Phantasy Star Online Showed The World The Future Of Console RPGs 25 Years Ago
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The internet was a very different place in 2000. That’s true in countless ways, but one of the biggest is how much the feeling of connecting with other people online was one of hope, rather than tiresome and frustrating as it so often is now. Even if your view was less utopian, the internet was something so new that the possibilities felt endless, and that was as true in online games as it was anywhere else. At the tail end of 2000, Sega launched one of the most ambitious online games ever at that point, one that embraced the optimism of the early internet, paving the way for the massively multiplayer online games that are commonplace today while capturing the limitless feeling that’s been drained from the internet in the 25 years since.
Phantasy Star Online hit the Sega Dreamcast on December 21, 2000. Announced at Tokyo Game Show a year before, Phantasy Star Online was a pioneering project from the Dreamcast that drew on games as different as ChuChu Rocket and Sonic Adventure while delivering something that no console game ever had. While games like EverQuest (which launched a year earlier) brought massively multiplayer games to PC players, internet access on consoles was still severely limited — something that Phantasy Star Online would be on the vanguard of changing.
Phantasy Star Online’s marketing leaned hard into a utopian vision of the internet.
One of the first problems that developer Sonic Team tackled for Phantasy Star Online was how players would communicate, according to a 2020 interview between the core team and Polygon. While EverQuest and its ilk could rely on players having keyboards to type out messages, the same assumption couldn’t be made for Dreamcast players.
The solution to that problem became one of Phantasy Star Online’s most distinctive features, and a sign of just how much its designers were committed to the utopian vision of the internet as a way to bring people together. Phantasy Star Online actually used multiple chat systems, each offering a different way to communicate. One was Word Select, which allowed players to pick from a set of pre-determined words and phrases, which would then be translated for other players no matter where they were logging on from. Another, arguably more innovative, option was Symbol Chat, a system where players could create their own custom emoji-like symbols to communicate. Taken together, these two chat systems let players cross the language barrier to play together, something that even modern MMOs sometimes struggle with or ignore altogether.
At the time of its launch, Phantasy Star Online was the cutting edge of online console RPGs.
Throughout its development, Phantasy Star Online found itself pushing on the limits of early online infrastructure. Unlike true MMORPGs, Phantasy Star Online could only handle putting everyone in a server together in limited lobbies. Out on missions, it became a four-player hack and slash game. Even within those confines, much of Phantasy Star Online’s gameplay was determined by limitations. Players couldn’t jump because doing so would have exceeded how much data the Dreamcast could download at once. For the same reason, players couldn’t move and attack at the same time, and only a few enemies could appear in the same area at once.
Despite its technical limitations, though, Phantasy Star Online was extremely innovative. The mere concept of a simultaneous online game at its scale was impossible before, with Sega’s ChuChu Rocket serving as a way to test the online technology that would be expanded in Phantasy Star Online. The game is full of strange ideas like the MAG system, which gives each character a Tamagotchi-like pet that could evolve through player interactions. The MAG system is itself an evolution of the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure, just one of the many virtual pets that Sega incorporated into Dreamcast games. And while parts of Phantasy Star Online have carried over into modern games, others remain oddities unique to the pioneering RPG, like a convoluted system that used your character’s name to determine the drop rate for items.
While it was playable solo, Phantasy Star Online was made to be experienced with other players.
The world of Phantasy Star Online is what kept people playing so long. While it might feel cramped and limited now, at the time, it was expansive beyond belief, with the freedom to seemingly explore anywhere. Its art and music were bright and optimistic, in stark contrast to its online contemporaries like Diablo. But it’s the thrill of exploring that world with other players that made the game so revolutionary. The developers of the Monster Hunter series have cited Phantasy Star Online as an inspiration, which is clear to see in how similar the structure of teaming up with other players is in both games.
While Phantasy Star Online’s servers have been closed for years, its impact on modern online games can’t be overstated. It’s neither the first online console game nor the first online RPG, but by showing that console players were just as eager to play together as their PC counterparts — and that games could be designed around the specific limitations of online play — Phantasy Star Online paved the way for everything that came after. Online games have changed a lot since 2000, and for all its problems, Phantasy Star Online is still a reminder of a time when a better online world felt possible.
