Phantasy Star Nova

Phantasy Star Nova is an offshoot of Phantasy Star Online 2 that sees a special ARKS group crash land on the planet Machia, a world where photons are unusable. It plays somewhat like an offline version of PSO2 as it was in episodes 1 and 2, but with a more traditional mission/story structure and its own exclusive Halo and Pile Bunker weapons.

From a technical standpoint, Nova's engine appears to have closely reimplemented the building blocks of PSO2 within Tri-Ace's inhouse engine. Filenames and naming schemes are identical in many cases and even much of PSO2's metadata for various items survives, often output to .csv sheets.

Unused Areas#

basic_test_map.axs#

This appears to be a standard fare testing map. It doesn't appear in PSO2 or any other PS game. As can be seen in the 2nd picture, there are a number of nodes that hint at what might be able to happen in the test map, but it's hard to interpret further based on current knowledge of Nova's files.

Unused Items#

Super Saiyan Hair#

Surprisingly, Goku's super saiyan hair appears to be hidden in the game, set up and ready to be used as a normal character hair. There are also properly rendered male and female icons for this, as opposed to NPC items with no render, so it's likely this was intended to be used at some point.

Zaraki Kenpachi Hair#

The game also has Zaraki Kenpachi's hair hidden away. Like the Super Saiyan hair, everything is set to go, but it was never used.

References#