For 3 or 4 years now I've been playing Phantasy Star Universe every Friday and Saturday night (or most nights, anyway) with Clark, Jim and my hubby. Sometimes my sis joined in too. It was something we could look forward to doing every weekend... a constant in life.

By the end of 2009 I'd gotten my main character, Reina Hidalgo, very close to the level cap (160, or is it higher now, not sure). I maxed her levels in 6 classes: Fighgunner (still my favorite ever), Guntecher (my 2nd favorite, yay for bows!), Fortegunner, Fortefighter, Protranser (EX traps rule) and Acrofighter. I'm very close to maxing Gunmaster and was determined to start on Fighmaster next, the melee weapon equivalent to the Gunmaster class, more or less. (Spear is one of their favored weapons... I love spears!)

But now it's all going to be gone at the end of March. :( We knew this would happen, the PC/PS2 servers have such loooowww activity compared to Xbox servers. But it's sad to see. All those hours of play (over 1000), yet even if I did get an Xbox I wouldn't be able to transfer all those levels over.

So... I've been sitting around messing with... ?!? a 3-day trial of Tabula Rasa. Yeah, wtf? Me poking at another MMO? But yeah, I felt like it. And so I did.

Now keep in mind that 1) I don't play a lot of MMOs to begin with, and 2) I never even played the TR beta, which I've heard was horrific. I especially (argh!!) hate when people feel the need to compare every single MMO that comes out with World of Warcraft. Especially with a game that's quite obviously science fiction, and taking cues more from FPS gameplay than the old mouse-click to attack and stack abilities on top of each other stuff. (Well, it does have some of that too. But the gameplay is not as dependent on it.)

Anyway, that means I'm pretty much immune to the bad press TR has gotten initially and from longtime MMO players. And I can say quite honestly that I enjoy this game.