanted a title that required Xbox Live.

Of course, it would have been possible to make the game without requiring the use of Xbox Live.

If we had made that aspect of the game easier for the single-player mode, there wouldn’t have been any motivation on the part of the player to play the multiplayer mode.

You could play the game alone, but it was better when you played with others.

It’s been mentioned elsewhere; it’s possibly an urban legend.

Before it was called Phantasy Star Online, it wasn’t a sci-fi game.

That’s the kind of role-playing game I had in mind at the beginning.

Before we had PSO, the question was how were we going to make an online game and we started with that fantasy online game I mentioned.

It’s really impressive because that “pet” system grew in complexity over time.

In PSO it’s almost like a game in a game, because you have to feed the pet, etc.

It’s a lot like a Tamagotchi.

We had the idea to incorporate something similar to the A-LIFE system into PSO from the beginning, and we had to come up with a system that would work for the game, and the MAG system is where we landed.

The team that worked on Nights was burned out from working on that title, so that’s why I had to come in and make Christmas Nights.

We didn’t want to hinder the player’s curiosity of trying different characters or experiencing different play styles within the game by forcing them to invest so much time and effort into one character.

We also removed the first part, of having to nurture your MAG from birth, and instead let players jump straight into being able to play the game with a completely leveled-up MAG.

One of the downsides of online games is that it’s difficult for people of different levels to play together.

Again, from the concept stage, we wanted to try to eliminate any barriers that would prevent people from playing together, regardless of your level or ability.

Being able to take a fully developed MAG and giving it to a completely new character to not be totally weak, even with a level 1 character at the start of the game, was a great idea.

We wanted people to write and talk about PSO on their homepages, right?

Other online multiplayer console games like Final Fantasy 11 removed player names from in-game screenshots for privacy reasons.

You would have to be connected online, and I’m not sure if it’s accessible overseas.

So it’s possible that it doesn’t exist on the GameCube version.

And for PSO, we were only able to focus on the gameplay elements of the game, so for PSU, I wanted to focus more on the story elements of the game.

Did you work on Phantasy Star Online Episode 3: CARD Revolution.

Especially after how good the first PSO was, and how high the expectations were for the next game, nobody expected a card battle game, because it’s a very different kind of game.

I wasn’t involved with that title, but there were members on the PSO team that wanted to make a card battle game and they wanted to add a PSO spin to it, so they went off and made that game.

But I wasn’t involved, so it’s hard for me to comment on that.

If it was a game I had made, I could respond to the criticism, but there are politics involved when commenting on other people’s work.

It’s such a great game and so many people still want to play the original game ..?

It’s Sega’s property, so it’s not something I can comment on with any kind of authority.

You can only play online.

If Sega will hire me, I’ll make another version?