Good morning friends! I’ve been playing a non-casual amount of Phantasy Star Online 2 over the last few weeks. Most of my posts about the game thusfar have been largely explanatory, given that there are a truly nonsense number of systems to digest. At this current moment I am level 60 of 75 and the leveling process has slowed down significantly. Imagine a train pulling into the station, each time you tick past 10 levels you feel a noticeable slowdown in just how much momentum is happening. I expect the 60-75 grind to take as much time as the levels previously gained to be honest.
I’ve not really noticed this that much however because the game provides a bounty of large set piece content for you to participate in. Right now I am mostly focused on “very hard” content, though I could bump up and start doing “super hard” though I am not sure the added difficulty is worth it. Several times a night something happens call and Urgent Quest, and for a period of time you can participate with other players on the server in a group activity. These feel similar to the Alliance Raids you can participate in while playing Final Fantasy XIV.
My current favorite of these is Dark Falz Luther, which is a multi part event. The first phases involve 30 minutes of farming the oddly bong shaped creatures two images up which drop a ton of meseta and worth a sizeable amount of experience. Once that phase finishes you get to fight Luther itself in a big raid like encounter with mechanics that more or less need to be observed. This phase can be done only once per character and tends to drop some pretty significant rewards.
After which you end up with this cool screenshot moment of the entire team. I’ve been lucky enough to participate in this event each evening over the last several days, and in part this is probably why I have gained several levels in rapid sequence. I’ve not really encountered one of these urgent quests that was not worth my time either in loot or experience gained, and as a result I tend to look forward to them when they are announced by the ships public announcer. It also helps to make you feel like you are part of a larger community.
Another thing that I first thought was really weird, but I am now warming to significantly… is the fact that every so often there are “Live” vocaloid concerts in the shopping area. I am not going to go into what a vocaloid is, but SEGA appears to have a cross promotional relationship with the folks behind “Hatsune Miku” and “Megurine Luka”. There are item packs associated with both that can be gained through the in game loot boxes, and periodically a concert happens of a song called “Living Universe”.
I admit that at first I considered this a bit on the odd side, but players legitimately turn up for these and as a result they become yet another spontaneous occurrence of community in game. I tend to turn up if I am available because of the prevalence of folks firing off various symbol art. I am slowly curating a collection of these images, and I absolutely snagged “Meatwad” shown above. I don’t personally necessarily get the vocaloid thing, but I don’t really have to in order to understand that it is good to have these moments of spontaneous gathering in a game.
The game has this built in farming culture that I also find interesting. When something is going well people tend to stick around and ride the experience and loot until it stops being interesting. I was doing a mission the other day that no joke gained me half of a level at 57 and the entirity of 58 all while just sitting in the same place. We had a full compliment of twelve players and for some reason this beach decided to start paying out in droves as we went through the course of three different PSE bursts. No screenshot can do justice to just how fast we were killing things and how much loot was dropping. This is the closest I have ever seen to the fabled Destiny Loot cave.
Sure most of the loot that dropped was trash, and I only actually picked up any of the “red” items which denote the higher rarity items, but the experience was fun regardless. I have to say the longer I play Phantasy Star Online 2 the more I end up enjoying it. Sure it takes a long time to really begin to grasp all of the systems and how they intermingle, but eventually you read a point of equilibrium where you are doing interesting things every day. The longer I play however the more of the community aspect I am experiencing, and while it is not necessarily my traditional jam, I definitely appreciate it. A fancy horned lad pole dancing in the cafe if nothing else breaks up the monotony.
Minecraft Dungeons is a new game from Microsoft and Mojang and released on all platforms on May 26th. Considering I am extremely late in writing this, I am figuring you have probably already played the game and already decided if it is for you or not. It is available through Xbox Game Pass, so if you partake of that it is pretty much a no-brainer to at least dip your toes in the water. For the rest of you that have not placed your hands on this game, you might want to pause a bit and listen.
Minecraft Dungeons is a game in the Minecraft universe, but effectively has nothing at all to do with the gameplay of the baseline game. It is instead a top down isometric dungeon crawler that just happens to feature the primitive graphics of Minecraft. You choose from a list of preset characters, which is the first strike against the game given it would be nice if we had some measure of control over our characters features. You equip suitable Minecraft world items like swords and pick axes and use them to bash your way through levels filled with a greatest hits collection of things you will recognize from Minecraft, namely Zombies, Creepers, and Skeletons.
You defeat levels, which unlock additional levels… each of which having a difficulty slider effectively determining the sorts of drops that are available and supposedly the relative difficulty. I am primarily playing this as my before bedtime game, but I have yet to finish unlocking everything available due to lots of short play sessions. I am not sure exactly what the ultimate point of the game is, but it seems to have a storyline woven around a bad group of Villagers called the Illagers. This is apparently a thing in actual Minecraft but I never thought of them as some sort of an enemy faction.
The game seems to sell itself as a sort of Minecraft meets Diablo experience, and based on my play sessions it feels like neither. I would say the core gameplay loop reminds me significantly more of something like Gauntlet Legends or Gauntlet Dark Legacy. The loot is neither plentiful enough or good enough to really feel like a Diablo game. The game also lacks anything close to the build complexity and nuance that is traditionally available in the ARPG genre, so in the end it feels exceptionally shallow.
In theory as you go throughout your travels you collect melee weapons, ranged weapons, armor, and can equip three artifacts at a time. The second significant strike is that all of the gear can be enchanted, but each item acquired has a randomly assigned fixed ability that as far as I can tell you can’t change. This leads to situations where you might find a weapon that is technically stronger than the one you are using, but it has a worthless enchant on it leaving you to hold onto your existing gear for far too long.
Similarly not all artifacts are created equal. Some are going to have useful effects and others are going to largely be pointless. For example the first one you get is an old timey bottle rocket style firework that you can in theory aim at a group of enemies to explode it. The challenge there is an exceptionally long cooldown and that it never seems to go in the direction you actually want it to. The best item I have found is an amulet that collects souls each time an enemy dies and then allows you to effectively have an extra healing potion. Over time this seems to heal less and less of your health pool diminishing its usefulness.
The third strike against the game is that there are a significant number of “cheap” mobs that seem to put you in positions where it is exceptionally hard to avoid taking damage from them. Additionally I have encountered even on lower difficulty settings several mobs that can just straight up one shot you. It isn’t so much a difficulty thing, as most encounters fall over without effort. There is an unpolished nature to the design that makes me question if it got the requisite time to balance the encounter design or even had a significant alpha or beta testing period. The game as a whole has this half baked and unfinished feeling to it.
A significant amount of your time is spent in your camp, which you unlock as a safe base of operations after the prologue. The game operates on collecting emeralds and then you can spend those emeralds at your base with first the Blacksmith for randomly generated weapons, and later the Wandering Trader for randomly generated artifacts. The problem is that in both cases the items created for you are generally several levels worse than whatever you can get as loot from the zones themselves.
The camp itself is also huge, but almost completely devoid of purpose. You have a house that appears to never change as you go through the game levels. You have various ruins scattered around the play area, that again never evolve over time. At first I thought that maybe this was just a side effect of me not having gotten far enough into the game to unlock more things. However one of my friends who has played a ton of this game with his son indicated that I have effectively seen everything that is going to open up. Once again… the game feels like it was meant to be something more, but instead we got an unfinished product that was rushed to market.
I have played the game on Windows and Xbox One through Xbox Game pass and then purchased it for the Nintendo Switch. In all cases they rely upon your Xbox Live account but also in all cases they do not seem to support any manner of cloud saves. This would be strike number four, because even though I have issues with the experience as a whole it might be more enjoyable if I could start the evening on my PC and then finish playing the same character and making the same progress on my Switch. It seems to pull in all of my Xbox Live friends, but while playing on the switch none of them have actually shown up as someone I could play with… making me question if cross platform play is a thing either.
What you have in the end is a game with the primitive graphics of Minecraft but is devoid of any creative outlets. A game that would like to pattern itself off Diablo but lacks any interesting loot and character building options. A game that seems to have a shared account system but is not utilizing it in any meaningful manner. Ultimately Minecraft Dungeons is a confusing mess of a game that feels unfinished and unbalanced, and after experiencing it myself for a few weeks there is no way I would ever suggest this game to someone. If you have Xbox Game Pass, by all means check it out for yourself since you can do so for free… but I would not spend a dime here until things have sufficiently changed.
Hanging out with Pizza Maid and her adorable Hatsune Miku Mag
This weekend I learned about a fun system in Phantasy Star Online, in part thanks to my good friend PizzaMaid. However since I have way more friends showing up through Xbox Live than I do friend avatars available I thought I would take a few moments today to talk about this system. First off at a high level Friend Avatars allow you to run around with up to 3 copies of your friends characters, pending they have gone through the process of registering an avatar. These are going to be weaker versions of their own characters, but nonetheless are a bit of a buff when playing through content as they do a non-zero amount of damage, healing and buffing.
Creating your Own Friend Avatar
Friend Avatar Creation Options
This system like so many begins with the Visiphone, aka the kiosk with the purpleish pink ? inside of a rotating oval. By now you should in theory make yourself familiar with this interface as it is also how you access this games version of the auction house, aka the Personal Shop. I’ve pasted together several of the UI screens showing the process of selecting the Friend Avatar option, choosing to Add and Avatar and then the settings that I currently have filled out for mine.
From what I understand the personality means nothing really, but the Attributes and Title impact how your avatar will perform in battle. I’ve not found a good NA guide to the settings, but here is one that I attempted to follow for my settings. I took that list and compiled it with the North American names here as a Google Sheet. I chose Hot and Cold which is known in the Japanese region as Tsundere and makes it so that they get better the more times you use them. Ready for War appears to translate to the “Battle Ready” option which means they have their weapons out and ready in advance which seemed useful. Lastly I checked the “Make Me Visible to Non-Friend Players” because whenever someone runs with your Avatar you earn some “FUN” currency as a result.
Real quick side note. You are going to have to go through this menu system every so often to update your Friend Avatar, as it will be snapshot at the moment it was created. Pretty much each day I go through and update mine so that as I gain new levels my friends will have access to those levels as well. The Avatar will in theory scale to the level of your friends, but it will be capped by the actual levels that you as a player have earned.
Running with the Avatars of your Friends
Friend Avatar Kiosk
You can access your friends avatars when you are just about to start a mission and are in this pre-loading area. Head over to the terminal that has an Orange “i” icon which gives you access to choose some characters to take along with you. In theory for most expeditions and such you can take three avatars with you. I have found a few missions that limit you to only having one, and others like Urgent Missions won’t let you take any with you.
Friend Avatar Selection Options
Once again I have pasted together several of the interface screens so that you could see the various options. The first menu allows you to choose one of the NPCs that you have gained some affinity for. Right now I only have two showing up which are Afin and Io. The next tab over shows you all of your friends that are available for running content. I have no clue what the “Support” tab does as I have nothing currently listed there, but the last tab labelled “Free” gives you access to the Avatars of random strangers. The avatars you have not run with that day show up as having “Fun Available” beside them, but in truth I ran a bunch of content yesterday and I believe I hit some sort of internal cap until reset.
Now you too can run around with what feels like your own personal army. I tend to largely pick classes that have a decent chance of healing or buffing me, because they seem to be more efficient than classes that attack things. They are by no means a “pet” and will ultimately have a mind of their own, but thankfully the game doesn’t seem to have a version of “in combat” that actually matters or blocks you from doing anything.
The Symbol Art System
Symbol Art System
Another random system that I learned about this weekend through my friend Ashgar is the Symbol Art system. If you are hanging out in the Gate area and someone throws out a message with a picture in it, then you have experienced Symbol Art. Based on my limited understand, there is an in game editor that allows folks to draw images as well as supposedly a windows based tool that you can import images from. What you end up with is a recipe for lewds and offensive content. So before you get any further into this system consider yourself warned.
In fact it took me a bit to find some pages that were relatively safe to show you in order to explain the system. You can access your symbol art collection from the Gear Icon and choosing Symbol Art. By default you won’t actually have anything, but the piece that Ash figured out is that the game seems to keep a rolling history of every piece of symbol art that you have seen. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the Personal Shop and as a result I have seen a TON of symbol art. At the top of the screen there is a drop down that lets you change over and view your history, and then from there you can save any image to your permanent collection.
And there we go, two new systems that I have talked about. The personal avatar system is pretty great and I am enjoying running around with an army of minions. I’ve also figured out where to spend my Memories of Ragol tokens, allowing me to look like a Phantasy Star Online 1 era RACast which pleases me greatly. All in all I am still really enjoying the game, but also still extremely confused about the finer details. I will likely continue to keep posting random observations like this, so hopefully you find them helpful.
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.
