A badly made shadow of what PSO once was even a shadow of the past PSO2, PSO for the dream cast and gamecube episode 1&2 and also the PC version (BlueBurst) was one of the first RPG/MMO that you had an interesting story, a dark one, with meaning of what are you doing in the planet you are, and what is your objective, the eerie setting with fun visuals, not a brainless grindfest without weight, there the weight for your classes, drop of weapons and things had meaning, to get a character to level 200 was something interesting, and while playing on consoles people would often ask if your weapons were "Legit" because of the dupes and stuff.

The dungeons systems were amazing, compared to this game which is close to none, the boss fights here are souless, the dificulty is dull and the only thing they appeal are visuals to become an oversexualized ERP fest of a social game that once was an incredible MMORPG/RPG, the mechanics does not exist, the systems are completely predatory and badly designed, the overwhelming menus and systems are so weird to navigate, the only thing that is "better" from the old game from 25 years ago is the combat gameplay, that even so, is different but modern, I think a first version but remake with combat would do better than this.

The feeling of accomplishment in this game is sadly zero, you enter the game and is shoved a bunch of mails with items and level boost, to have an idea of how bad the launch of this version was, they are adding features from the original PSO from 25 years ago just now, they are trying to reintroduce dungeons how they were, because they focused so much in fashion and visuals that they forgot the game was not a social second life game at first, but an RPG, like I mentioned before, this game at is right now, is social and an ERP fest, if you like those things, you will enjoy it.

If you liked PSO for what it was, even the old version of 2 (that had half of those problems already) go play a private server of the PSO BlueBurst, is junky, is old, but with a few tweaks for controllers in the built in options and using softwares like lossless scaling for a better image, you will have a better RPG and gameplay experience, but if your cup of tea is what is a problem for me, you will enjoy PSO2 NG.

At this point, the terrible management of this game seems intentional.

This game, originally labelled as an online rpg rather than an MMO, has somehow been reoriented to forego any story content and plot development for about a year, if I'm being generous.

If it were just story lagging behind other content it may have made some sense (though, would still be bad management by the SEGA team). Instead, the setting has barely expanded in any meaningful way within that same year-long time period.

While I used to enjoy the collaboration content, the significance of it has completely reversed for me. As it is some of the ONLY "content" to release consistently for 2 years of development time, this clear shift in priorities has instead turned each collab into a negative factor that pushes me away from the game while it stagnates.

Unless they fundamentally revise the development pipeline for this game and it gets consistent, dense story updates that measure up to this game's steep competition in the online rpg genre, then I believe it is doomed to be further eclipsed by far superior games already on/cming to the market.

Was enjoying it, but they changed anticheat and now the game crashes whenever I try to launch it :/

Hasn't been fixed in about 2 months now so I guess i'm not playing this game ever again lol