Episode 2 – PSO2Blog

The New Field: Quarry

In this post I’ll talk a bit more about the things shown for the newly revealed field, currently named “Quarry” by the community. Embedding a video below that displays the new field, uploaded by PSO2UP.

Quarry is the third field on the planet Lilipa, which data has only really hinted at for some time with the somewhat vague internal name of “Lilipa3”. It’s an abandoned mining facility that the Lilipans have made their home, despite all the hostile machinery about.

This new field is due to arrive this September.

Enemies

This section will list enemy names that were spotted in the videos released so far, with pictures where possible.

ヤクトバルガー – Jagdbalger
カノンバルガー Cannon Balger

Yakuto is the kana used for “Jagd”, a German word for hunting. “Balger” is a bit more difficult to place.

This pair of mecha wolves use the Phongalph skeleton. One wields blades in its mouth and uses a jetpack to deliver powerful thrusting attacks. The other has a twin cannon mounted on its back for.. well I’ll let your imagination fill in the blank there.

ヤクトディンゲール – Jagdingell

This monster sort of resembles Cougar, but whether it’s using the same skeleton or not is a bit hard to tell from this little footage. Even if it is, the enemy behaves nothing like Cougar so far. It wields a sword and appears to have a weak-spot on its bum.

シュタークガン – Stark Gun

Stark Gun seems to be using the Gilnas legs skeleton or at least resembles it. Packing a cannon which is seen firing a large laser-beam and what may be rocket launchers this enemy could be troublesome.

カストキンディッド – Custom Kindidd

Kindidds are an enemy that Big Vardha spawns during its boss fight. All this enemy appears to be is a wild variety of it.

カストガーディナン – Custom Guardinane

You can see it around the 3:06 mark in the video embedded in this post but it’s too blurry to really screenshot. However Guardinanes are a well known enemy that inhabits the Tunnels field on Lilipa, so I imagine the enemy will behave similar to that.

Bosses

At first glance, I was surprised to learn that the field has three bosses. Barba Lilipa, Vardha Soma and Blu Ringahda. This isn’t the case however, as Barba Lilipa is a rare encounter.

Barba Lilipa – Barbaripan?

Barba Lilipa is possibly a pun on “Barbarian”. In the Japanese it’s Barbariripan, but the pun doesn’t really work in English. Will be interesting to see what the official localisation turns out to be…

Despite clearly using Rockbear’s skeleton, it looks to be a fight that will be nothing like either it or Wolgahda. It can pull various weapons out from its backpack, thrown and melee weapons are shown. Reminds me a bit of Mimiga transformation in Cave Story, only after defeating them in their mutated forms the Lilipan returns to normal instead of dying.

Vardha Soma

Vardha Soma is the detached torso of a Big Vardha, naturally. You might expect that this would make it Quarry’s main boss but observe the quest goal text. It matches the style used for an Arks Quest, not a free field. This would make Vardha Soma technically a mini-boss, although thanks to the likes of Goron Zoran the line between miniboss and boss isn’t as definitive as that any more. Like Goron Zoran, despite being a “miniboss” you only fight one of it at a time instead of two or three when you face it with a party of two or more players.

Blu Ringahda

Blu Ringadha on the other hand is shown with quest text that does match the style of a Free Field. That makes it the field’s main boss, despite my initial expectation and assumption of it being a mini-boss. This is unexpected for two reasons for me. One, I thought Blu Ringahda was going to be the miniboss of the yet to be revealed “Seabed” field. Two, it’s a bird-type Darker. While story quests and the Advanced Quests do have fish-type Darkers typically the planet has been the domain of bug-type Darkers. I expected Quarry to be crawling with bug-types, perhaps even new ones of that type.

As for the name, it’s suspected to be a pun referencing an enemy from PSO; Chaos Bringer. They are both centaurs and both are dark-types of sorts (one being D-Cell the other being Darker).

Blu Ringahda has a large variety of ranged attacks, as well as being fairly nimble on its feet. This is going to be a fun fight for melee types..

Towards the Future

Well despite being inhabited by bird-type Darkers, the “birdsoldiers” have yet to make an appearance, so they’re at least likely to turn up in the unannounced Seabed area.

Given there is now a third area for Lilipa coming up I wonder if a new Time Attack quest will be crafted to go with it? An Advanced Quest seems unlikely until Seabed is out (they come in threes, afterall), which won’t be until December. This raises another issue for the new class, as Braver currently lacks any Advanced Quest exchange items, Iritista stone items or anything from Extreme Quests. If the old exchanges aren’t going to be updated, will Braver really have to wait approaching six months to be on equal footing with the other classes, gear wise?

[Thanks to Epsiokaos, Qwerty and Agrajag for names and discussion]

Episode 2: Official Update Page and Broadcast Information

The official update page for the start of Episode 2 has been posted up. It of course comes with a trailer, which I’ll embed as par for the course, however this one is unusually lengthy. You can find a rundown of the update page here on Bumped.

This post will pretty much be going over some information about particular aspects of Episode 2 that I’ve come across, as well as sharing my thoughts on them. If I find more information I’ll probably go and put it into a new post because I think this one is quite long enough now..

The background music at the start is the theme of the new Coast field’s boss, Bal Rodos. From around 2:49 on-wards I believe it’s the Coast field’s theme.

It seems Bal Rodos is Lv55 in the trailer, which puts it on the same level as Sanctum. So I guess that’s how they’re going to be keeping Advanced Quests relevant for longer, which makes me wonder if Lilipa3 will share the same fate. Seabed shouldn’t, as it’ll be released after Super Hard is out.

You can watch the live broadcast in its entirety through the following links:

PSO2放送局#10 Part1
PSO2放送局#10 Part2
PSO2放送局#10 Part3
PSO2放送局#10 Part4 – Contains the Coast field playthrough
PSO2放送局#10 Part5

Braver

The class is defined by the two new weapon types, both of which seem to at least look decent. The Katana has good mobility and area-of-effect capability, which will be good for all of melee’s demands. Katanas are at least more mobile than Swords for example, but the damage numbers that they put out seem.. small. In fact their stats and even Photon Art modifiers seem relatively low, however they could well make up for this in damage per second given how rapidly they can attack. Bows on the other hand seem to lay somewhere between Launchers and Rifles with a bit of Twin-Daggers thrown in for good measure. Certainly versatile but I have yet to be convinced of their overall effectiveness.

Braver seems to be a class oriented around the Ability (or Dexterity) stat primarily. It has an Ability Up skill, which is notable for being at lv3 in the livestream as that indicates it’s a pre-requisite for something. Both Katanas and Bullet Bows also require dexterity to equip, or at least all of the weapons shown so far do. However there may be no need to go raising a pure Dexterity Mag just for this class, as the requirements are quite low anyway. One revealed Braver skill, namely “Braver Mag”, converts up to 50% of the S-atk and R-atk into Dexterity. Whether or not this will add to your base and count for equipping things I don’t know (data suggests it’s a passive skill).

braverSkills — Ability Up 1, Braver Mag, Step, Step Advance, Snatch Step, Step Attack, Just Reversal, Average Stance, Katana Combat, Katana Gear, Rapid Shoot, Reversal Cover, Rapid Shoot Up

mxYA7rw — The Braver Skill Tree. Skills are: Ability Up, Sriking Up, Shooting Up, Average Stance, Average Stance Up, Average Stance Critical, Average Stance Charge
Katana Combat, Combat Just Attack Bonus, Combat Finish, Katana Gear, Rapid Shoot, Rapid Shoot Up, Rapid Shoot Mastery
Weak Stance, Weak Stance Up, Ability Up 2, Weak Stance Critical, Weak Stance Charge
Step, Step Advance, Snatch Step, Step Attack, Just Reversal, Reversal Cover, Rare Mastery Braver, Braver Mag. Source: Dengeki Play.

Of interest to me are the utility skills surrounding step, as for melee it’s absolutely crucial to mobility. Snatch Step is a skill that will deal damage during a Step. It is seperate from Step Attack as that skill allows you do perform an attack at the end of a Step. You can perform step with both Katanas and Bullet Bows at that, so you’re not losing out if you choose to go ranged.

While you can guard with Katanas, Braver doesn’t have any guard skills at all. The broadcast demonstrates that Just Guarding is possible with Katanas, but possibly only through their gear. If this is the case, I wonder if there’s any point investing in Just Guard should someone decide to have Hunter as their subclass? Or if the regular Just Guard would apply to the Katana without gear applies or even if it would affect the weapon at all.

Coast Enemies

The trailer revealed a number of enemy names, as did the coast field playthrough that was done during the live broadcast. I’ll list them here with names and pictures where I can.

Torpon

A small shelled enemy, weak to both fire and ice element interestingly. Better picture of them from the official site below. At a distance they appear to be similar to Micdas, possibly sharing the same bone structure. The one on the right below makes be doubt that a little..

Aculpus

Seems to share its skeleton with Naberius’ Galphs. Of course, their attack behaviors don’t resemble them much, with them swimming through the sand with their fins poking out. Land sharks. They also appear to do a somersault attack.

Blumegalla

It’s a flower! It pretends to be a regular giant spikey flower and then jumps out at the player after spraying something about. It also fires laserbeams because why not. Smaller versions of this enemy exist as well, namely Blumetta. They appear to share the same bone structure as Sanctum’s Pendira’n.

A picture of both of these enemies is up on the official page, re-hosting below.

Blundarl

One of the new bird-type Darkers. The second one named I believe, after Luda Sorcerer. A higher quality picture of Blundarl is posted below.

Strahda

Forgive me for the quality of these pictures, but it’s from a compressed video and there don’t seem to be any clear shots of these enemies sadly. Anyway, this is the somewhat legendary BIRDBIRDCROW in the flesh as it were. Their weak point looks like an exposed brain… It’s the standard orange colored weakpoint that most Darkers have it’s just how it looks given its position.

Another variant of this small bird is Tyraluda

Unfortunately there are no official pictures that I’m aware of for either of these.

So it seems that the Coast field’s elements are Fire and Ice for the natives and Wind and Light for the Darkers.

Now that we have a planet full of fish, after having been fighting fish-based Darkers for a while now, I wonder if a planet populated by insects is on its way in 2014? After all, PSO2 still doesn’t have a Grass Assassin!

Subclass EXP

Old news now, but confirmed at least once and well, it being on the official update page means Sega aren’t going to be changing their minds about it. It’s sad, but subclass EXP will be capped to level 40. Before that, your subclass will gain 10% of the EXP that your main does. Yeah it’s not particularly popular this decision, but it’s still decent at least initially for a subclass. However I imagine like others, I was hoping this would mean the end of having to switch to a class you don’t like playing in order to support a class you do, but alas.

Class Appropriate Rare Drops.. From Bosses

Nothing like hearing the rare drop jingle only to get an item you can’t even use, eh? Well from Episode 2 this problem will be slightly alleviated! By how much of course isn’t really all that specific and I have a feeling that, as a player, you honestly won’t be able to tell that the drop rates had been increased at all. 1/1000 is barely better than 1/2000 for example and I highly doubt they’d give that generous a boost anyway. The idea is at least good, I just have no faith that the difference will be at all noticeable.

Also, despite the update page itself not mentioning bosses according to an article on Shougai which contains a transcript from Sakai and someone else, it only applies to boss enemies. This is kind of a shame as a number of decent items do still drop from regular enemies, but it’s a least a step in the right direction.

EXP Penalty Readjustment

The EXP penalty, which I’m still not a fan of even now, is being relaxed somewhat. Instead of altering the rates however instead they’ll be increasing the number of levels before it applies from 5 to 11. They’re um, turning up to 11 as it were…

This means that you’ll be able to run Advanced Quests a little earlier, however you’ll still have your EXP reduced to 75% at least initially (unlocks at 45, enemies start at 56). However, being able to start running Advanced Quests at lv46 is a significant improvement over having to wait until Lv52. It also means you can skip ahead areas more quickly at the lower levels, which doesn’t really affect Normal mode at all for new players in any case.

On arrival to Hard mode, you’ll be only 1 level out of reach for Forest Exploration.

On arrival to Very Hard mode, you’ll be able to run all the Free Field quests except for Sanctum Exploration and presumably Coast.

Client Order Adjustments

Reducing the cool-down time for daily repeatable Client Orders (not to be confused with Daily Orders… I know) from 24 to 22 is a big deal. Why, you might ponder, it’s not much of a change. It means they truly become daily orders. The current cool-down of 24 hours is problematic because it introduces what I call “crawl”, whereby the time you can re-do the Client Order crawls around the clock and becomes later with each day.

Say you start the Order at 12:00pm, it takes you half an hour to complete and you turn it in at 12:30pm. The next day you can’t start it any earlier than 12:30pm, so the next day you won’t be able to start it until 1:00pm. Then 1:30pm, etc. A 22 hour cool-down gives you a much better chance of being able to take on these Client Orders at a time you’d prefer to take them. It’s good to see the change, but annoying that it took them a year to do something about it.

Episode 2 Speculations: New Fields and Super Hard

With a little over two weeks to go til Episode 2 arrives I feel like I might make a bunch of speculative posts in the meanwhile. Based on information I’ve seen floating about. As these are purely speculative, none of the information in this post reflects what will end up in the game.

Level Ranges of the New Fields

There are 3 new fields on the long term schedule. All of them will have been added by the end of the year. Two of them will be added before the addition of Super Hard difficulty.

This is an estimate based on the pattern of level ranges they’ve been using for the current free-fields.

Coast (Vopar) – Lv54-56
Lilipa3 (Obvious) – Lv.55-57

Why not cover up to Lv.60? I’m assuming they want to keep Advanced Quests and Extreme Quests relevant for a bit longer. I’ll be sharing thoughts on that in another section.

Of course, as Seabed won’t be released until after the lv.65 cap it could be that Coast and Lilipa3 could push closer to 60 than I’m guessing here. Seabed itself could well cap at lv60.

Level Ranges of the Super Hard Fields

The next level cap raise won’t be for some time, but it will arrive somewhat appropriately with the next difficulty level. Now, with the Very Hard update the existing fields and quests all gained the new difficulty but their level ranges were effectively crammed into a small-ish space. Back then, there were six fields and the level cap was 50, with 10 levels to squeeze them in (as the cap had raised from 40).

Call of Mortality Part 1

Forest – 41-43
Caverns – 42-44
Desert – 43-45

Call of Mortality Part 2

Tundra – 44-46
Tunnels – 45-47
Skyland – 46-48

By the time Super Hard is released, the game will have 10 fields and only 5 levels in which to squeeze them. In addition to the above fields we’ll also have:

Ruins (added back in the Destroyer of History update November 2012)
Sanctum (added back in the Solemn Sentinel update April 2013)
Coast (Scheduled to be added with Episode 2’s release 17th July)
Lilipa3 (Likely to be released with the upcoming Reminiscent Sands update, possibly in September)

It’s plausible that, like with the addition of Very Hard, not all fields will gain the difficulty at once. Can’t have us having too much “content” at once after all. But as-is, the free fields probably won’t be pushing all that deeply into Super Hard’s level range (estimated as lv60-80).

This isn’t a bad thing initially, as players will have the largest selection of level appropriate fields the game has ever offered. But like with Very Hard before it, it seems the Free Fields are set to become mostly irrelevant when fields beyond Seabed are added, never mind other content that could easily push deeper towards lv80.

Advanced Quests and Extreme Quests

Currently, these two quest types are PSO2’s endgame. They offer difficulty that the rest of Very Hard just doesn’t come close to. Note I’m talking about relative difficulty here, not whether or not the content can be classified as “difficult” (because it mostly isn’t). They also offer players current tier gear that’s obtainable and with decent stats, ones you could only improve upon with extreme luck.

So how will these quests fare when higher level content comes out? This won’t be an issue until we’re beyond October, so they will remain PSO2’s endgame until then. But beyond that the pull of having lv60 enemies in either quest type fades, which is a particular problem for Advanced Quests given they require you to run them 12 times before you see lv60 enemies in them (which then resets a few days later). Advanced Quests will still at least offer players an easy-ish way to get decently geared up for the next difficulty, even after it’s out. While it’s true that Super Hard will introduce new gear, given the astronomical odds rare items seem to have right now I wouldn’t go depending on drops to gear you up. Unless the drop rates are more generous, Advanced Quest exchange items will still be relevant a while longer.

Extreme Quests have a different issue. They don’t require you to grind them to get lv.60 enemies, but nor do they offer you much in the way of drops. Not outside of ingredient items required for Advanced Quest exchange items anyway. If you’re really lucky you can get 11* units from them, which are powerful items in their own right. However, the Extreme Quest exchange items will still take an ungodly amount of time for a player to acquire (ignoring the strategy of buying other people’s runs). I’ve talked about it before effectively requiring in the region of a year’s worth of playtime just to get ONE weapon. With that kind of time scale, you have decent odds of finding equivalent or better gear out in the field, which if true raises the issue of “what’s the point of running Extreme Quests once I have Advanced Quest gear?”.

I doubt the levels of the current Advanced Quests or Extreme Quests will be raised to match the current tier. Instead I imagine we’re going to get an update down the line that simply adds a new tier of them. Assuming they’ll want them to be the end-game of the current difficulty again and noting that the lv70 cap isn’t even on the timeline, let alone lv80, that could be some time away indeed.

PSO2’s First Event: Border Breaking Clumsiness

Events. Historically some of the most bug-ridden times in previous Phantasy Star days. Well in the Phantasy Star Universe days at least, I can’t comment on Phantasy Star Online. For the first event, players found themselves unable to complete the reverse-side of their Bingo Cards as particular nodes wouldn’t trigger when their conditions were satisfied. It has since been fixed, but thankfully Sega isn’t leaving it at that as they will be delivering compensation for it, including:

50 x Advanced Capsule a
4 x Extreme Passes

Effectively to cover the broken nodes. Exactly what the qualifying conditions are I’ve got to be honest and say I’m not sure. It could be you had to have unlocked the reverse side of the card before the emergency maintenance on the 21st or have to complete a node post it. Hopefully it’s the former or at least close enough to it. Update: You have to have unlocked the reverse side of the card before the emergency maintenance took place. Thanks, Espiokaos!

If you quality you should receive those items post regular maintenance on the 26th of June.

You will only receive this compensation once per account, even if you satisfy the condition on more than one character.

As a general apology for having to perform an emergency maintenance, everybody will be given the following items:

1 x Tri-boost 100%

This should also be distributed post the regular maintenance on the 26th of June

Episode 2 is Coming!

Kind of. The total size of the update that will bring us all to the next Episode weighs in at a whopping 5GB. PSO2 has had the pre-download system for a while now and they plan to use that system again for it, they just haven’t said when it is these patches will be available. Shouldn’t imagine it will be that long away though, as we’re now 22 days away as of this post from Episode 2 going live, after all.

Early patches are of course a data miner’s delight, so I’m sure some tidbits are set to be released.

Realy, Episode 2 isn’t as big a patch as I’d expect for something akin to an expansion. I mean yeah, it has only been a year since the game came out but the update itself is barely more than a regular content update. It adds a new race, new class and a new field as well as a bunch of photon arts and weapons and that’s all fine. I’m looking forward to that. I’m just saying that it seems a little lacking for something of its nature.

I Guess I Better Talk About The Event Or Something

The latest reward unlocked is Rare Drop Boost +100%. It’s the one I’ve personally been waiting for, as it means I get to stack rare boost items up from the event and use up the Extreme Quest passes I’ve been saving. Of course the reward that most people would like are the two at the end, which boost item grind and ability transfer success rates.

However, due to the way the Bingo Cards turned out to be, the point growth has significantly slowed down. I was expecting randomly generated cards with various objectives for you to fill and the more Bingos you got the more points you contributed. Instead we all got the same card, which is like we all effectively got Matter Boards. Only one card at that, so as soon as both sides of it are filled out you can’t contribute any more points towards the total. This is why the total has slowed down in growth so much.

Still, there is yet hope. Tonight’s maintenance is set to add a new Limited Time Quest (among other things), namely “Arks Ship Fire Swirl”. With it, you’ll also be gaining a new Bingo Card. Will it be enough to slightly tame Dudu? That has yet to be seen..

As for the event quest itself, I like it! The best part about it for me is the comparitive ridiculousness of some the spawns that can happen, as pictured above. It’s made even better by the number of combinations of enemies that can be encountered, thanks to the quest’s spawn list including nearly every enemy in the game. I never thought I’d see a pair of De Malmoths spawn along with two Tranmizers and a Vol Dragon for example…

It’s not perfect of course. Persona seems to spawn a disproportionate amount compared to other bosses for one thing, who has a nasty habit of killing players after he’s been defeated. The number of times he spawns vs the number of Coated Edge D’s that have dropped is kind of depressing a ratio at that.

Another aspect of it is that hardly anyone actually bothers killing Cougar. This means the supply of its Weapon Camos (skins) is extremely low in general. Never mind the Sword Weapon Camo, “SW Teardowner“, which can only be dropped by the rare variant of the boss. Persona and Cougar can actually spawn just about anywhere it seems, but only one of these two has a chance of being a permanent addition to the game. If Cougar is gone at the end of this event, then the supply of the Weapon Camo items is likely to be extremely thin forever. Mind, given his appearance rates in the quest logs it’d likely be that way even if it was a permanent addition to the game.

Episode 2: Dewmans and Bullet Bows.

The 9th NicoNico broadcast took place today. They promised information on upcoming content and in particular with Episode 2 information and they’re delivering. In fact they’re still releasing information currently so this post is likely to change before the day’s out.

Videos

I’ll embed what videos I find here, though I’ll may talk about them in more detail in a separate post.

Episode 2 Content Trailer

Dewman Character Creation

Also contains footage of the new weapon types.

Planet Vopar Footage

Dewmans

We’ve known these guys were coming since the closed beta tests and finally we see them. So what is their race’s defining feature? Eye-patches? Ear-shape? That’s right, you guessed it! Horns.

Eyes with alternating colours as well it seems, otherwise they’re still albinos by default. The character creation screen there shows that they can customize their horns, though not sure if all male Dewmans have one horn and all female Dewmans have two or if that can be chosen. It also shows that Dewmans get a bit of a bigger choice of skin colour than they did before in PSP2:Infinity (which was white and REALLY white). In PSO2 Dewmans can be pale white, brown, red or blue in various shades. Regarding eyes, I’m guessing that given there are two windows open with eyes that player can customize them individually. Rumour has it that players will be receiving a free character slot when Dewmans are released. I’ve not yet confirmed this, however.

Braver Braver was identified in the client fairly recently, with it being internally known as “swordarcher”. Katanas and Compound Bows were revealed, oh sorry, “Bullet Bows”. I guess Compount Bow might be pushing it in terms of name length, but Bullet Bow just sounds off to me. It seems Bullet Bows will have some kind of a charged action, perhaps similar to how some Sword and Partisan Photon Arts do. Fitting given how a bow is used, really. This does confirm that Katana and “saya” are part of the same weapon as well. The feeling was strong that this would be the case but the way the data was it implied they were separate weapons. How the pair function in combat is a bit of an unknown just now.

Coast The next field set to be added to the game and the first field that Episode 2 will add is the Coast field. That sure is a coast. The fountain landmark seems interesting, not something I expected to see. I can’t tell at that resolution whether it’s something technical or not just now. The Coast field is also confirmed to be set on the planet Vopar. With a new field comes new enemies! Most of which were known about but certain details weren’t. It has a boss, the expected “MarineOarFish” which now has the official name of “Bal Rodos / Val Rodos” (Ricardo at Bumped / Mewn) and a miniboss which we thought was going to be “BirdCentaur” but it is in fact something I don’t think we’ve encountered in the data yet, named “Orgublan”. The field also seems to be populated by angry flowers (the big ones being called “Blumegalla”), but not the PSO-like Lilys that were expected. These enemies are all part of a new enemy category internally known as “Chimera”. I can’t tell if that name is mentioned on that image there. “BirdCentaur” might not be a miniboss, but it is still quite significant. It’s pictured in the top-right there, above the actual miniboss. Looks sort of Egyptian themed. It is in fact one of the 3rd type of Darkers, which is significant as it means that all the BirdSoldiers and the infamous BirdBirdCrow are also Darkers. Bird Darkers was a possibility that was considered, but upon looking at their models they didn’t seem very darker-like to us. Didn’t help that they were texture-less as well. I’m aware that the bosses there have their names in Katakana but I’m not confident in my localization skills. I’ll add the names more experienced people grant them later.

Support Partners: The Return of the Partner Machine

A newly announced feature is a small girl you can keep in your room…. aaaaagh

pet_little_girl — A pet little girl you can raise, clearly inspired by the roguelike Elona.

I’m not being serious with that caption. They appear to be reminiscent of Partner Machines from Phantasy Star Universe. They were a bit like Mags, in that you raised them by feeding them items and what they’d evolve into depended on how you raised them. I don’t know yet if that’s how you raise Support Partners or not. Unlike Partner Machines, a Support Partner’s appearance is completely customizable, it’s pretty much making a 2nd tiny character.

The 4th item on that menu is “Customize Weapon”, so you can potentially set their gear up too I guess. Wonder if it’s physically giving them a weapon or something? (Thanks to Mewn for that).

aggggggh — Like Partner Machines of Phantasy Star Universe your pet… little person.. can follow you into the field. The Japanese text at the bottom indicates that Support Partners are active when you’re logged out, but it’s not clear really what’s meant by that.

It just seems… weird to me. I mean, you’re raising a tiny character. I mean before you had at least a little comfort in it being a little robot but, here it’s a little person. It can be a robot if you make it a Cast, but otherwise it really is effectively a pet person. There’s something unsettling about that.

Support Partners can only be raised in a room, but it seems you won’t need Premium Set to have the room to raise one in. All characters will be given mini-rooms, which presumably becomes your default room when your Premium runs out.

Long Term Schedule Episode 2’s release date is confirmed as happening some time in July, arriving with other things. I’ll list what I can with their respective month below:

July
- Support Partner
- Arks Road
- Planet Vopar with Coast field
- New race: Dewmans
- New class: Braver
- New weapon categories: Katana and Bullet Bow
August
- Nothing!
September
- New Field
October
- New Difficulty: Super Hard (Formally known as Super Very Hard? Or possibly a difficulty before it…)
- Level cap raised to 65
November
- New Field
December
- 12-man Quest Category
- Update to the Item Customization System

Nothing at all for August it seems. Anyway, there are two more fields coming up, which are presumably the as-yet un-named “Lilipa3” and the unannounced “Seabed”.