Phantasy Star Online was highly anticipated and launched to positive reviews and commercial success critics praised the online gameplay as addictive but criticized the single-player mode. As Japanese internet service providers charged for dial-up access per minute, and high-speed connections were not yet widely available, Okawa personally paid for free internet access bundled with Japanese Dreamcasts. Using what they learned from the project, and taking significant inspiration from Diablo, Sonic Team built Phantasy Star Online. Sonic Team's experiments led to the development of ChuChu Rocket!, the first online Dreamcast game. Believing online play was the future, Sega chairman Isao Okawa instructed Sonic Team to develop an online game for the Dreamcast, produced by Yuji Naka. The story is unrelated to previous games in the Phantasy Star series.īefore Phantasy Star Online, online gaming was limited to western PC games, particularly RPGs such as Diablo, Ultima Online, and EverQuest. It was the first online RPG for game consoles players adventure with up to three others over the internet to complete quests, collect items and fight enemies in real-time action RPG combat. Phantasy Star Online is an online role-playing game (RPG) developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega in 2000 for the Dreamcast.
