Ladies and gentlemen, today I’m very happy to announce that Phantasy Star Online’s reign as the only online multiplayer RPG on the Dreamcast has come to an end as Rune Jade is now back online thanks to the work of flyinghead! For those of you unfamiliar with this game, Rune Jade was actually the very first online RPG on the Dreamcast, beating PSO by a few months. That being said, it unfortunately didn’t last long, with the servers being only online for just one year and one month before being shuttered. The month the server shut down was ironically the same month Phantasy Star Online v.2 was released in North America. Honestly don’t think it stood much of a chance against PSO, not just because it was a third-party game going up against a juggernaut AAA first-party title, but because players also needed to shell out 300 yen for a Play Pass to play Rune Jade online. Going up against Sega’s own RPG which was free to play online (at least the first iteration anyway), the writing may have been on the wall from the very beginning.
That being said, Rune Jade is actually a really solid RPG and opts for a very different play style than PSO. Those of you familiar with the Diablo series or similar dungeon crawlers will feel right at home here. One of the coolest features of this game is that the game’s many dungeons are all randomly generated so no two playthroughs are ever the same. This may be something quite common these days within very popular rogue-like genre but back when this came out, this was a really unique feature. Just like PSO, the game is a hybrid online/offline game, allowing you to use the same character online as you do offline. At any time during play, you can head over to the “Netmaster” and connect to the internet to join up to three other players in some online dungeon crawling shenanigans.
I’ve actually played quite a bit of this game myself as I attempted a translation quite a few years back. I never actually completed it as it turned out to be quite the monumental task, with over 100 missions and each character class having their own storyline. That being said, I did manage to translate most of the menus, all of the in-game items, and the dialog with shop NPCs. I even translated the online lobby in anticipation of the servers being revived one day, and now I finally get to see my work! Upon checking out the game online for the first time, I did notice there were a lot of untranslated menus which made things a bit tricky to navigate, so I actually went ahead and did some more translation work there in order to make things much easier. It’s still not nearly a complete translation but my goal was to just make it easy to get online and playing, which I think I’ve accomplished.
If you’d like to jump online yourself, you can download the patched and translated image from the Downloads page. You’ll need to be running DreamPi 2.0 and you’ll need a unique “Login ID” in your web browser settings as this will be used as your account name when playing online. If you still have your ID set to “dream”, you won’t be able to connect to the server.
As always, be sure to check the Connection Guide for all the info you need on how to connect.
If you have any issues with the server, feel free to report them in the comments below. Huge thanks to flyinghead for yet another online game added to our selection! See ya’ll in the dungeons!