Phantastical Speedos Online

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtw22QZzeEo]

This week we take a brief look at a year since PSO2’s release to see how things are shaping up for male outfits. To give some perspective, initially during PSO2’s summer release, females were given a titillating sexy bikini while males were confined to these bulky summer shorts. It was very perplexing — how could they squander on such an obvious opportunity?

A few weeks later Sega released a player survey allowing one to request their desires for the game. Me and a few others took advantage of this, leapt forth to our keyboards and in a huff wrote an angry— er.. calm rational request demanding bikinis for all. Several months later our prayers were answered…

Well not exactly, but it was a step in the right direction.

The bath towels were… interesting to say the least, they came in two sets, in regular and one drenched in water. Naturally the wet version was the first to give you a glimpse of the derriere. Yet it was hampered by this strange design choice from the development team. On the underside of the towel, the modelers decided to obscure the view of the underwear by filling it with elastic foam. No up towel shots for you!

The team decided to release another survey—with summer approaching fast, we had to to convince them somehow.

Then sure enough they came, and how glorious it was! I’ll admit, these bikinis were a bit of a shock to me. Back in Phantasy Star Universe (the previous flagship title), the bikinis were modest—for my tastes—and covered up enough to fall out of the skimpy category. Yet in PSO2, they took it one step further, slimming it around the sides, drawing your eyes towards the character’s package.

Mmm 上首尾だな!

The beach certainly creates the most natural backdrop for speedos, that and the added benefit of having one of the best areas for lighting in the game. However, the day/night transition is extremely fast, and our group wasted a lot of time waiting for the sun to rise.

One of the hidden benefits of having a speedo seems to be that it draws a crowd. As long as there’s two or more of us together, we seem to either receive the disdain of passers-by or attract a crowd of onlookers who like to take part in the experience. When you have Japanese players shouting “nice ass” in hiragana, you know you’ve gotten somewhere.

The game comes with several dancing animations, with new ones released every few weeks. They end up being quite expensive but worthwhile as evidenced in the YouTube video. The game has a neat little feature that lets you sync up your dance moves with other players. If you played Phantasy Star Universe, you’d know that it was such a pain to get everyone dancing at the same time. In this game, you can just click on someone and select to copy their dance moves.

Sometimes when we get left out of the sexy costumes we try to come up with our own variations—resulting in our playboy bunny outfit in response to this outfit. The game lets you customize your character with an assortment of accessories. There’s so many, that you could really come up with some interesting concepts. Like dance moves, accessories can sometimes be expensive and reach into the millions. Even though this is a free to play game, you can still make enough money to afford them without shelling out real cash.

But it’s time for us to depart, thanks to Ken and Cole for helping to make the video, and everyone who participated in the screenshots. Baragamer will be moving on to our next major project, #Roevember! See you soon!