For a free mmo, there’s a lot of content here. I wouldn’t say it is my “go-to” MMO, that would be FFXIV. But, I like it regardless. I enjoyed going through the story mainly because of all the anime tropes that you see and it just made me laugh a lot because of them. I mean this in a good way of course. And like I said, there is a LOAD of content for the game all for free, which is fantastic in my opinion. You got limited time bosses or raids every 1 and a half or so, you can change your job at any time, and it has a very in-depth character customizer. It also has a casino where you can gamble with their digital currency and I’ll admit I spent an embarrassing amount of time in the casino because of how addicting it was.

You can’t go wrong with PSO2 classic, especially when it’s free. The game isn’t getting anymore major content updates from here on out due to New Genesis, but what’s there is great.

THIS LOSER SPENT MONEY ON THIS FREE TO PLAY MMO JUDGE THEM ACCORDINGLY

so. after about 6-7 months of playing this game daily, i think i'm finally calling it quits. i walked into this game going "this is not going to be anywhere in the ballpark of the same game as PSO" and, with that mindset, i was able to enjoy it. there's a lot here that i had fun with, but i would not say i enjoyed it on nearly any level as complex as PSO, which is odd to say considering how needlessly obtuse the game's systems (like affixing, crafting, etc.) can be.

i was talking about it with a veteran of PSO the other day and we both came to the agreement that this is really only a sequel to PSO in name alone. almost all of the systems from PSO (i.e. section IDs, quests, class stat minmaxing, etc.) are either completely absent or radically overhauled, and the setting is completely different from ragol with (unless i missed something) no mention of pioneer 1/2, or any of the named characters from PSO. in many ways, this feels like a game that was going to launch under a different name, but then got reskinned to be PSO2. that's not entirely a bad thing, but it is a thing. (for the curious, me and said veteran did end up agreeing that PSU is more of a sequel to PSO than PSO2 even is, lol)

as a game that you pick up, play for an hour to three, and fuck around in? it's very fun! some of my fondest memories of the game are when i would try to optimize how i handled an urgent quest with other players, or when i was dicking around with new character classes to find what worked for me (i eventually settled on fo/te, which is an engaging and entertaining way to play DPS for me). there's a lot of content here, especially for a free to play game! if you play this game and make a personal rule of "i will never spend money on this game", you'll be surprised to find out how little is gated via money. you'll miss out on extra crafting slots, extra mags, higher inventory/storage space, etc. but it's all extremely doable. i was able to hit 100 (the current level cap, and, i predict, likely the final one) without spending a single cent, and i only ended up spending money when i wanted to start minmaxing. again, as a purely simple package of free game for content, this is a great deal.

the problem for me comes in when you consider how much of this game just doesn't... work. i tried so hard to get invested in the story and good christ did i just not give a shit. i couldn't even make it past episode 1 because all the story segments were just cutscenes where your character watches other characters interact or gets monologued at. it's boring! it's very poorly told. and, having read a basic summary of what the plot even is, it doesn't seem to be terribly well written in the first place. i also regret to inform you that this is legitimately one of the first sega games that i've ever played that has a mediocre soundtrack. none of the OST is bad here, but it's unmemorable and bland. after a certain point, i would just listen to spotify while playing this game, and my experience jumped up in quality immensely when i did.

i feel bad not saying better things about this game, because there is a lot of effort and talent on display. there's a lot more map variety than i was expecting here, and there's actual verticality that's used in a lot of them too. compared to PSO and PSU, that's significant to me! there's just not a lot to actually invest in once you get past the newness of the game. i was going to make it a personal goal to try and hit 100 with every class, but after the third one, i lost steam and just eventually got burnt out. i put in around 350 hours, which is pretty fucking good on a return basis considering i only spent like maybe $20 at most. but i struggle to tell people "play this game and do x y and z" because i can't name worthwhile xs, ys, or zs. play this game because... you want to play it? there's a lot here that will hook you, but there's not that much that'll make you stay if you have no prior experience with the series. that's a missed opportunity for the game as a whole, and probably the worst thing about it.

overall, i enjoyed this game, and if you're looking for something to try out over the weekend for free, you've got a great candidate here. i can't say this is a great game, but for every tempered expectation i had, it mostly succeeded in passing. considering how much time i've put and still put into PSO and how difficult i can be to please, that's worth something to me.

Ugh… MMOs. The genre I initially hated as a teenager, that I allowed to win me over in some ways, that I now have extremely mixed feelings about. I probably should’ve just stuck with that initial dislike of them. First, they’re designed to take up time, which I find especially heinous in this age where the majority of video games expect me to spend a huge chunk of time on them. Even a relatively short game now expects me to spend 30-40 hours on it, and genuinely short games are extremely rare outside of indie games. It’s not that I want every game to be over in 5-10 hours, I just think there must be a better middle ground to be found between 10 hours and 100 hours. “Over 100 hours of gameplay!!!” now feels obligatory, rather than a specific design choice. The big problem is that an MMO wants to be a lifestyle, not a game. So, even if I think an MMO is a good game, I still have a hard time liking it because I know what it wants is to eat up all my time. The thing is, I know myself. MMOs turn me into my own worst enemy. When I played Destiny, the only game I wanted to play was Destiny. The reason I quit Warframe after breaking the hundred hour mark, even though I really liked the game, was that I could see hundreds, thousands of hours of Warframe stretched before me, and I didn’t want to be a person who only plays Warframe, just like I didn’t want to be a person who only plays Destiny, especially when there are so many other interesting games to play out there. I feel like my thoughts about games are more nuanced, interesting, and beneficial to myself when I play a wide variety of games. I like Destiny and Warframe, but I don’t want them to be a lifestyle, and that’s really the only way to play an MMO as it’s meant to be played. That’s the core reason why I can never really be a fan of MMOs. Like the quarter munchers of the past, they’re just designed to consume something, and that thing, time, is something extremely valuable to me. When I played Phantasy Star Online 2 a few times over the past week, I could feel that MMO player tendency rising up in me, that insatiable urge to complete every quest and tick every box and gain every level and collect everything and just do for the sake of doing. No matter how cleverly it’s disguised in an MMO, you’re not really doing anything. It’s a game that would eat up my life if I let it. This is why to me MMOs feel… oddly predatory. My second big problem with MMOs is this: when it’s well done, I really like that sense a game can give you of inhabiting a different world. In MMOs, I can’t help but feel that it’s a world made of cardboard. Even outside of microtransactions, everything in an MMO is transactional, everything is a thinly veiled coercion, everything is nagging me towards inevitable and meaningless progress. The end goal of an MMO is to make you feel like playing an MMO some more. I resent it. I resent it enough that from now on I kind of just want to stay away from MMOs on principle. It has game mechanics and classes and monsters and items and systems, but it seems pointless to go into any of that, because I feel like all I have to say about PSO2 is that it’s an MMO. You put time in and nothing comes out.

[NEW REVIEW]
As magical of an experience PSO2 was, I will never be able to return to it and enjoy it after playing FFXIV. I've played WoW since I was 8 years old, but all I've ever done in WoW was questing, so I never really experienced an MMO until I played PSO2. PSO2 had completely taken up my life for almost an entire year, because the game had insane depth to it. TOO MUCH depth. I've played FFXIV for about 8 months and I've experienced (though not completed) nearly every type of content in the game. According to Steam, I've played PSO2 for 813 hours (and much more since I played it on the Windows 10 store before it came to Steam), but I've barely scratched the surface on what endgame content is supposed to be like. Due to the fact that the NA version of PSO2 was released like... 8 years after the JP version, they had to release all the old content at a much faster rate than how they originally were. This meant that content bombshells were being dropped like every month, and the level cap was being raised like every 3 months. This was AWESOME...
Except...
Well...

Okay, so let me briefly explain what PSO2 as an MMO is like. You start in the lobby. You can't attack or do any flippy dippies or anything in the lobby, it's basically just for hanging out with other players, picking up side orders, using shops, and navigating to all the other content. To play the actual game, you go up to the quest counter, choose what content you want to do (most common being the basic "exploration quests", where you go from point A to B, fighting enemies and ending with a boss fight depending on what zone you picked.), and then walk out the gateway to be loaded into an instance with a maximum of 12 other players. Once you finish the main objective, you teleport back to your ship to hear your quest results (score/loot/sidequest progress/etc.), then you load back to the lobby. There's many, MANY types of quests you can choose to do... But most have completely dead matchmaking because the stuff you get from doing them were made obsolete every month or so. And I haven't even touched on the Urgent Quest system... At the time, this was the most unique thing I saw in an online game. There were scheduled times of the day where a server-wide announcement would play for every player, to tell them that they have a 30 minute period to play a unique quest that is unable to be entered during any other hour. This is when all the people that AFK in the lobbies (because this game didn't have any forced AFK logout timer...) would suddenly ALL AT ONCE rush to the quest counter so they could queue for this one quest. ALL of the insanely fun (and insanely difficult) extreme boss fights were basically only available during these periods. Imagine if in FFXIV you wanted to do the Orbonne Monastery raid, but you had to look up on the official website what time it was happening at instead of just being able to queue for it literally whenever you wanted.

Now here comes my personal wall blocking me from trying to re-enter PSO2 again. All of those Urgent Quests? 90% of them are (almost) impossible to play anymore. If you did not play the game as the content was released, you would be UNABLE to play the older content because the older content wasn't on the schedule anymore. You want to experience the very first superboss, Dark Falz Elder, on the hardest difficulty, with a full team of players, in 2021? Good fucking luck. First, you have to AFK for HOURS until a "random Urgent Quest" comes on. Then you have to pray to RNGesus that he picks the fight that you actually want to do and not one of those shitty tower defense quests. Then you have to hope that there's enough players that will wanna join you. Then, once you FINALLY get in... you wipe the floor with the boss because that boss was released when the highest difficulty levelcap was only level 80 and you're level 100 and they didn't bother adding a higher tier difficulty for this old boss fight. At least FFXIV fucking syncs down your level and gear to match the older bosses. Fuck you SEGA, release more content for NGS. Also PLEEEAAASE incorporate at least SOME of the original PSO2 (and maybe even PSO1) story into NGS...


[OLD REVIEW]
Love the gameplay but the MMO aspects are so shitty and grindy that they hold everything else back.
Story is meh at first but gets way better as you start to know the characters more. The characters are basically the highlight of the story, espcially Luther. Episode 5 is kino, and Episode 6 is a very satisfying ending to the story.

Extremely soulless and greedy game. Over 100 hours in and I could not bring myself to remotely care about the plot and characters or the story. Gameplay is flashy no doubt but it basically boils down to devil may cry without any depth. It certainly is fun to turn your brain off and fight big hordes of enemies but it does get old when you realize you’re doing the same thing over and over again. The main draw of this game for me was grinding to get enough money to buy cute clothes from the player market, where everything is disgustingly scalped. By the way, the only way to even sell anything on the market is by purchasing a market pass with real life money. The dark and mysterious art style of the original pso is replaced with a more polished boring anime style. I’ve heard New Genesis improves on aspects of this game, but it runs horribly on my computer so I guess I’ll never know.

Really puts the "Online" in Phantasy Star Online.

I've actually started PSO2 since maybe around 2016? So this is the only time I'll talk about gameplay for all EPISODES.

It's very braindead, which is all I need in a time passing MMO. Reaching Level 75 without even touching the first EPISODE is real weird but whatever.
I also don't care for the massive grind or min maxing or whatever MMO players smoke, I'm just dedicated to doing cool shit.

The presentation and gameplay has certainly aged, being made for 2012 and not recieving massive upgrades for its price (being free) and meant to be accessible on weaker platforms, like the Vita.

It's age is also shown in the rough execution of its stories, which I expect to be a running theme until EPISODE 4. The old progression of plot used to be finding cutscenes on the field, but they've all been crammed awkwardly into one menu and I pray for anyone who has no idea what Xion means by Divergence Matrix. You remove the gameplay breaks with long strings of mostly unconnected cutscenes and event battles that range from piss easy to absolutely annoying.

Not to mention the actual thread of events just sorta happens. It's a mess but with having experience with FFXIV's A Realm Reborn MSQ before it was cut down, can't say I expected anything else.

You're not missing anything not doing this, personally.

I like the part where it's like every class has 3 different action game design tropes at once and tells you "this one is the best one to use for the big number". Raw. I also like how they made 3 different spinoffs of Vergil but the last time they were like, "what if at the end of Judgement Cut End, he slides back and fires at all the lingering slashes with a gunblade". Kino. Episode 4 UQS. GOATED. I affixed some pretty alright units, it was okay. Swag. In-game Takenobu Mitsuyoshi model. Soul. Sodam? Stacks

Luster my beloved. I'll see you again someday. The secret to making MMOs not lame is to make every class a different flavor of DPS. If you get it you get it. Showing anime repulsed PSO gen x'ers my all scion class 4man Primordial Darkness runs to watch them mald into flames and dust. "Beating" an MMO is a surreal concept I think