back in 2018, three of my friends and i played PSO splitscreen for like 3 weeks straight. they came over to my apartment and basically lived there. whenever one of us would go to work the rest of us would just sit there and grind until they got back home so we'd could progress. they would sleep at my place and we would send one person out to get food on rotation. it was some of the most degenerate gaming i've ever experienced in my life but it was so, so fun. i really wish i could do something like that again. just get a bunch of friends together and no life PSO again.
anyway, someone ported PSO to browser and it is really fuckin cool. i heard that title screen music and it just brought back the memories. hard to believe that was already 8 years ago, and PSO in some form or another has stuck with me since then.
@beardalaxy I experienced PSO pretty early in my life but can't remember how. Probably some kind of private server shit because I definitely didn't have the hardware/region for it at the time. Seemed like a really cool game though.
@Vo the game has an offline mode so it could have been that too
@beardalaxy I think it was "Blue Burst" that I played, definitely was online but again don't know how
@Vo blue burst is on PC, yeah. you would have been playing it online. it had global releases i'm pretty sure so it shouldn't have been an issue. pso2 was locked to JP (mostly) for a very long time but PSO was largely available everywhere, as were a lot of other online phantasy star games.
@beardalaxy I do remember jumping through some hoops but I think those hoops would be seen as trivial in retrospect
@Vo dude, the hoops you had to jump through to play pso2 back when it was JP only lol. The captcha was in Japanese and it was timed so you had to be so fast with it. Took several attempts, and the other guys I was playing with at the time had to get our friend who knows Japanese to help them haha. That kept out the RMT bots though, which were such a big problem for global that they just straight up removed p2p trading from the game. Really sucks actually.
I never bought anything in pso2jp because that was even more of a ballache. You had to get on the Japanese Google Play store and download a mobile tie-in game and then get Japanese Google Play cards from one of those intermediary sites, then you could get the premium currency on your app and transfer it to pso2. Just not worth the headache at all lol.
@Vo it's alright lol there is a global version now, no need to jump through that hoop anymore xD although, it does mean i've spent way more on the game than i ever intended to 
@beardalaxy Fuck. Glad I experienced what I could of the franchise before shit like Google Play got involved