i played this when it came out and quickly ran out of things to do. and now i am back to see what this ver. 2 business is about, having long given up trying to understand what the 2 business was about. as far as i can tell it was a marketing thing to say "noo you can still use your PSO2 cosmetics you didn't waste all that money", and otherwise this is for all intents and purposes PSO3. even though just calling it 3 would have brought in so many more people and anyone who'd spent money on 2 would care enough to find out they still have their items. but whatever Sega's loss, and in turn the players' because it's a live service game

had to make a new account because my old one was linked to xbox and i de-microsofted my life long ago, but i very quickly would have decided i need to start again anyway because my god what a confounding experience for new players. the only thing that would've held me back is that i remember having some exclusive Sonic cosmetic stuff unlocked. also i apparently just missed him again, he was here they were all here Tails and others i could've met them but now i can't and i'm inconsolable. instead now i log in and i get Code Geass characters i don't CARE where is amy rose

character creation is good but it's hard for me to figure out how to not make mine look like a weird alien. also i swear the clothing i picked was the least dumb-looking available to me at the start, i am not like those other PSO players i am nice and sweet. i just went in with the hopes i would be barraged with some stupid gacha thing that gives me a hundred new clothing items to wear off the bat (i did)

i first played this on an older PC and i always remembered it running like hot garbage, so when the same was true last night i assumed it was normal. as time went on though it became clear it was just not playable, and i all but gave up until i did some last-ditch Proton fiddling, and now i kind of can't believe how smoothly it runs. still some stuttering now and then but it's so much better than any experience i recall ever having with this game. shame the characters still look like that

i cannot stress enough that what the hell is going on. there are too many currencies too many events too many items getting sent to storage. just when i decided to hop over here because FFXIV was feeling too slow and i was getting bored now i am missing it dearly. i'm already considering starting over a third time

there's a lot of tutorial happening for systems that as of right now i feel no reason to engage with, because progress is being made way faster than i recall being the case. i'm pretty sure i have a lot more abilities unlocked but what's the point in learning how they work when i can just hold left click and things die megafast. at one point it gated my story progress by telling me i needed 950 battle power and gave me tips on all the things i could spend some time doing to reach it. i was already at 1180 battle power and i hadn't done anything else yet

well. i got to level 20, and apparently there's a campaign going on at the moment. and now i'm level 87. it's late so i think i will come back to this at some other point, buckle down and try to figure things out. because it's fun enough running around and shooting things

i looked at the NGS website and it told me "lost? follow the main story for a while!" so i followed the main story for a while. one thing i hate about this game is the constantly changing waypoints; instead of telling me where to go it'll tell me to go somewhere along the way, and then update to somewhere further along the way. is that a gacha thing, because it's like a carrot-on-a-stick and that's what these people are about. level cap has gone from 20 to 90 over the past three years

i don't know why there are even cutscenes. there's zero substance to any of them, it's just watching incredibly ugly character designs with incredibly flat personalities saying incredibly uninteresting things. so far very little of this game feels like it was made by real people

i got to the level cap yesterday and i don't know if i need to play anymore. after looking into the current state of the game, the consensus seems to be that it has the same problems it did at launch, just that those problems have been stretched out into a longer game since then. everything revolves around making money for cosmetics (that can be bought with real money), which naturally is going to be the endgame for any MMO but if that's really all it's about i can't bring myself to care. seriously i watch their new update announcements and it's 4 minutes of new outfits and microtransactions and 1 minute of actual things to do

it just had me itching to play regular PSO2 again, only to learn it's since been put in maintenance mode in favor of NGS's minimal development. this isn't a massive deterrent for me, since i'm a big proponent of playing a game until you're done with the game and then moving on from that game. this is what kept me from immediately uninstalling NGS, because i felt hey it's fun to just mess around in for a while, but the game is constantly boosting me towards this endgame that apprently doesn't even exist. i suppose i could level up another class but i'm already deeply entrenched in "what's the point" territory