Don't feed your MAG till you do research

Don't go to block 69 if you're streaming Block 69 has been removed. RIP hentai lovers. (I think they are migrating to block 34 because you know...rule 34...)

Being a Male is a LOT LESS expensive than being a female (cosmetics)

Don't play around family & friends since 85% of all females are basically naked with the other 14% being "kawaii lolis"

Don't go all out on your armor and equipment, you will reach endgame needs pretty fast

Don't horde your Bonus Quest keys forever, they expire after about a week.
If your Silver Bonus keys expire, you can trade 5 in for a Gold, but if your Gold expires, then you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and should've used it sooner.
[EPISODE 6 UPDATE]: UNLESS THEY ARE ABOUT TO EXPIRE, SAVE YOUR RAINBOW KEYS FOR YOUR HIGHEST LEVEL CLASS. Rainbow Keys give an INSANE amount of XP and AMAZING Loot, BUT ONLY IF YOU ARE HIGH LEVEL (80-90+ minimum recommended)

DO NOT TRUST DUDU

The best elements you want to go for on your weapon are Light and Wind at the moment since MOST of the enemies in Urgent Quests are weak to one of them (when Episode 6 comes out, get a Dark weapon as well for those enemies)
[EPSIDOE 6 UPDATE]: Light is still the best weapon element to get since MOST Episode 1-5 monsters/bosses are weak to it, with Dark now being 2nd best since almost all EP6 enemies/bosses are weak to Dark. Wind is now the 3rd best element since only SOME of EP4 monsters were weak to it.

FEEL FREE TO ASK FOR HELP. VETS WILL GLADLY GIVE HELP. IF YOU DO GOOD, THE PARTY DOES GOOD, WHICH MEANS YOU ALL GET BETTER LOOT.

If you want to SELL items without buying Premium, buy a LOT of FUN points by exchanging Ex-Cubes. FUN Scratchers have a chance to drop "3 Day Personal Shop" passes

If you can't make it to every Urgent Quest to try your luck and get the best weapons and armors in the game with non-existent drop rates, just got with the next best ones that are farmable 24/7 unlike Urgent Quest drops, and they are also player shop purchasable (for a couple million). I recommend the Nemesis and Raven series weapons, which are farmable from the Ultimate Quests. and for armor, either the Ray or Saiki series. These are possibly the best endgame weapons and armors that DON'T require you to try your luck at EVERY Urgent Quest pop-up.

The new Hero class that will come out with Episode 5 will ONLY BE AVAILABLE if you have leveled any 2 classes to level 75. Keep in mind that Hero DOES NOT allow a SUBCLASS (it would be too powerful if it did).
[EPISODE 6 UPDATE]: To use ANY Scion class (Hero, Phantom, Etoile) you will need to do the above. ALSO unlike Hero, Phantom and Etoile CAN be used AS A SUBCLASS (but cannot HAVE a subclass).

Getting classes to Lv.75 will unlock a title which will give you a PERMANENT Stat buff to your character across all classes, which at one point may be necessary for you to utilize. As a Lv.90 Hero, I was unable to equip the new Elder Pain Omega sword. Despite being max level, my MEL PWR stat was too low. By leveling up FIGHTER to Lv.75, I unlocked a permanent +50 MEL PWR and other stat bonuses, allowing me to go back to Hero class and equip the weapon I once couldn't.

If you wish to get MIN/MAX DPS with weapon and unit Augments, look up a guide how to do it. Explaining Augments and which ones are ideal will take about a 3 page essay. So please go look it up on the PSO2 Subreddit, or something like that.
[EPISODE 6 UPDATE]: You can now get a LOT, if not, ALL weapons required to turn in for a powerful top tier 15* weapons by simply turning in Rising Weapon Badges, Unique Weapon Badges, or even just doing Collection Files to get the necessary trade-in materials. The grinding for 15* weapons has been HEAVILY REDUCED (you can even get some DECENT 15* weapons from trading in).

Feel free to throw anymore QUICK advice and I'll add it to the review! Enjoy your time in weaboo hell!

Feel free to check out my Personal Quarters or check me out in the Lookbook! I'm always AFK on Block 1. Sometimes B-34 or 42.
IGN: Neptune (Ship 3)

Feel free to also ask me for any extra help/advice personally!

Lastly, please give this review an award of any kind if you found it useful! Thanks!

Final Update: After 6000 hours of playing after this first launched for NA, I have finally stopped playing. I am currently cashing out in my shop. If you want me to add any advice to this review, feel free to leave a comment, because since I stopped playing, I don't know how to update this any further.

~~Most of these tips were made for base PSO2, it may or may not apply to NGS~~

As someone who put over 10,000 hours in the Japanese version and currently have 500 hours in the NA version, I've got a few things to say.

NEW PLAYERS READ THIS
These are the things you should know right away if you plan to play as a free player with as little trouble as possible

• Do NOT feed your mag until you've done your research on how they work
  
• Points in the skill tree cannot be reset without a free reset pass, which is usually handed out often enough as the game updates. But due to the NA version mostly having combat content that JP already has, it's not as often for now. If you have a reset pass feel free to mess around with the class tree to get a feel for things, but if not then you should do your research before putting your points in things you regret. Most of how well your class does depends on how you use these points.
  
• You get 3 characters for free, server-wide. You can put those three characters in one ship, or on different ships.
  
• More characters are your way of making in-game currency, which is how you upgrade your gear and get cosmetics
  
• Don't worry about making your character look perfect on the first try. You can change most things at any time (accessories, eye pattern, tattoos, etc). The things you can't change whenever are things related to the size of the character, shape of their faces, things related to that. But you don't have to worry about that either, because every so often you can obtain a free pass to change your characters looks without paying, and they come often enough. The only thing you can't change at all after making your character is your gender and race.
  
• If you want to avoid paying a cent but want to play every class type, make a character per atk type (Striking, Ranged, Technique)
  
• You can use as many skill discs as you want, there is no limit
  
• Every weapon and unit you pick up is trash, sell it in an NPC shop. Upgrade your gear if it's better. You do not need to hoard them until you start getting 10* drops or better, which in that case you put them in your storage until you learn how to use the recycle shop.
  
• You make money by doing Daily Orders every day, which is located on the left side of the quest gate from an NPC behind a counter. You make the most money by the time you can run things in the Super Hard difficulty. All characters can run them, making them the best way to make money.
  
• Start by talking to Officer Cofy and doing all her client orders, then from there start messing around and have fun!

Now, here are my personal opinions about this game.
I like to describe this game as something like Monster Hunter with Devil May Cry combat. As a free to play MMO, people will approach this with caution. But I'll let you know, this game is very free to play, you can play as well as you desire without paying a single cent. The pay for stuff is mostly for cosmetics and conveniences, to make you in-game money faster through real life money means. But if you know your way around the game, you never have to do this.
Starting out, the game is great! People don't really like to call this an MMO since most quests are only done with up to 12 players in a quest, but who cares. The combat is really fun, the random stuff that occur while going through maps is an experience. Then when emergency quests happen and multiparty bosses appear, those are really fun too! Upgrading gear can be kind of confusing, but isn't hard to do once you talk to others or do your research. It used to be a very frustrating RNG process but not so much anymore.
The only downside is that when you reach endgame, there's sometimes not much to do other than wait for emergency quests to happen and go through your daily CD's (which usually doesn't take too long). Also emergency quests that do not have an objective can be pretty stale, since it's mostly just running around in the circle on a map and one shotting any boss that spawns. A problem can be that bosses aren't all that fun to fight with too many players, since they flinch until dead. But this is mostly fixed later on when harder difficulties are unlocked. Either way though, games combat is too fun to easily put down.
The game is a beautiful anime game, and customizing your character is really great! If you want to make your perfect waifu or mimic a favorite character from a series, it's likely you'll be able to do so in this game. Also, being able to make mech's as well will make the mecha lads pretty happy!
There's talk of censorship but I don't see it. I still have my sexy bikini's, I still can make a character with the fattest and finest tits and ass. When there's cosmetics that pretty much reveals almost all of your characters body, I don't see where the problem is.

tl;dr - Games has really fun combat, true to the term "free to play", character customization is great, nice to hang out in, recommend to any of my fellow dumb weebs

Oh and go to Ship 1 :^)

After 8 years in Japan, PSO2 finally released worldwide, and it's been a great time. My memories of the Covid-19 lockdowns will be inseparable from playing this game. But just one year later, however, this is no longer PSO2. The original game, while technically still here, has already wilted in wake of New Genesis, the awaited expansion that reworks itself into a sort-of open world MMO, or it should have.

An MMO will generally have some structure involving starting you off fresh, progressing through harder enemies & areas while earning better gear, and eventually reaching high levels where you'll complete the adventure and do current end-game quests while waiting for new content and expansions, all while having more activities to enjoy, like room decorating, minigames, and alternative modes.

PSO2 has all of the above!.. Again, however, this is no longer PSO2; it's now PSO2: New Genesis. So instead, PSO2:NGS is what you get when a company decides to launch an MMO with just the starting area only. There's a level cap of 20 that takes no time to reach, about ten hours of content before you're left repeating daily/weekly goals, and an empty world that takes about 5 minutes to run across. This is where we've sat for 3 months. No PVP, no challenge mode, no casino. There isn't even an interesting place to hang out and socialize other than the single 50 ft stretch of shops where you spawn upon login. Despite having a chance to rebuild from the ground up, they've made minimal improvements to quality-of-life features and made some worse.

"Early Access" is the phrase that comes to mind. When you're mindlessly roaming across plains and canyons littered with the same enemies, and ignoring 90% of the empty city sprinkled with vacant buildings and vapid NPCs, it will be a familiarly bitter pill to swallow when you realize there's some genuinely solid gameplay here mired by the intense absence of anything meaningful surrounding it. But this isn't an early access, it's a product from an enormous AAA publisher that hosts broadcasts about the game and it's updates. According to their own pipeline, there's going to be some sort of bigger update this winter, but it's hard to say if it'll make a difference or if the game will even survive that long. Ultimately, they've rushed it out while barely taking advantage of its new core mechanics.

Seasonal events, something most people can get excited for, have been pretty sad thus far. Instead of a new quest, they've all been simply killing enemies that have a symbol. Not even a seasonal re-skin, just the same baddies but marked with a floating logo on their head. This has been the case twice in a row.

If that's where the problems ended, I could almost still recommend giving it spin just to see if it catches your interest later, but this is just the beginning.

Despite the sorry state of the game, SEGA feels no need to delay themselves from milking the community with microtransactions front & center. NGS fashion items are regularly pumped out bi-weekly on a schedule that somehow matches PSO2's year-long sprint of delivering 8 years of cosmetics in the span of 1, so the priority is clear. I do have to give them credit, though. The character creator is still top notch. I got so invested in my PSO2 character over the past year that it's probably the only thing keeping me tethered to it, but the move from base-PSO2 to NGS spurred them to remove F2P access to the biggest moneymaker in the game: player shops.

Yep, merely selling items to other players is now a premium feature exclusive. You will either have to pay $7 for a 30-day shop pass or $13 for a month's subscription that lacks anything else substantial. This means the new economy is exclusively controlled by whales for whales. At best, you can afford a single new emote or popular item by completing a month's worth of weekly goals then immediately stopping when you're done, because the return profit of playing beyond that is so low that grinding is unfeasible. This is also partially due to dragging their feet in dealing with bot-farming before it inflated the markets. Gameplay content is so sparse that I'm not even factoring how this would affect weapons & gear.

Speaking of character customization, a fun feature that should've added enjoyment to the exploration of the open-world environment is the ability to change the movement animations of your character, like how they run, jump, swim, etc. These have to be unlocked like any other accessory via a ticket that you permanently redeem. Unfortunately, these have almost exclusively been made as bonus prizes by purchasing 45 gacha rolls from a single series of cosmetic items. To summarize: want a new sprinting animation? $90, please.

You know what's the saddest thing? I could actually tolerate all of this. I've seen games that started out bad, go through rough launches and eventually get better, even if it takes years, but there's a recent scenario that's completely killed what little hope I still had for New Genesis.

As a result of aforementioned problems, NGS has been hemorrhaging people every month to the point that it's barely clearing 3,000 concurrent players anymore. To make matters worse, they've announced that they've just banned 1,600 accounts in the name of fighting "toxic behavior." Without any previous warning, punishments are being enforced by retro-actively combing through over a year's worth of activity and being met with permanent bans for first time offenses. Attempts to reach support are met with generic, copy-pasted responses about breaching codes of conduct with no examples, evidence, or means to appeal. Attempts to discuss this on the forums and discord are deleted with respective users subsequently banned from there as well. While this hasn't affected my account (yet), there's now a black cloud hanging over this game and it's already dismal population as it continues downward.

They spent almost a decade not releasing PSO2 to western audiences, actively tried to stop us from playing on JP and SEA servers, then finally put it out here, where it's only taken a few months after NGS to nearly kill it. Save yourself the heartache.

Congrats, SEGA. You've finally turned me into one of those dudes who writes a negative review for a game they played for a thousand hours.

No I do not recommend this game.

This may sound corny over a video game, but it does pain me to leave this review.
After 8898 hours in I finally have begun what feels like an Alcoholics Anonymous program for myself.

A short about myself: I consider myself a long time fan of Phantasy Star games and Sega. I grew up with Sega Genesis and the original games are still my most memorable JRPG experiences. I still own PSO on two systems, one I bought specifically just for the one version that was upgraded on GameCube.

Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis is not in the right hands. It feels like either the game director Kimura and team has lost passion for this game OR Sega has extremely underfunded and understaffed them since the Global release and launch of NGS. I played this game every single day since 2020 and can count on one hand how many days I missed logging in to do the run of the mill dailies (these are literally the core gameplay focus).

Hopping on the treadmill of completing dailies and spending real money for AC is a serious self abuse if it's in hopes for this game to ever become popular or have more to do in it. They call it a live service game but the only live service is more AC scratch tickets every week to suck $ out of players who fall prey to it.

It would be justified to spend $ on a game to support the developers if they actually had passion about the game and showed it through the addition of meaningful and decently paced "content" updates. More meaningful and impactful story. More places to go and see that have actual detailed thought out design instead of rehashed VR geometric areas that look like they are built with children's toy blocks.

The worst part about all of this is the game has five star combat, five star creative space, and five star character customization. But please believe me, it stops there, if the team spent half as much time as they spent on new AC scratch and SG scratch ticket items then this game could possibly have an acceptable pace of new story and places to see and go, characters to meet and build upon, new enemies etc... but this game is the definition of stagnation. If only they could do this then it could be a decent game, but it is sadly in my strongest opinion, in the wrong hands.

Too many years and times I have stuck up for Sega and the development team basically lying to myself and others drunk on the thought of it getting better and backed even worse by investing $ into it in hopes that it could get better.

Phantasy Star 2 NGS has turned the game series into a platform to advertise other games and vtubers and has even done it semi poorly. It's nothing but a long drawn out recycled cash grab of endless AC scratch tickets with 1/10th the development focus on the game's own identity. There is no meaningful loot system, no dungeons with detailed environments, I do not mind the open world but they should have by now built upon it with some "dungeon crawling" and quests etc that the original PSO was built upon.

If you made it to the end, then thank you for your time and allowing me to vent what should have been said at least a year and a half ago.

Coming from someone that played base PSO2 with min maxed god mark gear(Yes I spent a good chunk of SGs for Support scratch, don't judge me.), clearing HTPD S rank/etc.

Here's my takes with the game after playing it for a couple of weeks now, and comparing it to my experience in base as of (2021-07-01)

PROS

-The way combat works is fantastic. The weapons feel smooth, and the upgrades from base PSO2 have definitely elevated how these weapons play. I think this is the biggest key to this game.

-Affixing is a lot more accessible to casual players, it's no longer required to use an affixing simulator, or learn the system, it's relatively straight forward and the updates to it are great.

-Visuals are definitely a step up, and the new effects and updated models makes the game feel fresh.

-Multi weapon is a fantastic feature, and will exponentially get better as more classes, and more Photon Arts/Techniques come out in the future. The amount of combo/gameplay potential this system offers is insanely huge, don't sleep on this, because I have a gut feeling this will open up a bit more freedom for players expressing themselves in how they play their classes.

CONS
-Content is relatively small for now. NGS is a new game, and the content it has cannot be compared to what base PSO2 offered. If you're looking at PSO2 Base as a reference for content quantity, you'll be severely disappointed.

-FREE TO PLAY PLAYERS gets the short stick.
I need to preface this and say I'm on a Premium Status, and while I have access to player shop, the way F2P got jipped for this is insanely unfair.

F2P Players do not have ACCESS to sell their items into the player store. This hardcaps them to what is available for Reactor Core + Weeklies/Dailies, this means at a certain point F2P's budget won't be able to compete with the player market, and by the time you have enough money for a min max set (ie: Fixa Effects lv5 for example) They would have already been replaced. SEGA definitely did this to crack down on dupers, however in the crossfire F2Ps also got hit, and this needs to change.

This whole system isn't a big deal for casual gearing, but absolutely trashes on people wanting to aim for BiS equipment.

An idea to solve this, could be that Players have to go through a verification, going through several checks, and send a support ticket to have their shop privileges activated, and paying Premium Bypasses this "verification" time.

-Toxicity/Elitism. (Kind of)
This has calmed down recently, after the fix of the Gigantix Timers, however it still exists to a degree. On one side you have people being pissed off about other players not having a good enough gear, and on the other side, there has been cases of leeching during Gigantix runs, and calling anyone that criticizes them as "elitists" despite being told off reasonably. Like I said, this has died down recently, but its something to look out for.

Be kind to others, and don't stoop to these people's levels.

-End Game
While the game is theoretically new, we still have end game at the moment, and its mostly just tied towards sitting and waiting for Gigantix (There have been saints in the Fleet Discord showing schedules for storm, and god bless for them) But at the moment, the entire end game recycles from Gigantix Runs, grinding for affix capsules, jump in UQ, then wait for gigantix, so on and so forth. It seems like busy work, but its incredibly boring in my opinion.

-Premium Status doesn't really give enough.
Prem Status is about $15.00 per month, but at most what we get is the ability to sell in the shop, and a small premium status buff, as well as receiving reward 44 Stargems during PSO2 Days., which isnt really that much.

At the moment, certain games does this better, and I dont particularly find any reason for Premium status outside of just...having access to sell items in the player market.


CONCLUSION

PSO2 NGS has the potential to be a GREAT game, it has the ingredients to be one, and it shows with their combat gameplay. However these CONS are putting the quality of this game down. At the moment I cant entirely recommend it, but Im open to be proven wrong in the future.

Said i would only play for a little bit

---{Gameplay}---
☑️Try not to get addicted
🔳Very good
🔳Good
🔳Nothing special
🔳Ehh
🔳Bad
🔳Just dont

---{Graphics}---
🔳Masterpiece
🔳Beautiful
🔳Good
☑️Decent
🔳Will do
🔳Bad
🔳Awful
🔳Paint.exe

---{Audio}---
🔳Fascinating
☑️Very good
🔳Good
🔳Decent
🔳Not too bad
🔳Bad
🔳Earrape

---{Audience}---
🔳Kids
🔳Teens
🔳Adults
☑️Everyone

---{PC Requirements}---
🔳Check if you can run paint
☑️Potato
🔳Decent
🔳Fast
🔳Rich boi
🔳Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{Story}---
🔳Doesn't have
🔳Something isnt nothing I guess
🔳Not greatly told
🔳Average
☑️Good
🔳Lovely
🔳Will make you cry or smile alot

---{Playstyle}---
🔳Varies a little bit from person to person
☑️Weapon AND character classes
🔳Weapon OR character classes
🔳Creative AND Survival
🔳Creative OR Survival
☑️Melee AND Ranged
🔳Melee OR Ranged

---{Difficulity}---
🔳Just press a bunch of buttons
🔳Easy
🔳Significant brain usage
☑️Easy to learn / Hard to master
🔳Not so easy
🔳Difficult
🔳Dark Souls

---{Grind}---
🔳Nothing
🔳Only if you care about leaderboards/ranks
🔳Isnt necessary to progress
🔳A bit grindy sometimes
🔳Average grind level
☑️A bit grindy
🔳Insanity

---{Game Time}---
🔳Long enough for a cup of tea
🔳Short
🔳Average
🔳Long
🔳Depends on you
☑️Endless

---{Price}---
🔳Just buy it
☑️F2P
☑️Worth the price
🔳Wait for sale
🔳Maybe if you have some spare money left
🔳Not recommended
🔳Dont throw money into a rubbish bin

---{Micro-Transactions}---
🔳EA
🔳Mobile Game(Necessary if you don’t want to wait 15 weeks to construct a toaster)
🔳”Premium” Currency AND Normal Currency
🔳”Premium” Currency OR Normal Currency
☑️Quick way to advance
☑️Fortnite(Skins/Emotes/Etc)
🔳Only to show off big time
🔳Level DLC
🔳None

---{Bugs/Glitches}---
🔳Never had any
☑️Minor bugs/glitches
🔳Few bugs/glitches
🔳Can get annoying
🔳Ruining the game
🔳The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs/glitches

---{1/10}---
🔳1
🔳2
🔳3
🔳4
🔳5
🔳6
🔳7
🔳8
☑️9
🔳10

Phantasy Star Online 2 has finally been brought West after a little under a decade, and it's been more or less preserved in its original form for fans to enjoy. If you played the Dreamcast PSO, then just about everything here will blow you away, besides the graphical upgrade: A wide range of classes, overwhelming number of cosmetics, hundreds of weapons to collect & customize, and even more quests to complete. Rest assured, it truly is free to play, with no content locked behind a paywall. However, it has a plethora of problems which keep it from being one of the best, for reasons we'll go into below.


NOTE: Please note the date of this review. PSO2 is continually updated, and with NGS coming 2021, parts of this opinion piece may become outdated.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2192966903
✅ Though dated, the graphics hold up well
✅ Fun action-based gameplay. Rewards good reflexes and planning. A dozen classes to master, ranging from easy mode (summoner) to glass cannon difficult (fighter)
✅ Easy to run even on old hardware
✅ Free to Play friendly. Tons of free items, including Star Gem currency giveaways, which can buy game-changing quality of life rental space
✅ Easy access to all content by simple quest clears
✅ Bonus quests award massive EXP to shortcut grinding. Easy to obtain with dailies
✅ Silly anime storyline, with hours of fully voiced cutscenes
✅ Surprisingly well done animations, motion captured movements. Dances remain one of the most popular cosmetic purchases.
✅ No shortage of things to do: PvP, Harvesting, Challenge Mode, Casino, Crafting, Affixing, Rare item hunting. Take friends, join strangers, or go it alone.
✅ Hundreds of cosmetics, even collabs with other franchises (Persona, NieR, Blazblue...). You can recreate some of your favorite characters

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2211058225
❌ Clunky, cluttered, and nested UI. Menus inside of menus
❌ Jaggies, sharp corners, low res textures really show on high res displays. It gets away with these due to its anime flair, but really needs an upgrade.
❌ Sloppy hitboxes. Being juggled to death is the biggest problem in actual gameplay
❌ Painfully dependent on RNG in every regard. Besides loot drops, affixing your weapons to strengthen them runs the risk of destroying your hard earned fodder if you pull the trigger without 100% guarantee.
❌ Opaque systems. Absolutely mandatory to read fanmade wikis and guides to plan what you're doing. Can't reallocate skill points without a premium item that's rarely given free. Nowhere in game clearly shows you what your weapons can be upgraded into, where they drop, or where the required items are, which is relevant to the modern 15* rares.
❌ A collector's nightmare. Constant pressure to manage inventory, and never enough space. Even when you buy premium for more, you'll still run out of space. Cosmetic outfits and skins compete for space. Why?
❌ Loot locked behind 30-minute window Urgent Quests. Most are pre-scheduled, but some are unannounced. You can use a Trigger item to play these whenever you want, but can be costly and cumbersome to organize.
❌ Market inflation. Knowledgeable JP players snipe popular cosmetics and important components to stack them at colossal prices. Some argue this is part of the fun, but playing stock market is almost impossible the sporadic casual player. Furthermore, selling on market is only available by premium purchase or 3-day passes from a free lottery, which are very rare to obtain.
❌ Repetitive. You'll soon be running all the same quests against all the same enemies for daily rewards. Farming a 0.1% drop is only fun for so long.
❌ Ship restrictions. If you start on a ship different than a friend's, you must pay premium currency to move or delete and start over.
❌ Challenge and Battle Modes have very low population. Expect long wait times and no parties unless you can bring friends.
❌ Sloppy and inconsistent translation, likely done piecemeal by different teams. You'll enjoy the story just fine, but there were unforgivable item description mistakes or entire omissions that absolutely ruin the experience. Misspellings, grammar errors, and two names for the same location are other baffling examples. Dare I say the fan translation does things better in many instances.
❌ Lootboxes. Yes, they're optional, housing mostly cosmetics. But there are a few important boosters you'll probably want to make a strong weapon for endgame, that only come from these. You can buy them, but only if players list them on the market; Expect them to be scalped to the moon

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2208433782
PSO2 remains one of SEGA's strongest earners. It's the top of its F2P offerings, which generate around 1/3 the company's quarterly revenues. And indeed, the game is fun, and very accessible. Like most F2P's, you'll have a blast in the beginning messing around to test and see everything; With six chapters of content, there's a massive amount of things to do. But as it goes with these types of games, its longevity will depend on your goals and playstyle. If you're story oriented, then after you complete the full questline, you'll probably move on. If you play with friends or lean competitive, then you'll probably keep logging in for Urgent Quests, weekly rankings, or PvP. The endgame is a cycle of trying to upgrade to the strongest weapon, and then stuff as many power-boosting affixes on it to become a one-man army. And you can do this entirely for free, with careful planning and research.

The game is racing to catch up with JP's current content, bracing for 2021's eagerly anticipated New Genesis. It's practically PSO3, with graphical overhaul, open world, 32P hubs and 8P field play, and might be tied to PSO. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out, but suffice to say even if you don't fancy PSO2's gameplay, you might be hooked by NGS.

PSO2 isn't without a host of problems, but it's not a bad game. Try it out for yourself and form your own opinions. As of this writing, there are already dozens of player guides and helpful resources on discord and reddit. Everything is accessible to you, if you're willing to invest the time or make new friends. And even if you don't, you can still plug away at your own pace, on your terms.

Achievement Hunters: Despite the really long descriptions, fairly easy. Defeat target enemies, complete a quest with specific NPCs, grind a weapon, use a photon blast, clear the named story quests, and level up all basic classes to 30. If the latter doesn't pop on completion, change away from the class, exit the counter, then change back - it should work. Tip: Use bonus quest keys to level up quickly. Remember Summoner has a passive subclass EXP boost that will really speed this up.

The only tricky achievement is... trick darts. This is a personal quarters only item, which you can buy or find in someone else's room. There is no easy way to hit the perfect score, it's pure RNG. Program a macro, leave the PC, and it should eventually pop. I got mine it in about an hour.

UPDATE: NGS has in fact added a set of achievements. So in all likelihood it may continue to add more. At time of this update, there are 10 new with 4 hidden, probably enabled later. Create a multiweapon, party, defeat raid boss, get to level cap 20. The latter may take time since the game is new

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I've spent 5.7k hours since NGS launched and have been playing actively since until a few months ago when life got busy for me. Ever since I stopped playing actively, I've only been playing once or twice a week for a few hours and I got out of the sunk-cost fallacy trap.

Here's a few takeaway points from me:
1. The game is extremely repetitive, it's literally only fighting the same re-skinned/higher leveled but the same enemy over and over to grind for money, then create BiS gears. Once you're done with that, what do you do? You just complain at the lobby for hours.
2. The community is extremely jaded, but extremely inclusive at the same time. People will dunk on you if you complain in game, if you get mass reported by an alliance or a group you get permanently banned and there's no way to get unbanned.
3. Leeches are everywhere, a lot of people will just queue and hold left mouse button till the quest end. Some people will even queue to a higher ranked quest with better gears THEN take it off when you're inside the quest.
4. The game literally added a PAY TO SKIP EVERY CONTENT and get to endgame immediately.
5. Recently the game switched to xigncode3 anticheat software, a literal spyware.

It's a shame because this game has a good combat system and character customization. The price for the premium in-game currency recently got spiked by 46% for my region and I had enough.

If you're still playing this game just for the sake of it, please play other game first to get out of the sunk cost fallacy and assess again, you'll find out that the game very much has no content besides re-skinned mobs or higher level refresh of the same exact quest with more stats. Please don't let people gaslight you to keep playing this game, you deserve something better.

Edit: Minor spelling fix

(If you're wondering why I'm still logging in after this review, I'm selling all of my stuff and giving away all of my money)

It's inevitable this game will be rated Mixed or worse because people will look at curators or the in-app purchases and nope out immediately. Don't let those reviews stop you from trying out the game, it's not pay-to-win in any way and it's been worth the 200+ hours I've spent on it before Steam release. The closest thing to pay to win this game has is the fashion which is tradable in player market. 50% of this game is fashion, it's not all about combat, so it does matter. The ingame base currency Meseta is really easy to come by, so it's not impossible for you to buy and sell premium items without ever paying a penny. The reviews that complain this game is censored or is lacking JP content have no idea what they're talking about. The JP economy is beyond inflated and because cosmetic items often do not return, it's best to play the game in NA from the start and get all the items you missed out on from the 8 years this game was JP-only. All the content will be out by december. In 2021, they will release a new game and all your characters and items will sync between PSO2 and this new game. It's extremely crucial that you play the game in this region while it's still new so that you're ready for New Genesis, which is basically PSO3.