So, I’ve been spending a crazy amount of time playing PSO2 recently.  It’s improved soooooo much since I quit it… almost a year ago?  Wow.  There’s a whole new map for newbies, a lot of quests, permanent access to your room, not-completely-retarded EXP tables to make the grinding feel like less of a grind, a new class… so much stuff to get into.

First off, I want to get this out of the way: cute girls.

Girls, Girls, Girls!

 

 

Quna was introduced fairly recently.  I know for a fact she wasn’t around when I stopped playing.  She’s quite mysterious and appears to be able to warp in and out of fields easily.  I half thought she was some kind of elaborate hologram AI or something, but… well, now that I have the story patch I can try to go back to some event tablets and figure out what her deal is.

Deumans are a new race.  They pretty much have Oni horns and mismatched eyes.  I made my Support Partner a Deuman.

Support Partners are basically tiny, tiny helpers that you can recruit on missions or send out solo to retrieve fetch quest items.

 

Aki is still oh so yum.  She’s basically a researcher that sends me and her assistant Light into dangerous areas for… I guess specimens.  I am wholly ready to oblige.

Fourier is a CAST Ranger that is pretty much robot Natsume.  She’s a bit meek and appears to be on a quest to get stronger.  She also seems to have an affinity for the Lillipans.  My best guess is she wants to protect them.  And to be fair, they’re pretty adorable.  Kinship, maybe.

Now that that’s out of the way, on to fashion woes.  When I first logged in, I decided to look at new threads for Natsume to wear.

Time for a MAAAAAKEOVERRRRRRR

The blue onepiece is pretty close, but a bit bland.  Of course, summer brought in a lot of new swimwear.

That sexy swimsuit runs a little over 1 million meseta.  I was nowhere near close to being able to purchase it.

The Rifra Biscana is purchasable via badges you earn from the Vita version.  Not a problem for me, except Sega hates the west.  So, I would have to buy it.  How much is it on the player shops?  2 million meseta.

So, what is Natsume wearing right now?  It’s that nice dark blue outfit seen in my second Quna image.

Progress!

Anyway, thanks to the abundance of high-EXP yielding fetch quests, I finally managed to achieve my goal of post-40 in both Fighter and Techer.  Natsume’s a FiTe, or Fightecher.  Now, many like to say that you should go with Hunter as a secondary.  But you know what?  The stat increase by running Hunter secondary is negligible at best.  Besides, with a Techer secondary, I have access to Technics (basically, magic).  With Resta (heal), Anti (status heal), Shifta and Deband (buffs), I don’t have to waste meseta on items.  Razan is a spectacular wind technique that’s pretty much an emergency launch to keep an enemy off you.  And Zan… Zan is just plain fun.

It is now my goal to get a 10-star rarity weapon.  Unfortunately, they’re incredibly rare.  They’re available on the player shops, but it’s just terrible how the shop works with 10-stars.  You see, you can’t buy a 10-star rarity item from the shop unless you first own your own 10-star item and trade it in for a ticket that allows you to buy a different 10-star item.  And to top it off, you need a premium account to do that.  So I’m shit out of luck and need to do my farming myself.  Fuck you, Sega.

It’s bad enough that they’re rare as hell… but I want a wind element variant, so if one eventually does drop, there isn’t a decent chance of me having the type I want.  I’d have to be that much luckier.  And it’s not like I can use an item that changes the element to wind since… that costs real money as well.

As for story progress, I’m still stuck in Episode 1.  Mostly because of how I refuse to continue on with the backlog of Client Orders I’ve amassed.  I finally got Azanami and Barbara’s partner cards, but I’ve wanted Revelle’s card since forever, and she’s still not offering the quest for it.

Comparisons with Guild Wars 2 (LONG RANTING)

For a long time, I’ve stated that GW2 needs to take more cues from PSO2, and that idea has only strengthened with time.

Both PSO2 and GW2 are, well, 2’s.  They’re also both action RPGs.  Now, they each do their own thing; PSO2 has a single hub for players to meet with each other and missions take place entirely in instances.  GW2, on the other hand, has a huge open world.  There are pros and cons to each.  On the plus side for GW2, the game can handle soooooo many more players at once.  The most number of players you can have in a PSO2 mission is 12: three parties of four players.

GW2 has 8 unique classes with customizable traits lines you can change any time you’re out of battle.  PSO2 first started out with only three classes: Hunter, Ranger, and Force.  You also have different races, but… Okay, races in PSO2 affect how you look (it barely makes a difference except for CASTs) and some of your stats.  Races in GW2 affect how you look, what race-specific skills you get, and your personal story.  Story-wise, your race doesn’t matter at all in PSO2.  GW2 is the clear winner for race.

While every class can use Gunslashes, each class only had 2 or 3 weapons exclusive to them.  Hunters had the Sword, Spear, and Wired Lance.  Rangers had the Rifle and Launcher.  Forces had the Staff and Talis.  You also had 6 weapon slots you could swap to, and each slot gave you up to 3 Photon Arts for that weapon you could use.  By default, left click is a normal attack and right click is a Photon Art.  It’s very simple compared to GW2’s weapon skill system, but you know what?  It works surprisingly well.  Each weapon also has a Shift skill that’s usually a kind of defensive technique, but Forces and Rangers pretty much just use them to swap to their other Photon Arts.  It all balances out though since their evades are far more useful than the Hunter’s step.

PSO2 also had a level cap of 30 (then 40… but I think it’s up to 60 now), which I easily achieved on my Hunter in the couple of months after PSO2 came out but before GW2 did.  You see, PSO2 was a blatantly incomplete game that was rushed out to make money.  It took a few months before the advanced classes arrived: Fighter, Gunner, and Techer.  Fighters had the Twin Blade, Double Sword, and Knuckles.  Gunners had the Twin Rifles.  Techers had the Rod. With Episode 2, there is now the Braver, which can use Bullet Bows and Katanas.  Each of these weapons aren’t just for show; they all have their own unique mechanics and roles.  For instance, Spear and Sword have high damage output while Wired Lance is more for mob control.  Twin Dagger has less single-hit damage but attacks rapidly and has loads of super armor and positioning skills, while Knuckles have more power and an amazing evade attack.  Katana seems about average, but it has a wicked mechanic that doubles its PA damage if you release it at the right time.

Along with advanced classes came subclasses.  You can equip a different class you unlocked as a subclass, and you have access to that class’s photon arts, skills, and a portion of its stats.  Oh, and most bonuses from their skill tree.

Now, unlike GW2’s trait lines, PSO2’s skill trees have a lot more variety to them.  You also can’t reset them without a premium item, so you really have to plan it out and you’re forced to stick to your decision.  Skill trees are set up so you need to put points into a skill such as S-Atk+ before unlocking a branch.  Then you have to choose to put points into one branch so you can maximize your bonuses, or you could spread out for a wider variety of bonuses.  While this might sound just like GW2’s traits, where you put points into a line and choose at each tier what special bonuses you want, it’s not as simple.  You can put points into a specific skill to increase its effectiveness, so you can either have multiple stances for minor boosts as the situation warrants, or you can have a single level 10 stance with huge bonuses and rely on it as your main strategy.  Likewise you can put a single point into a element bonus for 105% power, or you can max it out for 120% power.  A lot of skills are good for just the first point since each additional point barely increases the effect, but some players might want to max out such skills because they really really like that specific bonus.  With GW2 trait lines, the process is simplified, but a lot of traits are just pathetic, and I wish you had some way to boost the effect of some of them.

The battle system is in a lot of ways much, much easier in PSO2.  It’s not very difficult to solo even stages that are 10 levels higher than you.  Still, I’d much rather have content that’s too easy than to have to deal with the terrible decisions in GW2 combat.

One word: Tethering.  This is the single worst part of GW2 combat there is.  Basically, if you pull an enemy farther than it’s intended to be, the enemy will just lose interest in you and RAPIDLY REFILL ITS HEALTH.  It doesn’t matter if you attack it while it’s doing this in a vain attempt to interrupt it.  It will restore that health and make a mockery of what effort you put into the battle.  A lot of times the boundaries make no sense.  I understand that this was done so you can’t attack an enemy from a place it can’t attack you back from, but SO FUCKING WHAT.  Taking advantage of your terrain is the mark of a smart fighter.  We shouldn’t be punished for fighting smart.  Now, mobs in PSO2 will often chase you to the very end of the map, but a lot of territorial enemies will stick around the same spot and not chase you very far, and they won’t restore their health automatically.  To be fair, you don’t have natural regeneration outside of combat like GW2 does, and this isn’t an open environment.  But again, so what?  This is a major problem throughout GW2: this weird-ass concept of a fair fight.

You know what else is weirdly “fair” in GW2?  Projectile tracking.  An enemy fires a projectile at me.  I move to the left.  THE PROJECTILE VEERS OFF COURSE AND HITS ME.  No, that’s bullshit.  It’s also bullshit that this happens if you stealth while the enemy is preparing its attack.  Winding up?  Stealth.  You can’t see me.  I move far away from my original position.  Enemy throws attack to where I am.  BULLSHIT.  Attack hitboxes are also absurdly large so they hit you even if you’re nowhere near the animation.  In PSO2, you can dodge shit any which way you can: evades, defense, and JUMPING.  You can jump OVER attacks aimed low!  Shocking concept, I know.  PSO2 is a game designed around the concept that if you’re good enough, you can AVOID EVERY SINGLE ATTACK IN THE GAME.  There are only a few encounters in GW2 I can think of where this is true.  Otherwise, the goal is to take unavoidable hits, look for the “big” hits and avoid those, and bring certain utility skills to deal with whatever unavoidable hazards pop up, and if you have the wrong build, you have no business being there without help.  It’s terribly unintuitive.

One thing GW2 gets right is epic bosses that require a vast number of players to join in.  In PSO2, most bosses can only be taken on by a single four-player party.  The exception is bosses that pop up in Free fields where up to 12 can take it on.  Still, even these bosses can usually be soloed.  GW2 has a much greater variety of encounters and more different mechanics; really, the only thing PSO2 bosses have over GW2 bosses is character. And that’s actually a pretty huge thing.

PSO2 has something called Emergency Quests, where players can take on a limited-time mission (usually only open for one hour), and, in some cases, challenge a difficult boss.  Emergency Quests are heralded by a global announcement, and you have a significant amount of warning time to prepare to finish whatever you’re doing and prepare for the start of the EQ.  The closest thing to an EQ that GW2 has is the recently-added Scarlet invasions, and even then there’s no warning.  Just the announcement that it started.  World bosses are about the same thing, only there’s no global announcement.  If it weren’t for third party sites, you just had to be in the map to know when something big is going on, and they’re for the most part spontaneous.  On the other hand, only a small few EQs are particularly impressive.  Back when the City EQ was the only EQ available, there was almost no point to it.  Dark Ragne was challenging at first, but it’s easy to beat it once you know what to look for.  Most people just refused to move on to the final area and farmed the shit out of the second area.  Now, the only EQ’s I’m aware of that are worth it are the Dark Falz encounters since those are actually a challenge and are unique.

Story-wise, both games are pretty crappy.  GW2 has by far more content in every way, but character designs are unimpressive and lifeless across the board with only a handful of exceptions.  And I do include Trahearne as an exception.  PSO2’s Matter Board has you running around in circles hoping for specific drops and monster encounters just to move on to the next story step.  Event tablets are pretty neat in that you encounter a lot of unique characters and learn more about them, but they’re incredibly short and don’t amount to much aside from taking in their quirks.  And in many cases it gets kind of old.  Jean is an old man that rambles; it’s funny the first time, and although he talks about something different in other encounters, it’s the same tired punchline each time.  This is the pattern for every encounter: Mild relevance regarding the mission area, joke about established character trait.

I’ve already touched on what’s wrong with the player economy in PSO2, and… yeah.  GW2 completely trounces it.  The only problem is that some shop-only items are outright unavailable.  Oh, and in PSO2 you can’t sell anything on the player shop unless you either have premium or a temporary pass to sell.  Terrible.  On the upside, it’s not terribly difficult to attain one of these temporary passes, and as a result the economy isn’t nearly as inflated as games like Mabinogi.  In fact, even the 1 million meseta costumes are reasonably priced considering how easily I got half a million shortly after unlocking Very Hard missions, and how those costumes were only available for a limited time.  But it’s still a blatant play for money.  Both GW2 and PSO2 offer costume skins on their cash shops, and players have ways to get them from other players without paying real money one way or another.  Both also are guilty of blatant use of RNG to sucker people out of money.  In GW2, they offered unique weapon skins in chests that had no guarantee that you would get a weapon skin.  An abysmally low chance, actually.  But if you hit the jackpot, you get a ticket for any skin of your choice.  In PSO2, they use the more traditional scratcher system, where you pay money for a scratcher, and you receive one from a pool of possible items, and if you don’t get what you want, you have to play again.  Pick your poison.

Lastly, PSO2 allows me to make a human with green hair.  GW2 still doesn’t.  What’s up with that?

Overall, both offer similar experiences, but PSO2 is more polished in presentation, while GW2 is more ambitious.  If you combined the best elements of both games, you might just end up with the best online RPG ever.  (Though if you combine the worst elements, you might just end up with a massive turd).

Boss videos

To end on a more pleasant note, here’s some gameplay footage of Natsume taking on an assortment of bosses to music that may or may not be appropriate.

De Malmoth is just a regular boss with an annoying knockback attack.  At least, it was annoying as a Hunter.  As a Fighter it’s ridiculously easily dealt with.  What you want to do is break the De Malmoth’s faceplate armor to expose its soft, tender forehead.

Bal Rodos is the final boss of the beach stage.  It has a unique mechanic where you use turrets to destroy breakable parts and a plasma harpoon to pull it down to the deck so you can get up close and personal with his cheap ass.  It’s everything the Zhaitan fight at the end of GW2’s personal story SHOULD have been.  And yet, this is for a final boss in an extra newbie world, not the freaking final boss of the game.  Eye of Zhaitan was a more worthy final boss than Zhaitan himself.

 

Big Vardha is basically a giant sand skiff with a GIANT ROBOT mounted on top of it.  There are breakable parts all over this mother, and it’s just satisfying slowly crippling its offensive capabilities to the point where you need not worry about anything but whacking away at its core.