Thanks to a windfall of selling some cosmetic items on the personal shop, I am now rocking a considerably cooler set of robot parts. The personal shop can be accessed through “visiphone” terminals which are the kiosks scattered all over the place with a purpleish ? set in a spinning oval. I have not fully figured out the economy of the game so I don’t have much to talk about here other than the fact that I did in fact figure out how to sell some items on it. I will probably talk more about this at a later date once I feel like I have a better grasp on the nuances of it.
A few days ago my friend Pete aka Nimgimli made a tweet essentially calling Scop and I out to try and write a post on how to actually play this game. I still feel like I don’t have anywhere near the amount of knowledge needed to actually write something like that. However I do intend to talk some more this morning about things I have figured out about the flow of the game. Hopefully these posts will suffice for the time being until I get a better understanding of the larger picture. Phantasy Star Online 2 is a game of systems within systems and they all seem a little on the nonsense side.
Afin is Your Extended Tutorial
As soon as you exit your first mission you are going to be introduced to this chap named Afin, and he is going to introduce you to the concept of Client Orders. These are effectively the closest thing that I have seen in the game to traditional MMO “quests”. The ones that Afin gives you are going to have less than straight forward directions, which seems to be a challenge for all of the client orders I have seen. They tell you what to do, but give you zero indication of where and exactly how to do them. Through much googling I managed to make my way down the list and only have one left which involves queuing up for a specific mission.
These quests are in theory designed to give you a run down of the basics of how you set up your characters, use abilities and train skills. I feel like this and pretty much everything else in this game needs a little work when it comes to actually explaining what the hell you are supposed to be doing.
Go to the Cafe
The first general tip that I have is don’t sleep on visiting the cafe. Visiting this area is going to essentially unlock the various crafting and harvesting systems in the game. This was not at all obvious to me, and I initially thought that the cafe was just a social hub where you could go hang out with your friends away from the busy gate area. It makes no sense at all that the crafting stations to build rings and such are in here, but alas this is not a game that entirely makes sense at all times. The client orders in this area are going to revolve around collecting items on planets or crafting specific items. Make sure you visit the rich old guy at the table, because all of his quests reward a significant amount of coin.
Once you have visited the Cafe, you will start seeing nodes appearing on planets that allow you to harvest. Once again like so many things most of these don’t make a ton of sense. For example this is a “mining” node, but you are also going to get random vegetables and such from it. The fishing nodes seem a little more straight forward and you will either get fish of some sort or some other manner of water dwelling creature. Additionally once you unlock harvesting, it appears that the monsters that you encounter can start dropping rare materials that are also used as part of these client orders from the Cafe.
Cofy Matters the Most
The counter highlighted in the above screenshot is Officer Cofy, and from what I can tell she is by far the most important counter in the Gate area. The client orders that she gives you seem to all be related to unlocking various features of the game. For example you get your first Mag Contract through her allowing you to start feeding random items to your very own floating digimon. Also similar you get quests to unlock the number of weapon palettes that you have access to and numerous other things. A lot of these quest are effectively just walking up to her and talking to her once you have reached a certain point in the game. If you see the icon above her head indicating that there are Client Orders available, then I highly suggest taking a moment to talk to her.
Titles Mean Free Stuff
This is Title Keeper Lachesis and she is your friend. It seems like this game is constantly throwing new titles at you for doing the most mundane of activities, and each time it does… you can get free stuff. Essentially this vendor will show you which titles you have unlocked and allow you to claim some sort of item for each of them. These range wildly from rez dolls to exp boosters, but regardless it is worth the time to check it periodically and see what you might have unlocked. I only found out about this through watching some videos, because I don’t believe that tutorial boy ever gives you a clue about this.
Daily Orders
This is Daily Order Officer Fina, and is anyone surprised that a game like this has some sort of a daily quest mechanic? Ultimately Fina officers a series of quests and the three of them that are sorted near the top of the list with a specific icon are considered daily client orders. These usually have a better than average payout and are associated with another mechanic that I will talk about in the next section. I believe these are also the way to earn some hard to get items since the are limited to being done in a specific day. I’ve only actually finished one of these so far, but all of the guides I have read or watched indicate that you should be doing all three every day.
Quest Counters
These are the Quest Counter clerks, Anneliese and Rebecca. They ultimately serve as the gate keepers to the various missions available in the game. of note you can also find a quest clerk in the Cafe as well as a Kiosk that serves the same role in the warp gate area, allowing you to choose a new quest and drop right back down to the planet after missions. These allow you to choose a whole slew of mission types and grant access to the Story of the game that plays out in a sequence of very “on-rails” story missions.
If you select “Main Quests” you get to a screen that shows the “Recommended Quests”, and if I am understanding this correctly these should in theory be linked to the Daily Client Orders. I had a lot of frustration surrounding not really knowing where I should be doing the daily client orders, because I have no clue what any given monster is called in this game yet. However based on what Ash and Tam were telling me, these should in theory take you to the areas where you can fulfill those Daily Client orders.
Skill Choices are Permanent*
This is Class Consultant Bhea, and you are introduced to him initially through Afin’s series of tutorial quests. One thing of note about choosing skills is that this is effectively a permanent choice, and there is no easy system allowing you to reset these choices. It is apparently entirely possible to build a character that will perform just fine in solo play, but will be completely useless in the end game. I have probably been building one of these characters because I have given zero crap about actually researching what a proper build looks like. However all of the guides I have read underline this point in bold, because it will not be easy for you to take back any choices.
As far as I am aware there are two options available, buying a second skill tree which will cost you 500 AC which is roughly $5. Resetting a skill tree costs 1000 AC, which is roughly $10. Every so often it is said that Sega gives out free skill resets, like those of us who played on the Xbox prior to the PC launch got one for free. I am going to hold onto this as my ace in the hole for if I get serious about this game and need to redo all of my bad decisions. Similarly punitive is the Mag system, which is apparently very difficult to fix your mistakes and similarly there are very specific Mag builds that are needed for end game content. For the time being however I am ignoring all of these directives and just playing the damned game.
Client Orders Everywhere
This is Hans, he gives some quests that are fairly lucrative and involve killing boss monsters at the end of maps. However that isn’t important, what is important is the fact that there are quest givers scattered throughout the ship and that the game from what I can tell won’t actually lead you to them. I suggest you fan out and at least check the quests available on each of them. They can be found in the Gate, in the Shops area, the Cafe, and even your Alliance Quarters if you have access to an Alliance. I still don’t fully know what half of them actually do, but it is at least good to know that they exist.
I still do not feel like I have a good grasp on the game, but I figure in the meantime I will continue the share the things that I have figured out along the way. This is absolutely not going to be a game for everyone. I was a die hard Phantasy Star Online playing back in the Dreamcast area, and even for me it still feels like a really big ask to sort through this nonsense. I realize that the current zeitgeist is once again landing upon a title, but it is absolutely fine for you to give this one a pass especially if you have a low tolerance for waifu/idol/otaku culture. This is absolutely not going to be a game for everyone, but what is there is enjoyable… but not enough to set aside the other games I am playing to play this one exclusively however.
Look for an old guy named ‘Jan’ near the lower ends of the shopping area. He is the ‘Afin’ of gear enhancing. Offers a stack of quests that train you on it and most of them give free ‘mats’ to do it with. His first quest also turns him into an Ally you can use on missions alongside Afin.
There’s some kind of bonus for being in full parties – so when playing solo you want to bring 3 allies and stick to the 4-party missions. Am told doing that gives some big bonuses. So Jan and Afin are a quick path to 2 of them.
Thank you!
Now, for your next assignment…. 🙂
If/when you figure out the various ways to improve gear, I’d love to hear about it. I know you have the Mag that you feed (I got that far on Xbox but have forgotten how to do it, my Mag constantly as a low-battery icon floating next to it), then I think you can enhance weapons by salvaging a similar weapon, but also maybe you can add slots for modules to a weapon, or something?
When I quit on Xbox it was because a) I’d taken a break for a few days and forgotten everything the game had ‘taught’ me via pseudo-tutorials and b) my inventory was constantly full of stuff that wasn’t readily identifiable and I got in that “full inventory paralysis” mode where I’m afraid of deleting anything because it might be important!!
Seriously, thanks for taking the time to write this up!!