The Nightmare Fuel page for Phantasy Star Online.
- The loneliness of the areas can get to you; aside from monsters or NPC escort missions, you're the only one there.
- Dark Falz. "Hey we finally beat the game! Good job gu—WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?"
- Pay attention in the story opening, and you'll see the silhouette of his form awakening when Pioneer 1 and 2 tried to contact one another. While maybe not quite to scale with his actual fight later on, he easily is almost as big as, if not larger, than an entire human colony.
- When you enter the Dark Falz's lair, all you see is a pretty blue sky and green grass. It seems you have beaten the game and about to collect your spoils, but no, the sky turns black and the nice green grass warps itself to tiles of screaming faces. Then Falz shows up. . .
- Oh hell, everything about Dark Falz is pure, concentrated nightmare. If the above notes hadn't convinced you already, let's take a closer look, shall we? Dark Falz is found sealed in a space ship. And yet the last two floors look like the innards of some giant monster complete with pulsing, squishy organs, weird, gigantic yellow/orange blood cells floating in you're-best-not-asking-what, and loogies plastered as far as the eye can see shaped like spider webs. When you finally meet him, you are greeted with the sight of a monstrously mutated humanoid thing that shoots little spikey things that come after you and has powerful techs that get even worse for every new form he takes.
- And if you didn't already pick up from the hints before you face Falz... Falz can infect another living creature and infect them beyond recognition to the most hideous abominations capable of making Nemesis look as cute and cuddly as a puppy. Rico charged into battle before you did, so take a wild guess what happened to her. Really, guess. What's more,as an added bundle of fun, Dark Falz doesn't have to do anything to infect you even while he's already infecting something else as his body, because just coming in contact with his hordes of spikey mooks and getting reckless enough to be scratched by them is enough to start the fun. And by "spikey mooks" we mean the hordes and hordes of spikey goodness that swarms you the minute you get anywhere near his precious obelisk. Good thing you are just too awesome to be affected by any of Falz's infections, because in Episode II you'll see someone else who wasn't so blessed, and promptly got infected. You even get to personally meet him later on, and although he did get the added boost of being combined with an AI and his dark-energy-based sword, just imagine that that could've been you had the game and story segregation gods not loved you enough.
- And just in case you didn't notice, your battleground is covered in twisted faces, writhing in agony.
- Just to add to the atmosphere, oh god, the music. The first thing you hear when you warp to the field is The Nearest Place to Heaven
. Well, hey! This is kinda nice. Little piano music and birds...why are the birds obviously looping? Must be a lazy track editor...is...is it making a noise? Like a...hazy sorta, distorted noise in the background? And then all the eeriness just adds up over each other and you start to feel real uneasy. Just go near that obelisk and—oh dear god, what the hell is going on. When did I start playing Silent Hill?! W-what are these things?! Why is the music crying at me? Then Dark Falz shows up. The music transitions wonderfully into a grungy sort of techno perfect for a final boss. But it's okay, you beat it! Let's tackle Hard Mode. Ha, beat him agai— what is this, I don't even. You finally realize this just isn't a big monster; that music? That look? You are fighting a god. The tracks in all just work wonderfully at emulating exactly what you're all ready feeling.
- The Seabed in Episode II and the Apocalyptic Log contained within. As you move through the dungeon, the logs cover the mutation and corruption of Heathcliff Flowen. Then, you encounter a log entry that's just heavy static interspersed with rambling nonsense. Only the next time you get to speak to your NPC guide, she nervously informs you that it wasn't a recording; it was a transmission from elsewhere in the facility.
- Just the name of the final boss arena is somehow disturbing on a very subtle level: Test Subject Disposal Area.
- The noises Olga Flow makes when you first enter the boss area are disturbing in the extreme.
- In Episode III, it's revealed that the players really are beating Dark Falz and Olga Flow over and over again, with them getting stronger each time, and eventually strong enough to break free of their confines and destroy everything with no one capable of stopping them.
- The implications that the "germ" that is used for weapons research isn't simply a case of Evil Is Not a Toy, but deliberately engineered to be absolutely enticing to weapons development and research solely to bait another Falz-like infection outbreak. And, as far as the lore and greater scope of this continuity goes, something only loosely referred to as the "Great Shadow" seems to be stirring all of it, which may as well be the Profound Darkness in all but an uttered name for all we know. For an extra kick in the pants, this was never picked up on again or resolved, unless you happen to believe this game is somehow loosely in the same canon as later titles like Phantasy Star Online 2 by some unknown means, so even with Ragol finally being able to be colonized the Pioneer crews have no way to know what's next or ever hope to stop something they barely know even exists.
