Phantasy Star Portable 2: Infinite
I said to myself I don't want to be seen as a Sega guy, so I'd play something for an intermission post/secondary coverage on a different unloved and underappreciated console than the Sega Dreamcast.
So I was going through my library and I saw Phantasy Star Portable 2. I remembered there was a fan translation of the "Complete" version, Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity. So I boot that up and I start taking notes and I realize...
Fuck me, that's a Sega game on a different platform!
Phantasy Star Portable 2 opens three years after the first PS Portable. The SEED has been beaten back and the RELICS sites are being explored to try and help undo the damage these weird organisms caused.
What does this mean? Well... itâs not that important. Youâre just some mercenary who showed up as a freelancer to a RELICS site to help look for anything useful. You get trapped in the complex with a young lady whoâs boss/mentor figure seems to be incredibly unkind to her, and then your life turns upside down as you end up working for a mercenary outfit called Little Wing as her new mentor.
Your boss, a Beast named Kraz, signs you on with a full bonus package and âFree partnerâ, Emilia, the girl he was being a shithead to earlier.
Kraz seems to be Emiliaâs foster father at first glance, but as it turns out, the Cast receptionist Chelsea and Emilia were... people he took in as employees to settle a bar tab as the only one who came into the bar consistently until it went out of business. Heâs incredibly gruff, but there seems to be some kindness buried under how hard he is on Emilia, who... also seems to be something of a brat with no regard for actually working despite having the resources poured into training her as an operative at her request.
But Kraz is also a shithead and a drunk who treats Emilia like garbage in very mundane ways. So far thereâs hints of him being more capable and caring than he lets on...but also itâs pretty clear it doesnât matter that much and most of the company doesnât seem to have faith in him, despite their parent company leaving him in charge of the private security firm/mercenary company on CLAD-6, a resort station owned by a corporation called SKYCLAD trying to help solve the problem of natural resources being depleted by the war with the SEED in the first game. The first storyline quest he sends you on is collecting from someone who owes him money because SKYCLAD wonât reimburse him for a lingerie receipt so he doesnât have the personal funds to pay a bar tab because of it.
Nobody tell them what Skyclad means they might enforce a new dress code and I donât want anyone to know the angle of my dangle unless Iâm getting paid industry rates. Actually, given the quest hook there they probably know. I will be expensing the banana hammock if they do because good lord thatâs gonna be a lot of fabric.
So it doesnât take long before this debt collection quest throws you into the thick of things. In a genuinely harrowing way. When you go to collect for Kraz, you find a ton of ships landed near a cultural site on a planet called Moatoob, not the kind of place that usually gets masses of visitors. You find out from another freelance mercenary and her husband that this is, in fact, abnormal...
Showing a surprising amount of good intuition from the normally subdued Emilia. The mission goes on and you find the cultural site, a village of a tribe called the Kasch, up in flames, and the target you were sent to collect from moving like a puppet alongside the villagers and a strange guy with silver hair talking about âWeak, mortal fleshâ.
turns out the Ancients that the SEED Corrupted and wiped out seeded life in this galaxy to replace them, but their descendants have fallen into the trap they set eons ago after defeating the SEED, and now the Ancients want to wipe the minds from the bodies of the current civilization and take them over. Mika, the Ancient cohabitating in Emiliaâs mind, is staunchly against this.
Kraz praises you for at least putting the guy in his path to catch and collect from when he was fleeing from you, Emilia has a real conversation with Mika, and resolves to actually put the work in because sheâs mixed up in some serious shit.
And thatâs where Iâm gonna leave off for the plot synopsis because I didnât do it justice, there. I didnât even talk about how this is canon to the original quadrilogy and the SEED were/are some kind of weird and wibbly generation of Dark Force/Dark Falz and how this is still the far reaching consequences of whatever force corrupted Lassick in the original game and caused Mother Brain to go haywire in Phantasy Star 2 an unfathomable amount of time ago, lightyears away, after the flight from the Algol System in Phantasy Star Online.
...supposedly? I dunno if itâs fanon or canon because Phantasy Star is one of those franchises that Sega just sort of stopped caring about. But Iâm choosing to believe it because itâs REALLY cool to think about honestly. Worldbuilding and lore can really add to RPGs, and I think itâs kind of a lost thing in gaming these days because everyoneâs a little caught up in the âUh, story, not lore!â hype train the same way people think âShow, donât tell!â is universal advice.
At least in the case of any given Phantasy Star game, the extensive lore and âsub franchisesâ all being well liked by the fanbase goes a long way to enhancing the experience.
my next writeup will be more thoughts and impressions on the writing of Phantasy Star Portable 2: Infinite before returning to Evolution 2: Far Off Promise for the conclusion of that. I might sneak some anecdotes about my time playing PSP2âs original US release on the active servers when it was live and how this is actually my first experience with the story all the way through, and the expansion, at some point.
This game is incredibly enjoyable in ways... opposite of Evolutionâs little duology. Evolution is very... simple. The lore barely exists and the story is emotionally resonant but the characters and their motivations are... simple. And thatâs not a bad thing! Itâs actually a very very VERY good thing in its case, seeing as itâs a series aimed at younger teens and older kids. I really appreciate that it doesnât complicate things with excessive story, and just focuses on a jumped up teenager who really loves adventure who will literally fight an entire army regiment to save his sister.
I like stories, yaâll. I like stories a lot.!