#phantasyposting

[harpy-of-the-storm]

A Rambling Post about the way Lyrical Music is used in Phantasy Star Online

Cool let's get started.

When you start a new character, or if you wait on the title screen, this will play.

It's a song that swells with hope for...well, a whole new world. That's the general plot of Phantasy Star Online, which starts the After Unification War timeline. We've messed up our home planet, Earth Coral and we're sailing the sea of stars to find a new one.

However, I wouldn't say that The Whole New World only represents the planet Ragol as a hope for continued human civilization in-setting. I'd argue that it also represents Phantasy Star Online's bold push to bring online multiplayer gameplay to the living room, albeit this is perhaps a retrospective view that would not have been as visible at the time.

The lyrics are definitely compact - just two verses of four lines each.

Innumerable stars Won't tell us where to go It's a long, long run To the palace in the sun

With hopes and dreams Our ship will cross the sea To the whole new world Shining like a pearl The whole new world

Which is itself an interesting comparison to the ending theme of Episode 1, Can Still See the Light. This theme has a few variants - one in which the lyrics are replaced with "la-la-la" vocalizations, an instrumental piano, and later a wind orchestra variant.

However, I'd like to talk about the lyrical one.

Contrasting The Whole New World in a few ways, Can Still See the Light has a lot to say. Take, for instance, the opening two verses.

Wish for peace Wish for dreams Wish for love You are gone Without saying goodbye

Starry sky I can still see the light You've saved And I think of you tonight Soon the dawn will come again What have I got What has it cost me

...So we've clearly moved on from the hopeful ship that set sail from Coral. This talks about the wishes that are held, or perhaps were once held...and begins talking about the sacrifices that were made in order to make them real.

It talks about those innumerable stars. How they're still visible, and how the singer thinks of the person who made that possible for her. But, she questions the price of seeing another day.

I can feel you are near Within me, outer space Here and there Tell me please How much we have to bleed When we'll get the land of dreams After lonely bitter days

Here, she's saying she knows she hasn't lost this person she's singing about - not entirely, she still feels the subject of the song is with her; yet she begs an answer, which I'd argue it seems she doesn't believe she'll get. How long? How much? What do we have to give to make it all the way?

Why must I do it alone?

It's really the "after lonely bitter days" line that makes me think...she knows she's talking to empty air.

Lastly, the song closes with a somber refrain of the questions above; about the price of a new day. Except on the final refrain, the singer asks it directly.

Why can I still see the light You've saved Though you are now out of sight Soon the dawn will come again But what have I got What has it cost me

With this one word changed, from now to why, we change the entire framing of the verse. She no longer seems happy - if indeed she ever was - that she can see the light of a new dawn. Instead, she's asking a hopeless question.

Why is she still here?

Phantasy Star Online's second episode doesn't get a new opening theme - it reuses The Whole New World, which admittedly does hint at a deeper level of the plot. As we move in to and finish Episode 2, however, we are awarded a new ending theme to chain things together - World With Me.

This song pleads. Gently. Softly. Entreating the listener to stay and weather the storm together.

It opens with verses saying how the singer understands your feelings of unease, how you feel overwhelmed. And understands answers where a prospective listener to the song is saying it's too much, too hard - they can't let it go.

And she assures you, gently, that you have to. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing's going to remain the same. So all we can do is believe, and choose to keep living, right?

The entire understanding of World With Me is that, you are someone's forever. You are someone's want. You are something to someone.

It's fairly generically 2000s, I think, as far as the song itself goes as a standalone. Telling you not to give up, to believe in love, that nothing is permanent so you have to keep holding on. It's pretty standard feel-good-and-stay-motivated talk, right?

I think, though, that it's important in the context it's provided in. Phantasy Star Online is not a game with a lot of hope. You save the world but kill the girl. You have to overthrow the government just a little bit. All of your heroes are dead and a solid quarter to a third of the monsters you've been fighting were once people who are now horribly mutated by the ancient evil that was sealed on the planet the game takes place on. You're trapped in a time loop that will ultimately end in your failure and the ravaging of the universe.

And you are being asked to hold on and keep fighting. To believe that help is on the way - that it is possible to be saved as you stand alone against all of this.

Lastly, I am going to double back a bit for one more "lyrical track" that does a great job at being what it is.

This is the theme of the final boss of Episode 1. It does not have recognizable lyrics. There is a sound in the background that is representing lyrics which starts about 70 seconds in. However, it is not strictly legible as anything other than some sort of background choir.

You are not meant to know what this is, or what it is saying. You are facing an unstoppable, soul-devouring, reality-warping force of destruction that has you in its own personal arena that it designed just to fight and kill you.

Everything about this fight is meant to unsettle you, but the addition of uncanny valley not-quite-lyrics?

I did have to throw this in as an honorable mention.

[astralphantasy]

if any of you know a good site i can order a body pillow from hmu~

i need to get one for a certain body pillow cover that i’m hopefully getting soon :3c

[harpy-of-the-storm]

Disorganized Thoughts - Unnoticeable Game Design in Phantasy Star Online

Earlier I posted about the way Phantasy Star Online uses lyrical themes to convey messages of hope and loss and grit. However, there's something else I'd like to touch upon.

When you play Phantasy Star Online, you might not realize that every indoor room has a textured ceiling. Some of these you simply cannot see, and others you can only see because they are low, or because the camera dips to a floor-facing-up kind of angle for increased tension during a Quest.

Sometimes rooms are simply big enough that if you stand at one end, you can adjust your camera slightly to see the ceiling of the other side. However, most of the time you are focused on clearing the area and likely do not notice.

But...it's there. While Episode 1 has Forest take place almost entirely outdoors, the Central Dome where the boss fight against Dragon takes place is enclosed, and it has a damaged interior.

The entirety of Caves, save a select few rooms which "open to the sky" and thus fade to a massive colorful light source, have textured ceilings. Most of these you cannot really look at, and honestly if you aren't in a hallway you flat out can't look too closely at all in normal gameplay.

Phantasy Star Online's camera controls do not go to the floor like some Quests do. Not when they're in your control. They go up to your character's back. So it can be very difficult to see up.

Playing through after thinking about this, it was easy to notice just how often the game does afford me the chance to see it...and how often that meant I hadn't taken a look. I felt a little sad, really.

Phantasy Star Online is the kind of game to let its story be heavily optional. Not just "you can jump right to online" optional, but I mean even offline it is optional. The little orange capsules that tell you tutorial information are the same capsules which would deliver the game's plot to you.

And you can skip them. You don't ever have to read a single one.

You wouldn't know that Rico Tyrell left them. Yes, the same Rico Tyrell you're on a quest to investigate the disappearance of, because her dad is your boss. You'd miss her anti-government and anti-military stances. You'd miss her self-depreciation about how she's not a hero, she's just the woman who was there to fill the shoes that needed filling. Her resolve that even if it won't make her any richer, she wants to be the helping hand, and that she wants to solve this mystery.

You'd miss her whole story. That you've been just a little bit behind her this whole time.

And you were still just too late to save her.

In my previous post, I discussed the lyrical themes this game employs, one of which is Can Still See the Light. This is a song that plays as part of the ending cinematic for Phantasy Star Online's first episode, during which the famous "Red Ring" bracelet that Rico wore spins down over the course of the song until it comes to a rest.

...This has only ever been speculation, of course. Just...if Rico is the one singing. That last refrain takes on a new meaning, right? Where the singer asks, Why can I still see the light?

If it's Rico singing...she'd have a good reason to ask that.

She died, after all. Why would she, of all people, still be able to see the light you saved?

Well...I guess that moves me in to my last segment of disorganized thoughts here.

The names many of the themes in the game have are interesting. You won't know they're called this while playing, so if you're looking them up on YouTube for the first time you're probably searching "phantasy star online dragon theme" and you might be surprised to learn it's called Growl, from the Depths of the Earth.

It has a matching theme in Episode 2, with the boss of VR Spaceship, Gol Dragon - Growl, from the Digital Haze.

Every area notably has a "Part 1" and "Part 2", which are calm, no enemy themes for Part 1; and more frantic, oh shit fighting is happening themes for Part 2, without fail.

Episode 1 just calls them that - Forest is Mother Earth, of Dishonesty part 1 and part 2. There's something to be said for the name itself, how Ragol seemed a perfect world to escape to, but it held danger just beneath the surface.

The winding tunnels of Caves are represented with The Kink in the Wind and the Way, with its boss - a mutated leech that has grown to unimaginable proportions and now lives in acidic sewage runoff from Mines - has the theme From Seeing the Rough Wave, which...I admit I don't have much to say about the name of, but I do think the theme is baller. I've kind of wondered if "rough wave" is just because it's a somewhat aquatic boss that lives in acid, but there's not much I feel able to put together, unfortunately.

Mines has Empty Space, out of Control, due to how the research and guard machines are no longer under the control of the researchers who were building a lab here. It has two boss themes, as the boss - Vol Opt, the control program for the Mines base - has two phases.

The Crazy Program - it rather is humanity's habit to judge any machine not operating the way they like it as crazy, huh? You Have Nowhere to Go - Okay, actually, so when Vol Opt pulls out an entire missile-launching, smashing-pillar-summoning, self-healing, player-killing war body that takes up 90% of the room you fight it in?

...Maaaybe that's a little off the rails, yeah, gotcha.

Lastly, I'll stop with Episode 1 this time and talk about Ruins to close this out. We have Revolution to the Origin, which hints forward about a bit of the truth behind the mystery of Ragol; and the boss themes.

There's a few of these, so stick with me here.

The Nearest Place to Heaven is what you hear when you arrive. It's a tranquil piece for a tranquil place, but both the flower field and the song have something off about them.

Between the massive obelisk, the lack of exit in the cave you apparently just came from, the bird song in the background being prerecorded, and the waxing and waning sounds of some kind of firefight or alarms which will overtake the Part 1 variant if you sit around long enough, you want out of here.

Touching the obelisk will trigger Part 2 of The Nearest Place to Heaven, as well as a grotesque transformation of the battlefield. The field of flowers will vanish - it was never real, anyway. You are left with the silently screaming faces of the souls the final boss has devoured as their bones rise as spindle-thin, razor-sharp spinning tops from the ground, gloomy purple flame-like souls caged in some of them still.

Now you understand why this is the nearest place to heaven.

It's as close as you'll be getting before you're eaten, too.

...Well. You're the protagonist, so nuts to that! Defeat a set amount of the bone spindles and you're rewarded with the actual boss and its first theme:

Pray, for IDOLA the Distorted.

The distorted, huh...if you look close, there's a figure that's loosely in tandem with the overall giant's movements, attached to its body; and around that smaller figure's left wrist...

Is a red bracelet.

I did say you were too slow, didn't I?

Defeat this form, and the one that follows; unlock Hard mode; and get here again to be rewarded with the third and true form of the final boss.

Cry, for IDOLA the Holy.

Cry. Because you couldn't save her.

Cry. Because her form is gone, leaving only a gaping maw and a terror reborn.

Cry. There is nothing holy here.

There is only you. Your weapon. Your will.

And the monster before you.

Cry your tears when it's done.