➤➤ Short Review: --Skip--

I "wasted" 4.7k hours in this game, hoping since launch (back in june 2021) that the game would improve as the foundation was really hitting that itch for me, but it's time to give up. After multiple world expansions (up to 3 new regions, 1 new randomized dungeon and a city exploration with timelimit), multiple class reworks, expansions and updates, after many "new enemies" to fight, player housing, a card minigame and after some new quest types, the game still isn't in an acceptable state. I played the game for this long mostly because of my alliance (guild) in the game and I had fun playing with them, even if the game itself wasn't good.

➤➤ Long Review:

- Story: The story of Base PSO2 is good, but it's majority cutscenes with some fights here and there. The story of NGS however, it's not great. It's slow, boring and somewhat predictable. It did however get somewhat decent with the latest story update, but it wasn't enough for me to say they redeemed the story.

- Gameplay: NGS gameplay originally was one of the stronger parts, but the longer you play it, the more you notice how empty it really is. It looks flashy, but there is no depth. The devs even realized this and added more customization to the attacks, trying the bare minimum to increase the build variety in the game, but for me, this is just a bandaid fix for deeper issues.. Another massive flaw was the overreliance on Dodge/Weapon Actions (A parry/counter unique for each weapon). The devs again realized this and added new mechanics to bosses such as Attacks that can't be avoided with dodge/weapon action, again, bandaid fix for deeper issues. Let's talk about the elements next. Usually, you would think Fire does something different than water or light, but in NGS, they all do the exact same. If the enemy has an elemental weakness, after hitting the enemy often times with that specific element, the enemy will go into "elemental down". That's it. There is no "fire deals damage over time" or "water decreases armor/damage resistance". Besides the "elemental down", there is also the "physical down", which is also the same as the elemental down, but it relies on physical attacks instead of elemental attacks. Now with all of the different classes available and lots of different weapons types, you could just play a different class/weapon combo to fight the boredom, but as mentioned above, the game heavily relies on Dodge/Weapon Action. Every fight with all melee weapons will be the same, the same goes for all ranged weapons and all tech (elemental) weapons. There are some minor differences for each weapons playstyle, but these are really small. The gameplay also doesn't have the typical 3 roles system for the classes. Yes, you have classes that can "heal" or "buff/debuff", but they're extremely simple, Only 2 Skills that heal, either the same amount as a healing item or Full Life and Full PP (Mana) once with a massive cooldown and 1 buff skill. The Debuff isn't even a skill, instead it's a passive for one specific class which applies when you hit the enemy. Not to mention, all of the skills mentioned above aren't even necessary to clear any content. (Instead of them, the class called "Ranger" is necessary, as this class can apply an effect on an enemy that increases the damage of all people hitting the marked spot, basically making them necessary to have if you want to clear high end content when they launch.)

- Sound: The Soundtrack is actually decent and somewhat memorable. Doesn't feel out of place as well, but as with any soundtrack, you might start to hate them.

- Visuals: The game looks visually decent enough. The world looks nice and the effects are good, but the characters are bad. I don't understand how they thought this style for characters was in any way good. As an active player, you get used to the graphics, but for majority of new players, 90% of characters just look straight up awful and in some cases, it's not even the player's fault. They tried to "fix" this by adding a cel shading option to the game for all characters or just yours. This however isn't enough in my opinion. The foundation is already flawed and shows cracks. Just watch the reveal for the Atelier Ryza collab with NGS. The NGS versions of Ryza and co. look awful.

- Collabs: Yes, the game has collabs, quite a lot actually. From Eminence in shadow and Frieren to Atelier Ryza and Melty Blood, tons of collabs here, HOWEVER. The collabs are really barebones. In the beginning, all you got was "AC Scratch Tickets", (Real Money Gacha) for the cosmetics of the collab IPs. That's it. Now, You also get cardboard cutouts of these characters to place in your Creative Space (Player Housing), AMAZING! No quests, enemies, stories, nothing. The only exception being the Sonic "Collabs" if you want to call them that. Instead of "AC Scratch Tickets" with the cosmetics, we got Limited Time Quests somewhat Sonic themed. They were ok the first time, but they get boring really really fast.

- The only positive of NGS that no other MMO currently tops: Character Customization. The character creator in NGS is surprisingly deep and good. You have tons of sliders that actually change the character. You have the ability to mix and match outfit parts (which are separated into 3 layers, Outerwear, Base/Setwear and innerwear). You also can freely customize your whole character and change everything about it with no barriers. Want to change the Gender? Do it. Don't want to be a human anymore, change to a CAST (Robot). Now with all the years of NGS behind us, there are tons and tons of different outfits, hairstyles, accessories, motions and so on that you can use to create truly unique characters ... IF you either scratch (pay for the gacha) or grind yourself to death for the ingame money.

- I skipped so many other flaws and problems. There is no Trading between Players, the player market Search is horrendous, gear progression is boring, content gets repeated (especially normal enemies), the community is extremely horny and down bad, Rewards for "difficult" content is really demotivating, the game is p2w, the game punishes you if you play for free, The tutorials are bad (if there are even any tutorials explaining specific things), the open world isn't being used at all, majority of content gets obsolete in few months, and and and ...

This game is super disheartening. PSO2 was a major game that i was really looking forward to. Phantasy Star had been a major, longstanding win in gaming achievements for me, so when this came out, I rushed to the Japanese servers to play it first and that's where it all went horribly wrong.

Not only were the levels short, uninspired and bland, the story was also not that great. The VA was subpar and I couldn't help that a lot of the focus was on the gacha stuff. So I decided to let it grow and wait a bit for the English Release.

PSO2 launched on windows store, which came with a thousand problems and constant disconnects and crashes with no real reason why. The fanbase had to build a patcher to solve these issues before a formal fix came out.

The storyboard was completely removed from the gameplay, completely removing one of the best parts about PSO2, that being the story progression alongside gameplay and combat to uncover the mysteries in the story. You could just gallop and blaze through things and not give a crap about the story one bit, which i suppose some people might like.

Again, by this time, more Gacha implementations were being made at outrageous prices, the game was only held up by events and while it was semi decent, it took a long while to be ported to steam- and fixed so it wouldn't constantly crash, for that matter. Most people seemed to focus solely on the character customization, which was indeed a strength for the game. The Market was FLOODED with items and a newbie could amass some meseta and buy an end game weapon for no real effort. The money sinks in place were *not* working. The weapon customization system was pretty much sidelined due to being able to just *find* a good weapon. An entire mechanic, wasted.

I have to impress that this spoiler, of where they split up Dark Falz, a universal evil into 5 hokey counterparts was not to my taste. It felt silly and unserious and most of the story didn't do a good job introducing them as a real threat- just some weird kinda sidestory thing for some characters. The Original Dark Falz literally consumed a girl as an avatar and has, cannonically tried to end the entire star system. This is a real big step down.

Then New Genesis Came.

I wanted to expect a new breath of life into the game, maybe Sega would do right by us and make a really good update to the currently not so great format that had been on life support with expansions that felt very overdone, trope-wise.

New Genesis started off with seriously bad framerate issues that still persist today, even after all this time. The VA and story were inscruitably bad, even if the story was now finally joined with gameplay. The content that i'd been hoping for was reduced to a mere open world experience with very, very little variation in combat, enemies, etc. Gameplay felt slow, clunky- unsatisfying. Many things that a PS fan would hope to see there were just either half implemented or were not there.

I again waited a good amount of time and gave New Genesis several chances to improve, only to see it stagnate and fail as a game.

As of writing this I have discovered that Sega has put a "skip gameplay" button, labeled exactly as such in the class shop. You can also just skip the story at no cost too. Pretty much admission that there's no point to doing any of what was made.

Sega doesn't care anymore. I'm really, really upset that they'd throw away such an amazing IP. All I can do is hope that maybe, there's a PSO3 or another and that they do it justice.

Sega, why'd you have to ruin my favorite series like this?

Base is really good, just play that. NGS is just awful.