It’s 3 things as that. 1: The giant roulette wheel with giant stacks of cheap meseta pso2 coins. 2: All the public areas, for some time you had to work your way through a mission or two just to reach the area you desired, nice that they made a fast move for it. 3: The BS system. It was hated by everyone but that feeling when you grind out a 10/10 was epic.
Both existed PSO2 for a period as lower-tier rares(they had been wired lances,) but if the NT weapon system came out a massive amount of the 7-9 celebrity rarity weapons got only… thrown out. Maybe we will see a weapon camo for this later since OT weapons are unobtainable in NA.IIRC Neiclaw WL was 9stars and Falclaw WL was 11stars, but I am pretty sure they were left behind when the OT/NT change occurred. All those camos in the photon booster shop was by grinding the holy shit from AQs individual weapons you could farm. Rather than having them for every weapon them compressed to multi-weapon camos.
Better integrated story assignments. I have been hanging throughout the story for Eps. 1-3 and it’s one of the most agonizing narrative experiences I’ve ever…experienced. And I even enjoy the narrative / writing well enough. But the way is aggressively bad.;? Plus it seems like this is a measure’up’ from the way it started. Since PSO 1 did it wonderfully, the thing frustrates me. PSU more so. I really don’t understand what happened in PSO2, except to suppose that the first implementation was designed to artificially drag the storytelling out within a longer period of time… Which is a terrible design choice.
I have never played any other pso game, therefore I am not certain how it compares, but it feels like they designed Pso2 to be too modularly instanced in the get go and this type of system does not lend itself well to an incorporated linear narrative. It’s weird though because they’ve scripted events happen inside quests, so it seems like they might have readily made Story Quests that take Expeditions and have them activate cut scenes as you go through the map, just then call those Story Quests rather than having them all separated. In any case, I totally hate the present system and it’s really slowed down my drama of pso2 as I’m not thinking about playing just for the purpose of leveling up my personality, without the story being important to the play I don’t feel as though there is a reason behind my efforts.
Personally I really dislike the writing, making it even harder to slog even though a menu driven narrative, but I feel as though it would still get me into Phantasy Star Online 2, even if I didn’t like the writing, if it had been better integrated. Without some narrative cohesion everything feels like endless chores that serve no purpose. The Role Play aspect is made into desktop fodder. It is disappointing because originally I thought it was an intriguing world based on what I played in the beta, but then I got beyond the guided part and it’s only all menus and endless map conducts. Is that typical of pso2 sales a PS game? It turned me off.