Phantasy Star Portable 2 isn’t quite out in America yet — that’ll be saved for mid-September — but Japan’s already receiving a rather extensive update to the PSP online RPG. Sega officially announced Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity in that region today, an expansion that improves nearly every aspect of the game in one form or another.
“We’re emphasizing the fact that this is not a simple upgrade,” producer Satoshi Sakai told Famitsu magazine. “We aimed to pursue the very limit of the online RPG genre on the PSP with Phantasy Star Portable 2, and we put everything we wanted into the game. At the same time, though, we still felt we could do more, and now Infinity is going beyond the limit. The story alone is half again as large as PSP2’s.”
Indeed, Infinity will feature a whole “Episode 2″ which picks up where the original PSP2’s story ends. The central character of this episode is Nagisa, a mysterious young woman who seems to have no problem wielding gigantic Cloud Strife-size swords around. “Nagisa is lacking in general common sense a bit, and she has a personal mission in mind,” Sakai commented. “You can’t tell if she’s friend or foe at the beginning, but you’ll want to watch her as she kindles a friendship with Emilia and Yuto and begins to grow herself.” (All the other races are getting a visual facelift, too.)
Nagisa is a “duman,” a new race of mutated human beings that’s making their playable debut in Infinity. Dumans are described by Sakai as highly warlike in nature — “they can be summed up as ‘magic swordsmen’; they are highly skilled in all attacks, but weak in defense. Players will need to be able to deftly dodge enemy attacks with them, so they are somewhat geared towards advanced gamers.”
In addition to the big updates, Sakai and team are planning a wagonload of smaller fixes and improvements. Partly in order to celebrate PSO’s 10th anniversary in Japan, Infinity will feature PSO-style visual lobbies in online mode, as well as a variety of monster from the old games. There’s a skill-reset system that lets you reconstruct players if they’re below a certain level, a new screenshot applet, and “mission codes” you can trade with friends in ad-hoc mode. “There are a great variety of mission codes,” Sakai explained. “They may unlock missions with high rare item drop rates, or missions where dragons show up, and so on. Combining codes together can also give you new mission codes — a mission with high rare item drop rates where you get to fight a dragon.”
The Infinity update is slated for a winter release in Japan.
