Recent reviews by Nuchi

good remake

cute characters

bunny

Ads in game.

Not perfect but very fun.

hit dagron with stik

Hololive themed garlic-like but you don't have to be a Hololive fan to enjoy it.

Lacks important accessibility options for people with astigmatism. Tooltips are very difficult to read and cause eye strain and headaches. I had to screenshot every tooltip and invert them in GIMP and make a collage out of them on my 2nd monitor.

Party members will rape your character if you talk to them too much. It seems to come out of nowhere and there isn't an option to disable it. There is no warning about this anywhere ingame or on the store page.

There is no option for keyboard movement and mouse movement is very unreliable, especially when the camera gets stuck somewhere. It's easy to end up in a situation where you are stuck only able to walk back and forth between two points unless you switch to a controller. The game will sometimes randomly swap back to keyboard and mouse when using a controller, the rapid control mode swapping can sometimes crash the game.

The developers recently released an update that removed content from the Digital Art Compendium DLC that people have paid for.

The "New Genesis" version of this game has been out for about 2 years. It launched with about 1 hour of story content. Every 6 months they release about 30 minutes of story content. So far, there have been only 4 updates.

The story itself is not very good. They are constantly introducing new characters but never give them enough time on-screen for anyone to care about them. Once you finish the update that introduced a character, other than the unlikable main cast, you will probably never see them again.

Outside of the story, there isn't much to do. Sure, you can run around the "combat sectors" and kill enemies, but they don't drop anything of value. They do drop a ton of worthless garbage though. You cannot avoid picking up the garbage. Your character has a trash-magnet in their pocket which automatically vacuums up every piece of garbage in a 100km radius around them. Your inventory will quickly be filled with trash that you are supposed to sell to a vendor for very small amounts of currency. Because of the high drop rate for trash, you have to stop playing every 5 minutes or so to clean your inventory or just ignore it and pretend there is no drop system while the game eats all of your "loot". When players complained about this system, SEGA's solution was to offer a premium service with a high (real money) price tag that automatically sells the trash when it gets forced into your inventory.

The combat itself seems good at first but has major flaws that ruin it once you notice them. Most classes have 2 or 3 weapons they can use and each weapon has around 4 "Photon Arts" that they can use along with a basic attack and a "weapon action" which is usually a block or counter attack. The main problem with combat is that when you are fighting groups of enemies, you just spam the AoE Photon Art that hits everything, and when you are fighting a boss you just spam your weapon action to counter the boss's attacks until the boss takes a nap and lets you spam your best single target Photon Art for a few seconds. It doesn't matter if you're playing the melee-focused Fighter, the "technique"-focused Force, or the pet-focused Waker. Every single class has the exact same strategy. The main difference between classes is a cosmetic difference in what animation plays when you use your block button and whether or not you have to use a normal attack after blocking to trigger the counter and damage the boss.

While story and gameplay updates may be sparce, every 2 weeks they add a new clothing lootbox for you to spend your money gambling on so you can dress up your character. I know the devs that create lootboxes are different from the devs that program new content, but I think there may be a bit of an imbalance in those teams. Maybe there are a bit too many lootbox devs and not enough content devs. Or maybe this game is just a soul-less cash grab targeting the long-time Phantasy Star fans who haven't yet accepted that the series is dead, and the horny teenagers who want to dress up their waifu character in lewd outfits and ERP with each other with their modded emotes in Central City.

The music is good. Check out "Meteorn's Song" or "Song of War: Against Fate" on YouTube.

There is also a kind of hidden game. When you finish the tutorial, you can go to a "Ryuker Device" and select "Transfer to a PSO2 block" to go to "Phantasy Star Online 2", the original version of this game. There, you will find 8 years worth of story content and likeable characters that get fleshed out properly and stay relevant to the story from the time they are introduced until the end of the game. You'll also find much better gameplay, more interesting classes, and more varied combat.

Soon, they will be releasing "New Genesis Version 2". What is Version 2, you might ask? It's a "creative space" where you can build a house, maybe 2 new bosses to spam your weapon action at, and some reskinned enemies to make it seem like they added more content than they really did. No new areas to explore, no new Photon Arts, no reason to use the Photon Arts you already have, no reason to continue playing.

I've been playing this game since before the launch of "New Genesis". I've been playing the series since I was a child. Phantasy Star is one of my favourite game series. I am not some random hater that downloaded this game because it was free on Steam. I wanted this game to succeed. Now, I don't care. If SEGA doesn't, why should I?

This game used to be so good but SEGA threw it all away. This series used to be so good but SEGA murdered it and is puppeting its corpse around like a marionette.