Phantasy Star Universe

» see phantasystaruniverse.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed phantasy star universe. by 2006 i was either still nursing ultima online characters on private shards or burning weekends on counter-strike, and a japan-codified sega mmo with a high learning curve and mediocre us reviews was not the door i was going to walk through. psu's audience was the same group of phantasy star online lifers who had been with the franchise since the dreamcast, plus a thinner layer of curious wrpg players who were not paying world-of-warcraft money for a sega title with a 64-metacritic score.

the game launched in japan on august 31, 2006 for pc and ps2. north america got the release that october and europe in november. the xbox 360 version followed in december for japan, then arrived in north america in early 2007. you picked one of four races for a story campaign that ran offline, then took the same character online into multiplayer lobbies. sonic team designed it as the next step from phantasy star online, which had been one of sega's last critical wins on the dreamcast.

reviews disagreed about whether psu was a follow-up or a regression. metacritic settled around 59 on pc and 68 on ps2. the bigger problem was that 2006 was the year world of warcraft already had eight million subscribers, and any new mmo without a hook beyond the parent franchise was going to be measured against blizzard's release cadence. psu's first expansion, ambition of the illuminus, shipped in september 2007 with new races and new area content but did not move the needle.

~ the dossier ~

~ the actual end ~

sega did not kill psu in a single announcement. servers shut off in regional waves over two and a half years, starting with the north american and european pc/ps2 service on march 31, 2010. the japanese ps2 service followed in april 2011, with the xbox 360 worldwide service ending in september 2012. the very last server, japanese pc, closed at midnight jst on september 28, 2012. by the time the last login screen went black, sega had already shipped phantasy star online 2 in japan as the actual successor.

~ the long tail ~

psu is not gone, technically. fan-run private servers keep the game playable for the people who still want to log in, the same pattern as ultima online or star wars galaxies. sega's official line was about player population dropping below maintenance, which was true, but the unspoken layer was that phantasy star online 2 had already claimed the brand's future. psu was the bridge that nobody crossed.

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