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

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

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.

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

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.