Localized menus aren't in Japanese, but they can be so detail-dense you'll think they are.

About two hours into Phantasy Star Portable, something I can identify with finally happens. "So this is what sadness feels like," sighs Vivienne, my new partner. Vivienne is a CAST -- a robot -- but she's of a new breed that can experience a realistic sort of emotion. The story arc of PS:P traces her progression from barely emotional automaton to ? well, something humanlike. More or less.

Though my character is almost always silent, typically expressing himself through the awful Japanese role-playing ellipse ("?"), he helps Vivienne along the path to being emotional. As she jaws with other characters (a couple of which persistently engage in various forms of sexual harassment, providing spare moments of uncomfortable hilarity) I'm occasionally given a moment to respond; these responses dictate the path her evolution takes.

It's an interesting thing, to some extent, playing this sort of "RPG by proxy." But the game is so Japanese that I always ended up smiling when I should have apologized, and vice versa. If nothing else, my hours spent with Phantasy Star Portable have taught me that my limited understanding of Japanese culture is perhaps best deployed in bars and nowhere else.

The character creation system is quite detailed, yet always spits out the same Extreme Schoolkids From the Future.

But story isn't really what PS:P is about. All the game really cares for is the grind. Anthropomorphized, this hack-and-slash extravaganza would be a mean little troll squatting on piles of trinkets, collections of old newspapers and a full set of Precious Moments figurines. It wants you to be a mean little troll, too. The story is just a way to lead you under the bridge.


You'll witness Vivienne's emerging humanity in between dozens of missions, all of which amount to moving forward, pushing square and triangle a few dozen times to attack, picking up whatever is dropped by monsters, and moving forward again -- repeat, repeat, repeat.

No matter how much stuff you pick up, no matter how you arrange it and power it up, the combat is always numbingly repetitive -- so much so that it is a mockery of the process of collecting and manipulating stuff. There is no strategy, not even real tactics. Just hitthebutton, hitthebutton, hitthebutton, hitthebutton. Yeah, I copy-pasted that phrase. Welcome to the gameplay of Phantasy Star Portable.

(OK; that's an oversimplification. A few conventions borrowed from brawlers inform the combat, like the multi-button attack combos for handheld weapons, through which you can power up strikes. Does this stuff make the battle more varied or interesting? Nope.)

It's good that Ice-T's kangaroo from "Tank Girl" finally got another role. And a sex change.

This is a sadness, because not only is there a lot of stuff to grab -- a ridiculously large amount of it, much graced with obscure names and identifying icons -- there's also a pretty good menu to put it to use in combat. You can assign items and weapon combos to one of six "Action Palette" slots, then quickly cycle through these configurations, even in the middle of battle. Special attacks (called Photon Arts) can be attached to weapons to further customize attacks.

If there was a reason to go to the trouble of collecting, evaluating, configuring and leveling up all this stuff I'd be in item-troll heaven.

There is no reason, beyond the compulsive need to keep playing. I can see why PS:P was a big hit in Japan, where trains and other public transport can take up hours of your day. An ad hoc multiplayer mode lets local players connect to play missions together in groups of four or less. Characters can seamlessly bounce between solo and multiplayer modes with all their stuff intact, which is better than some previous Phantasy Star games have managed.

The story could have made PS:P into a more appealing version of the awful grind we played in Konami's two Rengoku games; instead it's just another grind. To maximize UMD space, Sonic Team reduced all the story moments to streams of dialogue and static 2-D character portraits. Not such a bad thing, really, but the voice acting competes with high school theater productions for awkward characterization, and overly verbose localization makes the dialogue sequences drag.

If Sonic Team were honest about things, they'd just make exploration with a big map screen.

Visually, this is a reasonable approximation of Phantasy Star Universe, from which most of the game systems and mythology are carried over. But the mission instances are so bland that you'll pay more attention to the mini-map for orientation than the actual environments. Draw distance is pathetically shallow, so details are always popping into existence. Then again, that's more interesting than the artificial intelligence and monster assortment.

After the dominance of World of Warcraft, I'd expect games that emphasize the grind to at least feel pressure to work harder. Phantasy Star Portable feels lazy in the sense that it tacks an inconsequential story onto all the stuff from the PlayStation 2 (and Xbox 360) Phantasy Star Universe. If we're going to ruin thumbs button-mashing through a grind-fest, we should at least offer the sacrificial digits up to a title that cares.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.