Phantasy Star Online 2 has been one of the most awaited MMORPG games by the community and its waiting is not a mystery, since besides being published by SEGA, it is one of the best MMORPG games that has been released in Japan, so the level we can expect is quite big. It had always been kept in Japan until 2020 when it was released in North America without any IP blocking, so everyone can play it right now.

After having more than 300 errors when installing it (something normal for me), I was finally able to test it.

These are my first impressions, let's go directly to the game. Without any detour we start with the race selection, we have four different races which are: Human, Newman, CAST and Deuman. They are quite similar names but in design they are quite different.

Then we will have to select the class of our character, we have six, some are the typical ones like the warrior or the archer, and some new ones like the Bouncer, which is the character that attacks with legs in an aerial way. So you have to select quite well, and one that especially suits your style of play.

Then we move on to the customization, in my opinion it's one of the best I've seen, and you'll say to me: "But this game came out in 2012, eight years ago, how can it have a good customization? I was wondering the same thing and I was expecting a fairly simple and straightforward customization, but it's absolutely the opposite; obviously it's not like Black Desert where you can edit down to the pores of the skin, but it's pretty deep. You can go after pretty much everything, the face, the body build, the clothes, the hair. There is a wide variety of styles, quite rare and very peculiar.

Something that surprised me is that you can also edit the facial expression of the character, if you want him to be happy or sad, and you can even change his voice. So this section is extremely complete, you can create your own waifu or a robotic Spartan, whatever you want, the mix that you can think of.

Once this is done we move on to what is the game itself, it starts with a prologue of the story, you can even select the difficulty of this option, you can also skip it. I recommend that you do it because it gives you an introduction to the story, which is quite interesting and also teaches you all the mechanics of the game, especially the most important, so you will not be lost in the game without knowing what you have to do. Along with this we can also observe what is the graphic section, which although it is true, is not developed in the latest graphics engine of last generation, it really does not need it, since this game is set in a mixture of anime style with a little cartoon style. With this, more people can have access to the game.

The requirements are quite low, so I think most people will be able to play it, yes, the game weighs 90 GB, so you have to delete several things to free space. What I will emphasize in terms of graphics, is the design of the enemies, they make you want to give a sword in the legs to each of them and destroy them completely, and it is because of the good design that has in general.

On the subject of gameplay is quite dynamic, we have different skills that we will unlock as we progress through the missions, we can use them simultaneously and make various combinations. We can also create strategies according to the enemy we face or the companions we have. I honestly liked it a lot, because apart from having several skills you can also change weapons in combat, my character is a kind of warrior who has a giant sword, which I use mostly against the final bosses, because it is the weapon that has more damage; but when I face against several enemies or against large hordes, I use blades because it does much more damage in range, so you can select the one you want. Weapons have their own abilities, which means you don't have the same abilities all the time.

The game consists of performing different missions and races to progress with your character, it is not an open world game, all the people are in a general lobby, in which there are different places which give you missions. But this does not detract at all, because for example, when we do missions we go to completely different scenarios without maps, each with different enemies, bosses and different objectives. In the first mission we can find ourselves in a forest and suddenly in the other mission in a completely different place, as in a volcano, that's the big difference of this game, it does not give you the feeling that it is repetitive, on the contrary, it is not that you run out of things to do because we have missions of all kinds.

As for the difficulty of the game is quite progressive, it also depends on the mission and if you are playing with other people, because for example, at the beginning I played completely alone and I died about 7 times without exaggeration, I do not know if it's because I'm a one-armed or because if you do them alone the difficulty increases considerably.

In summary, these were my first impressions of Phantasy Star Online 2, obviously I have much more content to discover, but only with what I have already mentioned is enough to give a chance to this great game. For a reason it is one of the most played games in Japan, besides the fact that it is completely free to play.