Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis

Unlike other reviews in this game that literally do not understand how to play this game. Here's an actual review who spent hours of this game and has some decent understanding of the game. The game is very free-to-play, no need to spend additional money on most things and every paid option always has a free-to-play alternative. And most paid options include player shop access (given some shop passes by the Battle Pass for free), Auto Selling junk items (also given for free by the Battle Pass), and Material Storage (also given for free from various sources). Those are noteworthy gameplay aspects that are behind Paid options and does not inherently hinder progress. Every other Paid options are cosmetics and enhancing showcase methods of your character's looks and fashion. Gameplay and Progression: Starting from scratch, you start with nothing until the game starts giving you free weapons at certain Level Thresholds. At the start, the story gives so much experience that by just going through the story (whether skip or not) gives you some initial meseta and enough experience points to start your endgame gearing and some temporary free gears to help you farm the actual content where the endgame gear can be farmed for free. Classes are playable and serviceable with varying degrees of success, and class balance are more or less balanced (with some nuance that I will not go into in this review). After that, you're pretty much free to choose what to do. After getting your Free gear, you are encouraged to actually upgrade to actual properly enhanced and augmented gears so you can farm more efficiently, make more money in less amount of time, and feed your fashion needs for your character. The free gear is strong enough to let you enter endgame content, but it is the weakest gear you will have until you use proper farmable weapons. Customization is endless, if you can think about it, you can do it. Please just don't do abominations where you have the sliders maxed out and with the ugliest character possible. I beg of you, I like to look at character fashions and I don't need to see another monstrosity just because. There is some Social aspect to this game, ranging from chatting with other players in Lobbies, partying with them in instanced quests runs and participating in Urgent Quests, limited time quests that occur at certain times of day where you can think of it as a Raid. Creative Space is there for you to create, well, anything you like. Minigames? You got it. Dream House? Possible. You want a venue for community events? Make it. Optimized Room layout for points farming? Heck yeah. There's a lot of things to do with this game, but don't treat it as your main game that you spent hours and hours with it and then complain there's nothing to do because there are a lot of things to do if you really like to explore what the game can offer. Don't go in this game, liking only one or two aspects of the game, and saying "this game has no content" because that's a stupid opinion and I am allowed to call you out for it. It is a game where you can have no commitment, come back to it after a day and still be able to catch up and farm relevant contents and do whatever you like. Oh and, those reviews who put so much blame to AI Chatbot, goes to show none of them understand what the actual feature is. Yes, I am also calling them out. And for those who are actually curious and knows how to read and understand, here it goes: They added an AI Chatbot called Mag AI that is there to serve as someone that you can talk with. Because contrary to popular belief, not a lot of players actually talk with other players because of a certain lobby space that is very questionable and has bad opinions so the general culture about that certain lobby space is to avoid it like the plague. Now, you are not forced to use this AI chatbot (if you can even call it AI), and you can opt out and not do the task to enable it. You can play the game normally without it and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. If you do use it, just expect its answers to be as bad as current LLMs like ChatGPT because its not AI, its not going to solve your problems, its there for you to talk and mess around with. It has a very limited data and will not provide you gameplay tips and informational source as of yet. May or may not improve in the future depending on SEGA (or outright remove it if enough people cry about it). I won't put a TLDR because thats how you form really bad and misleading opinions so read this review if you have the attention span. If you don't, this is already a check of you whether or not you'll want to play this game. Gamers nowadays have so little attention span, they can't even freaking read anything.