Phantasy Star Nova will be set in the same world as Phantasy Star Online 2 but will drop many of the online elements and take on a much more single player approach. If the idea of playing without your friends sounds horrifying, the game will include 4-player co-cop play. The title takes place on Planet Machia, a planet where 'Photon' energy is useless. Without the ability to recover energy or upgrade your weapons, players must take survival into their own hands, exploring the planet of Machia and unlocking the secrets it has to offer. The creatures inhabiting Machia are giant beasts appropriately named 'Gigantes.' In order to take these massive brutes down, you'll need to find and hit their weak spots together with your allies. Sega also implemented tweaks based off the Phantasy Star Nova battle demo into the game. After the first demo, tri-Ace increased character movement speed by 1.4x, reduced input delay, fixed issues with locking on to enemies, and fine tuned the speed of the camera, among other improvements.
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Phantasy Star Nova served as an "offline" counterpart to PSO2. It's also the last Phantasy Star game that's not an MMO or mobile game of some kind. It's also the last game in the series to use the "just attack" system, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
The premise is that an expedition team from ARKS is shot down while looking for unknown planets, landing on said planet. Here, none of their typical "photon" energy works anymore, and they have to find a way to survive via alternative means, and get off the planet alive.
Most of the enemies you'll fight are variations of familiar PSO2 enemies. There are also these big, hulking beasts made of organic+inorganic matter known as "Gigantes" roaming the planet's surface. To combat them, your team invents two new weapon classes: Halos and Piles. Halos create floating platforms that give you a much better vantage point to fight Gigantes from, and the same can be done using a consumable item. Piles are a bit more interesting. After you break some armor off a Gigantes, there'll be a pulsating yellow weak point beneath, and that's where you want to fire your Piles. When the Gigantes is at low health, you can give the "ignition" command, which will cause a "GRAN LINK" that captures the Gigantes. After that's done, you can summon said Gigantes in missions for massive firepower, even against other Gigantes.
As for standard gameplay, it really is PSO2. You choose a class, level it up to gain abilities, level up those abilities, etc. My hat goes off to the "just attack" system though. The combat could rapidly descend into mindless button mashing if it weren't this system. It trains you into a rhythm where you perform your next attack right when the circle around your character becomes red, granting higher damage output. Combat can still get mindless, but at least you're still paying attention.
Overall, I just think Nova is a really cool title, even if a bit simple in execution, and lacking the MMO appeal that can help fill the void in PSO2. Seeing that this game came out in 2014 on a system that was...less than popular, I have to wonder if this is the last single-player, story-focused, portable Phantasy Star game we'll ever get. PSO2: New Genesis already did away with the "just attack" system in favor of something more conventional, and a more open-world structure. I hope that's not the case, but I enjoyed this title regardless. If you want to play it, I'll leave some links down below that help with the more obtuse stuff.
(Enemy/Item drop locations (use a translator extension in your web browser of choice))
(Tips that really helped me with capturing Gigantes)
