Now here was a frustrating demo.

In the zany hustle-and-bustle of the E3 show floor, it can be very difficult to play slow-paced, methodical games like RPGs, especially dungeon-crawlers like Phantasy Star Portable 2 which requires you to customize your own character, a secondary character, and also demands an awful lot of patience as there is a TON of text to read through before finally getting to the meat of the game.

There was also a mandatory opening cutscene that could not be skipped, with several unskippable scenes afterwards. With so many other games, and itchy P.R. people begging for my attention, it got wearisome skipping text over and over again just to get to the primary hacking and slashing.

Finally, I GOT to the slashin’, a handy tutorial segment where a girl named Emilia and my robot hunter named Steve got stuck in a cave and we had to fight our way out. As per usual tutorial fare Emilia schooled me in the ways of hitting two different attack buttons that could combo together, redirecting my camera with the D-pad and using the L button to lock-on targets, and equipping new weapons on the fly (by holding Circle to open up a real-time menu that I could scroll through).

It was all very seamless and easy, and with the new dodge ability very reminiscent of Capcom’s Monster Hunter series (perhaps Phantasy Star Portable 2′s biggest competition in this genre). Besides dodging and an overall similar combat/control scheme, the other big similarity was the replacment of the series standard MAG companion with the new MySynth, a robotic sidekick much like the cat-looking Felynes from Monster Hunter. I didn’t get to try these babies out but I was pleased with the Japanese-flavored way of customizing them at the beginning. Aside from naming them you can dress them up in maid, nurse, bellhop or waitress costumes. Goofy, but fun. …I chose the bellhop.