So really a handful of hours after posting the previous entry, the 21st Live Broadcast took place. This broadcast revealed a fairly sizy amount of future content that I didn’t really expect them to! This post will focus on the newly announced area and planet.
Remember all that stuff I said in the previous post? I was completely correct!
Alright that’s all for this post, see you next time everybody! Byeee!
Alright well I suppose I better talk at least a bit about what we were shown.
Let’s begin with the first trailer for Episode 3. This also includes a showcase on the new class but we’ll get into that in another post.
It certainly is Japanese, isn’t it? I mean it pretty much is feudal Japan, complete with feud! The area is the “White Nation”, set on the planet Harukotan (or Hulkotan). The White Nation is in conflict with the Black Nation. Alternative names would be the Shiro Nation and the Kuro Nation.
The planet itself seems to be modeled after the Yin-Yang symbol, though the light spot in the dark side seems to be missing. The dark side of the planet also seems to be continuously emitting darkness into space. The term “pissing into an ocean of piss” rather comes to mind…
So how does “Mono” act as a shorthand for the planet as an internal name? At a guess, it may be short for “Monochrome”, which is a type of bitmap image where the only two colors are black and white. Only a guess, though.
Harukotan, or whatever the community eventually agrees enough on to call it, is populated by titans. True to their name, they are some big bastards for the most part! I can’t really obtain screenshots for the sake of comparison as the compression is too high to get anything worthwhile from it, however you probably can see it well enough from watching the trailer yourself anyway.
The map itself seems to have a fair degree of vertical room to it. Not quite the amount that Caves has right now but in any case to be able to climb up onto the rooftops and fight enemies on there is pretty cool looking!
This flaming wheel creature would appear to be the White Nation’s miniboss. Reminiscent of the Wanyūdō of Japanese mythology, this boss rolls around while emitting jets of flame. As for the apparent area boss:
So far this is about the best image I can obtain of it, until someone uploads an HD version of the trailer this muddy mess of pixels is all we got (Update: Got a slightly better image from the official channel\s video). It certainly looks large and I expect it may even be large even among the rest of its Titan brethren. Kind of impossible to get a real sense of scale right now, though.
The selection of enemies certainly is pretty varied looking, from the thug-ish club-wielding ogres to the more ferocious sword-wielding oni types and the mystical floating horse wizards. From the more beastly to the more human-looking, it’s a pretty nice selection. The area itself looks good, though I’d want to see some more screenshots of it before I make my mind up on certain aspects of it, like how the town looks while up on the roof-tops. There don’t appear to be any environmental hazards or mechanics demonstrated through the trailer however, it would be a bit of a shame if the map lacked them.
Speaking of things that are absent, there’s currently no sign of any Darkers on the planet. Well aside from the creepy twins, Dark Falz Double. No individual Darker enemies have been shown, which leaves it rather up in the air as to which Darker type will be dominant in the White Nation. While Double is implied to be the true master of the bird-types, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the planet will only be besieged by angry chickens. Afterall, Naberius could be argued to be very much the planet of fish-type Darkers given Elder’s body resided there, but that didn’t stop bug-types crawling all over the forest.
While I imagine the planet’s aesthetics might be a better fit for the fish-types myself, this is only based on the idea that the biggest regular Darkers seem to belong to the type and it is a planet populated by titans. The actual size of the Darkers really doesn’t matter at all, as afterall, it doesn’t matter how hard the titans may stomp all over the likes of Krahda and Strahda. The story established very early on that the only way to defeat Darkers is through the use of Photons. The Dragonkin of Amduscia learned the hard way that all their might crashing down on the Darkers was only spreading them.
So we have a planet in the apparent grips of a war between two nations. We know that there is a Black Nation as well as a White Nation, so I don’t think it would be entirely unsurprising if the Black Nation turned out to be one of the other fields available for the planet. I like to think that the area between them would be a battleground, making it three possible fields for the planet. Three fields would bring it in line with the other planets, at that. At this point though, we don’t really know all that much about what’s really going on on the planet or what its story and history may be. Honestly, with Sega’s track record of story telling I somewhat doubt that will ever really be all that well fleshed out anyway!
The field is set to arrive with Episode 3 in August.
PSO2Blog 
Oh, I’m late to the party since they’ve already revealed more details about it already, but I actually did notice a few days ago that they showed off Double’s new toy darkers very briefly at about 1:53. It’s some kind of small and hyperactive jack-in-the-box creature.