Welcome to Another Review

Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis is a free-to-play multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Sega. This review is based on 15 hours of play. Being an online RPG, there is a vast amount of content to work through, but this review will give you a sense of what the game is like in the first instance.

GAMEPLAY

If we talk about Gameplay, First, you create your character from a variety of classes, including hunters, rangers, fighters, or trekkers. Overall, it's not a bad system, but the facial details were pretty awful. Combat-wise, you've got a variety of different strikes and attacks, from charges, sidestepping, glide abilities, lock-on, and blasts, with more becoming available as you progress. General combat is pretty good fun; the animations are smooth, the controls are fluid, and it has a satisfying feel of Gameplay.

The game world is pretty vast, with several points of interest, such as training cocoons where you can learn good tips. Finally, on gameplay, the world itself is pretty nice, and nicely designed, with a central hub city acting as a good place to pick up your missions and do a few other bits and pieces, but overall, the missions felt pretty jaded in terms of what you actually have to do. Much like many other games in the online RPG genre, you know, I got a real sense of Black Desert vibes here.

Graphics & Sound

Graphically, it's a very vibrant and colorful experience with a solid game world and smooth animation. However, the game has some major issues with its technical performance, with slow down, frame rate drops, and occasions where it freezes for what seemed like an absolute eternity. The menus are pretty appalling, and once again, the font size is so small, making menu usage really painful, and the tutorials also were pretty badly worded as well. Add to that the overzealous volume of on-screen items, making it very hard to see what's actually going on. All these things just kind of left me feeling underwhelmed by the visual experience. In terms of sound, the effects are pretty solid, but the voice acting is an absolute cringe-fest, and the music becomes one of the most annoying soundtracks I've ever heard.

Good and Bad

Good -
The game world is vast and colorful, the combat is fast-paced, and the character creator is okay.

Bad -
The story setting and missions felt devoid of character, the audio is for the most part an absolute disaster, general gameplay gets very tedious quickly, and performance-wise, it's a complete show with hard crashes, frame rate drops, and long freezes that ruin the experience.

Final Thoughts

Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis is a good Game, but it lacks the magic of other superior titles in the free-to-play market. Despite having a nice combat system and pleasant-looking game worlds, it doesn't have that bit of magic to make it stand out. It's very much a by-the-numbers online RPG; it's nothing we've not seen before, things we've seen done much better in other games. There are lots of quests, lots of busy work, combat to get involved with, and some nice multiplayer potential, but the narrative is shocking, with characters that lack any charm. To be honest, I got pretty bored after the first 10 hours, and I don't really think it's a game that's going to hold many people's attention for more than a handful of sessions.

Maybe after 15 hours of play, things start to get better and more engaging, but unfortunately, the issues with the game's technical performance and lack of interesting story and characters overshadow any potential improvements. The vibrant game world and solid combat system are simply not enough to make up for the tedious and uninspired missions, cringe-worthy voice acting, and frustrating technical problems.

I would like to mention that I was busy with my studies and I wasn't able to find time to play games and write reviews as I mentioned in my previous posts. Now, I am almost free so I will do my best to post reviews daily