An introduction

Hello.

Allow me to tell you a bit about myself and my experiences with the Phantasy Star games of the past decade. Our story begins in the year 2001. I guess you could call it something of a "space odyssey".




For starters, I received a Dreamcast along with the original PSO for my 20th birthday at the end of March in 2001. My first character was a HUcsat named "Metal Givera", but after getting to level 5 or so, I didn't like the color or the name so I restarted. I made another HUcast by the name of "MetalGriever" and just went with it. I went with the HUcast because it had a sleek and menacing look to it. I looked at the other classes but none of them did anything for me. Oddly enough, I would end up taking a HUnewearl all the way to 200 on PSO GC in light of the myriad changes to the game itself.

I spent most of my time doing the offline quests and learning the game. Very seldom did I go online for those first few weeks. One day however, I was cruising the web for info on PSO when I came upon a site called Dreamstation. They hung around Umbriel block 13, so I decided to start hanging around there myself and posting on their forums. Met folks like Shiori, Dam, Virgil, SpiritMaster and a number of other great folks. I would ding level 100 for the first time only to have the memory card shit the bed a week later.

Fast-forward to the next year and being so hyped for PSO on the GameCube. I imported the Japanese version during the "1.0" fiasco where people figured out how to dupe within a week of the game coming out. The NA version would come out the following month so I went there to reunite with old friends from the DC era only to have 99% of them jump ship to Ragnarok Online when that game re-opened after a 3-4 month hiatus. I would stick around there until late October of 2003 after dinging level 200.  I was even friends with one of the guys who made that "Happy Fun Box" keyboard adapter. I would play PSOBB for a bit in 2005, but it didn't seem to get along well with my internet connection at the  time. All in all, I would say the GC era was my favorite part of PSO by virtue of having accomplished the most with it.

 As for PSU, I participated in the closed beta in the spring of '06 and was one of the OG importers. That first month of JP PSU was nuts! I made an account on NA PSU just to harass a few friends that didn't import, but I went back to JP after a major content update. I found it weird that NA PC/PS2 PSU didn't require entering a game key whereas JP did. Not sure if this was intentional or SoA just derped out. All you had to do was download it off a torrent site and just pay for online.

When PSO2 was announced in 2010, I'll admit I face-palmed. However after playing in the closed beta in April, I'll admit I liked what I saw. I was also pleased to see the amount of testing so as to not have a repeat of the derpfest that was PSU's early days. Lots of nice stuff coming down the pike. Let's hope they keep this up!

As for the title of this blog, it's a nod to an old site from PSO GC. It was among the first sites to have updated drop tables for Very Hard/Ultimate for each section ID. So to the creator of that site, if you're reading this and would like for me to change the name, I will.