I just got my imported version of Phantasy Star Portable for the PSP from Japan. (Special thanks to my bro for hooking that up) The game is completely in Japanese and so far has no option to convert to English in any way so you either have to find a Japanese friend or tough it out. Luckily the game itself is very easy to follow and if you played enough Phantasy Star Universe like I did you will be able to pick out the symbols on screen and figure out what is what.

The game itself runs smoothly and pretty much is a scaled down version of Phantasy Star Universe for your PSP. Many of the same items, mobs and planets make another appearance in this version and one huge difference is the rate at which you gain experience, which is much faster in the PSP version. I played for about an hour in order to figure out the layout to create a character and navigate around the menus (agian these are all in Japanese) and managed to get my character to level 10 fairly easily.

Another major difference which I actually like is the fact that the ability to free roam around the city has been taken out. I don’t miss walking around form vendor to vendor, instead now you just click on a shop and it opens up from a mini map, makes the game play much faster.

I created a HuCast or Robot Hunter and took to the game very quickly. The gameplay is fluid and the buttons are pretty intuitive, your toughest part will be navigating the menus to equip items and set them up in your action bar. If you are a current fan of the Phantasy Star genre and especially of PSO or PSU this is definitely worth the import.

If we have any Japanese readers that could lend a hand in translating or have a translation just drop us a line. Rumors have been swirling of an English patch for the game or even since it has done so well in Japan that an English version could be hitting stateside but nothing confirmed just yet.

Stay tuned for a full review soon.