Official trailer for PHANTASY STAR ONLINE II (PC)

[Pointy Cat]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BAYKvH5 ... r_embedded[/youtube]

Trailer of the next update shown at TGS. New ruins zone, sub classes and Halloween stuff. The second half is just people talking about it in Japanese.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu6Of7Kp ... r_embedded[/youtube]

A new PSO2 Vita trailer. Seems to work quite well on it.

[Pointy Cat]

Also Very Hard mode comes with the Ruins update. There's apparently going to be new rare bosses for VH mode, such as 'Mr. Umbra' haha.

[Deef]

Lol those Japanese are so Japanese. Thanks for the update. Can you give us a quick rundown on what content there is in total now? Any better mags too? What about proper RAcast models? And do you know much about the sub classes? Because the classes system so far is lame.

I'm not sure if there's any way I'll be able to get into this for a while now having recently discovered the meaning of "busy" while still learning the crazy idea of "time management". But I still would like to keep up with it, being literally the only freemium game I'd happily put money into.

God dammit, no time for anything like this, or PSO 1, or Eve, or MGS or damn near anything. I play a fangame for 20 minutes and feel guilty. I want to buy JSR and will buy NiGHTS but I wonder then what am I supposed to do. Oh yeah, time manage. Forgot already.

[GameHED]

You should play PS Zero on the nintendo DS. It is short, the dungeons are small and the pace is fast because it takes next to no time to clear the 'rooms' and move about. The story is pretty good too. Eugenicist space elves (hippies) use robots to replace filthy humans or somethings like that and as we know the real villain is the dark side of the force who possessed the central computer that contrls everything and then using that authority corrupted and perverted the belief systems of all races to make people angry so they would war with each other and kill stuff - pretty standard star wars trope of good vs evil then)

Would love to see sega make a sequel to PS Zero. Called it PS Zero 2. Come on sega. Stop being such a sony whore and support nintendo 3DS as well.

One thing I have noticed is many of those robots look like something from gundam. Do bandai know sega is ripping off their franchise? Maybe they are going easy on them because they (bandai namco, sega capcom) are doing that crossover 3ds game project x zone. The perks are that sega can now put gundams in phantasy star so the artists don't have to design their own.

[Deef]

Well, holy crap.

https://www.polygon.com/e3/2019/6/9/186 ... lease-date" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Where else has a thread ever slept for 7 years only to pick up again and still be current.

[Candy Arse]

SOLD

[Deef]

So the first NPC in the game is Australian now.

Says it all really that despite finally getting a western release after 8 years, this has still been forgotten here at the ranch. But indeed this actually did happen; first releasing on Win 10 / Xbone via the MS Store, then arriving on Steam a few months ago bringing Win 7 support with it.

I'll just mention the few oddities about this particular release that I've noticed so far.

Wankers! That's what brought me here. The new voice acting is really the one thing that's going to be significantly different for anyone who played JP PSO2. As mentioned, the first NPC in the game is Australian, in the "Let's make this one an Ossie" sense. So he says "mate" 3 times within 10 seconds of meeting you, and exclaims early in the tutorial that the enemy alien lifeforms are "wankers", which made me lol. It would have been truly amazing had a genuine contemporary Aussie accent been there instead, but the reminder of that old "Eat s*** and die!" chestnut from PSO1 was worth something at least. It is textbook cheesy Aussie imitation... funny to think we're now part of PSO lore. He exclaims "Holy s***!" later on too.

But having said that, the subsequent voice acting I've encountered is actually good. I wasn't expecting much or even caring; I hadn't really remembered spoken dialog was even a thing in this game, but the new voices are actually way preferable to the Japanese ones. Zeno and Echo, the next 2 NPCs you meet, are legitimately completely fine and good! So, better than expected there, but it's just so funny when the script then returns to Afin.. the Ossie.. who replies "Ah, cheers, pleasure's all ours love." It's decent in one moment, then cringe the next. From memory however, Afin isn't around long so he's good for a laugh at least, and I'm interested to see how the rest of the NPCs turn out.

The launcher and options show their age. Obviously it's nothing like the NASA launch simulation that was getting JP PSO2 installed, but it's still a weird Steam-then-launcher process. You cannot toggle fullscreen while the game is running; gotta adjust that with the launcher, same with text sizing which needs some tinkering since we're not in 2012 anymore. I tried overriding the game's AA with whatever I could in Nvidia Control Panel, but it doesn't appear to have done anything. There are premium-only shader options... I think they're new. Speaking of visuals, the cut scenes are oddly less saturated than the game itself, even though they're all still just real time. So every time a cut scene finishes it's an unexpected slap of colour when control is returned.

There's a little more hand-holding in the tutorial and significantly more once you reach the public lobby. Now it really does force you to "learn" to jump, and run, and move the camera. It lets you start playing first and name your character later. There are big yellow arrows in places now. Exciting stuff. You get through the basic How-Missions-Work mission and then the game slaps a big, ugly, compressed movie of someone else's PSO2 on your screen while a voice-over hammers in the same thing you just spent a quest doing. It's a really tacky addition to this release.

Since I last tried it out (maybe 5 years ago), there's also a 7th class: Summoner. Summoner basically appears to mean "You have a pet now so forget about aiming". The pet is always on screen and I hope it evolves or something, since it's currently a quite uninspired Pokemon/MLP crossbreed.

Mouse motion feels a little bit laggy. I can't really comment on how that compares to JP PSO2 since the laptop I used to play it on was already laggy-as with its mouse input.

Anyhoo, I didn't intend for the tone of this post to be negative or positive. Just THRILLING!

All in all, the wait was too long and PSO2's time has passed. It's hard to recommend this to anyone, since those most compelled by the IP would have already tried JP PSO2, and those only interested in playing an action RPG probably won't be greatly excited by what PSO2 offers nowdays. The Venn diagram union of people interested enough to want to play it, but not interested enough to have installed JP PSO2 in the last 8 years, has got to be pretty damn slim.

The thing that really threw me off PSO2 was that while it was a solid, albeit belated, successor to PSO1, its high damage and low interaction ended up feeling too overcooked to me. On its original release it felt really well balanced; the first level and first boss had the difficulty, progress, HP levels and healing limits, motion and gunplay all really just perfect, and if the game had stayed like that I would have stayed impressed. It was a more fun, more playful, more reactive PSO. But through further plays over the years it appears to have turned into something more like 3 hacked Spread Needle users being in your game, every game. Maybe I just got unlucky with my parties, maybe not. This Summoner class I'm just now trying really epitomizes the issue: My very first Forest run sees my pet hitting enemies for 300 - 400 damage (acknowledging it's all relative, but still these are pointlessly high numbers) while I'm level 2 and barely aiming, let alone actually having a concern for positioning. Cast your mind back to early levels in PSO1. You had to work. You counted damage, you watched your timing and positioning was critical.

So honestly, to someone interested in PSO2 because of its ties to PSO1, it's maybe a better suggestion to download PSOBB and instead enjoy the nostalgia from that angle on one of the several private servers still getting around.

But, I'll give this a bit more time and see how it feels, and maybe come back and write even more.

[Deef]

Really, I just told my pet to attack a wolf. It not only continued to attack it until it was dead without me needing to click anything further, it then killed the other 6 wolves and a rappy nearby, all still without me clicking anything. It agros enemies as well, so you really do just sit there and watch. I'm not sure what the Summoner class is supposed to deliver other than dopamine.

Edit -- Literally as soon as I wrote that, a Rockbear appeared... the typical level boss. I right-clicked, so the pet went in to attack it, and I stood there doing nothing. I am still standing there doing nothing... I am genuinely alt-tabbed doing something else (writing this) while my pet plays the game for me.

Oh it's done.

The pet does appear to have a life bar so we'll see what happens when/if that runs out.


Edit 2 -- Right, so I entered the boss room and it was a new boss I hadn't seen before. Nice.
Right-click and the pet goes in for the attack. I watch it for a good long while, doing nothing myself. I did have to move once to get out of their way.
However eventually the pet did indeed die, so I ran around avoiding the boss for about 30 seconds, then the pet revived itself and was literally 5 seconds away from actually killing the boss. Done.

So in short, the Summoner class seems to be a fantastic way to completely remove concern from the game. Maybe it's aimed at people who just want to be able to go through the content without having to concentrate too much. It does reinforce the point about how PSO2 appears to have evolved to into being about mindless damage spam compared to PSO1's very tangible battles... but maybe that's just what this class in particular is meant to be. *shrug*

Well, eggs are now a thing you find, which turn into different pets, so that's interesting. I guess pets are this class's staple "weapon".