[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.