Fun With Fake Friends

This weekend I learned about a fun system in Phantasy Star Online, in part thanks to my good friend PizzaMaid. However since I have way more friends showing up through Xbox Live than I do friend avatars available I thought I would take a few moments today to talk about this system. First off at a high level Friend Avatars allow you to run around with up to 3 copies of your friends characters, pending they have gone through the process of registering an avatar. These are going to be weaker versions of their own characters, but nonetheless are a bit of a buff when playing through content as they do a non-zero amount of damage, healing and buffing.

Creating your Own Friend Avatar

This system like so many begins with the Visiphone, aka the kiosk with the purpleish pink ? inside of a rotating oval. By now you should in theory make yourself familiar with this interface as it is also how you access this games version of the auction house, aka the Personal Shop. I’ve pasted together several of the UI screens showing the process of selecting the Friend Avatar option, choosing to Add and Avatar and then the settings that I currently have filled out for mine.

From what I understand the personality means nothing really, but the Attributes and Title impact how your avatar will perform in battle. I’ve not found a good NA guide to the settings, but here is one that I attempted to follow for my settings. I took that list and compiled it with the North American names here as a Google Sheet. I chose Hot and Cold which is known in the Japanese region as Tsundere and makes it so that they get better the more times you use them. Ready for War appears to translate to the “Battle Ready” option which means they have their weapons out and ready in advance which seemed useful. Lastly I checked the “Make Me Visible to Non-Friend Players” because whenever someone runs with your Avatar you earn some “FUN” currency as a result.

Real quick side note. You are going to have to go through this menu system every so often to update your Friend Avatar, as it will be snapshot at the moment it was created. Pretty much each day I go through and update mine so that as I gain new levels my friends will have access to those levels as well. The Avatar will in theory scale to the level of your friends, but it will be capped by the actual levels that you as a player have earned.

Running with the Avatars of your Friends

You can access your friends avatars when you are just about to start a mission and are in this pre-loading area. Head over to the terminal that has an Orange “i” icon which gives you access to choose some characters to take along with you. In theory for most expeditions and such you can take three avatars with you. I have found a few missions that limit you to only having one, and others like Urgent Missions won’t let you take any with you.

Once again I have pasted together several of the interface screens so that you could see the various options. The first menu allows you to choose one of the NPCs that you have gained some affinity for. Right now I only have two showing up which are Afin and Io. The next tab over shows you all of your friends that are available for running content. I have no clue what the “Support” tab does as I have nothing currently listed there, but the last tab labelled “Free” gives you access to the Avatars of random strangers. The avatars you have not run with that day show up as having “Fun Available” beside them, but in truth I ran a bunch of content yesterday and I believe I hit some sort of internal cap until reset.

Now you too can run around with what feels like your own personal army. I tend to largely pick classes that have a decent chance of healing or buffing me, because they seem to be more efficient than classes that attack things. They are by no means a “pet” and will ultimately have a mind of their own, but thankfully the game doesn’t seem to have a version of “in combat” that actually matters or blocks you from doing anything.

The Symbol Art System

Another random system that I learned about this weekend through my friend Ashgar is the Symbol Art system. If you are hanging out in the Gate area and someone throws out a message with a picture in it, then you have experienced Symbol Art. Based on my limited understand, there is an in game editor that allows folks to draw images as well as supposedly a windows based tool that you can import images from. What you end up with is a recipe for lewds and offensive content. So before you get any further into this system consider yourself warned.

In fact it took me a bit to find some pages that were relatively safe to show you in order to explain the system. You can access your symbol art collection from the Gear Icon and choosing Symbol Art. By default you won’t actually have anything, but the piece that Ash figured out is that the game seems to keep a rolling history of every piece of symbol art that you have seen. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the Personal Shop and as a result I have seen a TON of symbol art. At the top of the screen there is a drop down that lets you change over and view your history, and then from there you can save any image to your permanent collection.

And there we go, two new systems that I have talked about. The personal avatar system is pretty great and I am enjoying running around with an army of minions. I’ve also figured out where to spend my Memories of Ragol tokens, allowing me to look like a Phantasy Star Online 1 era RACast which pleases me greatly. All in all I am still really enjoying the game, but also still extremely confused about the finer details. I will likely continue to keep posting random observations like this, so hopefully you find them helpful.