lately i’ve been playing Phantasy Star Online on the Ephinea fan server. for the unfamiliar, PSO is an extremely fun & addicting 3d sci-fi Diablo clone by Yuji Naka’s Sonic Team, originally released in 2000. PSO is special for its stylish visuals, amazing soundtrack, and its unique approach to combat that emphasizes spacing and knowing the often quirky rhythm of your weapon’s attacks over button mashing
Ephinea provides a “vanilla plus” experience with modern conveniences like experience points being shared across the whole party and item drops instanced per player while leaving basically everything else alone. i’ve been enjoying this little trip down memory lane and wanted to invite others to join me!
i wanna play!
getting set up on a 20+ year old online game that hasn’t had official servers in more than a decade sounds daunting, but Ephinea makes it really easy. just go here, sign up for an account, and download their client. no emulation necessary, no modded gamecubes, etc, all you need is a PC. a gamepad is probably a good idea but PSO is completely playable on keyboard alone.
there are technical troubleshooting tips there too but tbh it’s an ancient PC game, it should run on a toaster. that said, i highly recommend turning off all of Ephinea’s optional graphics options (bloom, AA, etc,) picking DirectX9 or above, a good widescreen resolution, and using Reshade and these CRT Royale shaders for that ideal y2k vibe~
my username there is infophysics & my Lv16 RAmarl is named WORSTGIRL. i’ve set up a selectbutts Team, i think we have to meet in game for me to add folks to it?? we’ll figure that out as we go.
i’m far from an expert on this game but it’s a really relaxing chill time and i’m happy to answer questions best i can <3
edit: for people who’ve played this before – when making your character just name them whatever, you can use the /modsecid chat command in the lobby to set your section ID to whatever you want once, ie. /modsecid Pinkal will set your section ID to Pinkal the next time you log in
