I took a bit of a break this year from videos, and this Phantasy Star Online video was intended to be a little bit of a warm-up. Whenever I try to do a less intense video, I always try to go back to making video versions of old articles. However, the script typically changes so much that it doesn’t save any time.
I’m not sure how much I’ve mentioned it before, but for years, I’ve wanted to explore why I like the gameplay mechanics of PSO in a bit more depth. There’s a simple and relaxing 3-hit combo system to PSO, but I also knew there was more depth than that. This video really gave me the opportunity to dive into the core mechanics of PSO. Thankfully, I think the old Shortcut Window article I wrote forever ago was a good guiding light on where to look for the depth I enjoy out of the game.
Ultimately, as an influential early online game on console, PSO is a game I feel like we all to often rely on personal memories to recount its successes. I wanted to avoid going deep into that topic since a lot of people have told their tales in that regard.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think I found a good balance between mentioning PSO’s historical significance and its place in the early online gaming industry without getting too bogged down in the details or personal tales.
Ultimately, in my eyes, PSO is a strong enough game to stand on its own. The forever-in-progress FFXI video attempts to bring this part of that experience out as well, so this is a successful draft run.
The script’s structure of the video is where I think things get a bit iffier. I’m not quite sure why, but I hid the Shortcut Window toward the back of the video. This created a weird situation where I think I was info dumping about what PSO was as a game without the context of why the user needed to know it.
When I realized this was an issue and thought about how to restructure the video, I was already far along enough in the video process that I didn’t want to rework it. This was intended to be a warm-up video after a break, so I didn’t want to start but scrapping a bunch of work.
In the end, it makes the video feel like I’m dragging the viewer along. My plea toward the last third of the video for the user to keep watching wasn’t really scripted; I just felt like I was reading the script long enough without getting to the point that I wanted to acknowledge to the viewer that we were getting there soon.
I’m glad I was able to include that naturally, for a light bit of humor. But that isn’t really the ideal solution.
One ongoing issue I have with making videos is sometimes I play way more of a game than I really need to. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But I spent a good number of hours playing PSO for pretty minimal benefit in terms of footage. I was trying to provide a variety of footage, but since I was really focusing on the Dreamcast version, I opted to keep the video to PSO Episode 1 specifically, which is only four total dungeons. Episode 2, which includes four more, was only included in the GameCube and Xbox releases, so I opted to leave them out to prevent confusion. The idea was to have various character classes to offset the more static imagery, but ultimately, I think it was a pretty minimal benefit.
Of course, I got the personal benefit of playing some PSO on my own, but that’s time I could have spent elsewhere having more fun.
Overall, for a video I sort of fumbled together, I’m pretty happy with it! Both from a quality perspective and view-wise. It did much better than I expected and at least for now is growing steadily. Though I’d say looking at the comment section, I’m mostly hitting existing Phantasy Star Online fans. Typically I try to aim at people who are less invested in a topic.
I think spending more time on thumbnails generally has been paying off as well. I spend multiple days creating and drafting them now. It can be a bit hard to tell what combination of elements ultimately results in more people clicking through.
As for the future of PSO coverage, I’m not really sure. It’s been a really long time since I talked about the series, though I could see myself wanting to better understand more of the community aspects of the game and what kept me coming back. But I don’t think I’ll explore that any time soon, hence why I paired this video with a podcast with two people who actively play the game today.
Phantasy Star Zero is also its own unique love of mine, so that may be worth digging into in the future as well. But that likely won’t be any time soon. First I need to wrap up the Nintendo video, which you can hear the rough draft audio for here.
