User:Choto 3000/Sandbox

Contents

• 1 First Impressions - Phantasy Star Online 2
  • 1.1 Starting out
  • 1.2 Gameplay
  • 1.3 Levelling up
  • 1.4 Story content
  • 1.5 Other content
  • 1.6 Final thoughts

First Impressions - Phantasy Star Online 2

I haven't played that many MMORPGs in my lifetime. RuneScape was my first one and the only one I've stuck with for more than a few months (and paid for), though I've also played Lego Universe, World of Warcraft and some Final Fantasy IV. But a year ago when I saw that Phantasy Star Online 2 was coming to the west thanks to Sega I honestly got rather curious about it. At first glance it reminded me of Xenoblade Chronicles X as the art style and mechs looked similiar, but I knew the story would be very different.

In this article, I'm going to go over my first impressions with the game from the first 10 hours of playtime. The article is technically a bit late due to RuneScape 3's Archaeology and yak track grinds, but bear with me.

Starting out

I'm not going to bore you with details regarding the opening cutscene, but it's there and it gives some context to what's going on. A monster threat known as Falspawn is spreading across the universe, causing monsters to manifest on all sorts of planets seemingly out of thin air. You are an ARKS operative, a member of a group of combatants capable of using photons as weapons who are tasked with investigating this phenomenon and fighting back the Falspawn horde.

After the cutscene, you're greeted with a character creation system. You can choose from four races; humans, Newman (basically man-made elves), CAST (machines, the one I chose) and Deuman (basically human-falspawn hybrids with recessive falspawn genes). It's actually quite capable, you can change the shape of faces and body parts much to your liking after choosing some base models and your class. Ah, right - the game uses class-based combat like most MMORPGs (RuneScape is a rare exception here with its classless system). There's a ton of different classes to choose from, I personally went with Braver who uses a bow and a katana. Each class basically specialises in two weapons, one melee and one ranged weapon, and there are some weapons like gunblades that any class can use. This is another similarity to Xenoblade Chronicles X, as it also has a melee and ranged weapon for every class. PSO2 offers everything from gatling guns to swords and summoning. The only thing you cannot change after creating your avatar is its gender, though this isn't a big problem as you can have multiple avatars per account.

Then you begin your standard tutorial and introductory mission on a woodland planet, with an AI partner. Nothing too specific to point out here, you're explained the basics of combat and you get a small boss fight at the end. After some cutscenes you'll arrive at the game's hub area, ready to start your adventure for real.

Gameplay

If you've ever played MMORPGs other than RuneScape, the controls are fairly standard affair. You can use either a keyboard and mouse or a controller to play the game, I chose the latter (wired Xbox One controller) simply because I wanted to see what it would be like. You have an ability bar of sorts on the bottom-centre of the screen, party health and "adrenaline" gauges on the bottom-left, a chatbox on the right and a minimap plus a potential objective on the top-right corner of the screen. You have two buttons directly mapped to attacks and a modifier that switches them to another set of abilities, so four abilities in total, but you are able to add additional abilities to the action bar. They work via a cursor that moves left and right and a button that activates whatever is currently selected, including healing items. In my case those were controlled via the D-pad and pushing the left stick in to use. Weapons and their assigned abilities can be changed via a scroll menu, in my case with the D-pad's up and down buttons. There's also a jump button and one used to interact with the environment, such as to pick up loot or to activate machines. Finally, you have a dodge/dash and a block button (depending on your class and current weapon, some classes cannot block) and one used to lock on to enemies and their body parts for easier targeting.

The control scheme feels fairly solid overall for a "console" game. They're responsive, you can develop your character to take advantage of good button timings and it's fairly intuitive when you get used to it, but it's not perfect. Some actions would make more sense being mapped to different buttons and healing in the heat of battle is cumbersome, as you need to wait for the healing animation to finish before you can do anything, during which you're a sitting duck for a boss' finishing move.

Levelling up

You level up by doing fetch quests and slayer task-like quests from NPCs as well as from fighting monsters, so pretty typical. But unlike RuneScape, you have access to a ton of skill trees, one for every class.

The skill trees aren't super-elaborate or complicated. For every level you go up, you get a skill point to use in your skill tree. It can unlock new class abilities, enhance existing ones, reduce incoming damage and a lot more, including giving you the ability to heal when performing a perfect counter attack on some classes and such. That said, later in the game you can unlock the ability to get a sub-class and unlock another skill tree from a class of your choice. I don't fully understand the benefits yet, though.

Speaking of quests, this game has a ton of them, though unfortunately they're nothing like those from RuneScape. Like many other MMOs, PSO2 has reduced them to basically checklists, more like the achievement system in RuneScape 3 or Achievement Diaries in Old School RuneScape. They have next to no plot (so far) and are really bare-bones, with the only goal of providing the player some kind of a reward. And that's a great segue for -

Story content

PSO2's story, after you reach the hub, is basically turned into a menu option on the mission select screen on the equivalent of a "guild" this game has for the place you go get quests and such in many other MMOs (not comparable to RuneScape's guilds). If you've seen a few fantasy game anime shows, you probably know what I'm talking about. When selected, you get a list of chapters - at the time of writing the western release of PSO2 has four chapters available, and I'm still in the first chapter. You choose whichever one wou have available, and get another menu with one or more scenes to choose from. Yes, so far all story content has been cutscenes, outside of the main game, with maybe one combat event per segment that may or may not have any story leading up to it. The cutscenes feel fragmented at least in Chapter 1 as they don't feel connected to each other at all at least initially. You get some info here and there, but it's clear that there's little cohesion. I think it'll improve later on, but even if it does the fact that the story and the rest of the game feel so disconnected isn't a great first impression. These cutscenes should ideally be part of the missions you select and happen while exploring a new area with your party. I'm not impressed.

Other content

If we ignore the story, at least the world feels surprisingly alive. Every now and then emergency missions appear and alert all players on the server, similiar to the world events from RuneScape 3, where you get to gang together to perform some feat. From what I've seen there's defending a mining colony from waves of enemies, taking down a massive warship with mechs and protecting a city from a Falspawn invasion. They're actually quite a lot of fun and bring variety to the gameplay of just rushing through randomly generated maps on different planets.

You can also create your own NPCs that you can use as party members if you don't feel like playing with other players, and you can also use them to gather items. On the above image is my very own one, hanging out in my PSO2-equivalent of a player-owned house.

I have yet to see any PVP options anywhere in the game, but everything is centered around combat. You can trade items between players or NPCs, there's no skilling though you can craft your own weapons and such if you have the materials. There's also nothing to explore other than the randomly generated "dungeons" as the hub world is fairly small, a single spaceship, so basically if the gameplay isn't interesting there's little value left in the rest of the game.

Final thoughts

I don't really know what to think about this game. I kind of like the gameplay, but it's so similiar to most other MMOs it's not really distinctive enough. In fact at times it feels like a lazier version of Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, which is very similiar in its gameplay but you can actually fire your weapons exactly where you want instead of having to rely on the targeting system or dumb luck, and you're not constrained to one melee and one range weapon - you can actually have two of either if you want, a melee-only or a ranged-only build.

Since there's not much in the way of a catchy story, it's a big problem for me because I love games more for their stories than gameplay. RuneScape has very interesting lore and every quest tells an actual story, unlike most MMOs, but even in other MMOs cutscenes are usually not just a menu option.

Chances are I won't be playing this for much longer simply because it's too narrow-focused for my tastes. The premise wasn't bad, but the execution is lackluster.

Final rating:

• Presentation (graphics): 8/10
• Gameplay: 7/10
• Story: 3/10
• Variety: 3/10
• Total: 5/10

Article by Diapolo10