PSPortable: You Know Your Party AI is Stupid When...

1.) They get stuck on curving corners.

 

2.) It takes a minimum of five seconds for them to start fighting after the enemy has them surrounded.

 

3.) They ask you if you got lost when you go around a corner too fast.

 

4.) They will suggest strategies that are impossible to use, since they follow your every move, immediately abandoning whatever it was they were just doing.

 

5.) If you stand between them and a enemy monster, they'll slash/shoot/punch harmlessly--and stupidly--at you until you move.

 

 

The plot of Phantasy Star Portable's Story Mode is pretty thin. Your character's random muteness set aside, there is no build-up to the villain, no build-up to the story's crisis, no feeling to it at all. The characters tell you what's going on but you get no real feel of the threat at hand. The points of the main storyline are few and scattered far along the line.

 

The characters of PSP themselves don't help either. They appear, and then they disappear before you can get a hold of them, their personalities, why they're there, if they're just filler characters or not, etc. If you look back and think about it, the sub-plots couldn't have moved on without them, but as to the main storyline very few contribute to whatever it is you should be experiencing from it.

 

So to sum up this long two-paragraph story, don't expect an impact at all even from the supposed heart-wrenching plot twists. It's not worth the money buying PSP for the plot alone.