The official site was updated today with this page, which sheds details on the content that’s coming up upon release.
- The open beta is scheduled to be over on the 3rd of July, 11:00am JST.
- The release begins on the 4th of July, 2:00pm JST.
To summarise what’s coming up:
- New Field: Tundra – The snow-covered areas of Naberius will be added, along with new bosses and monsters, as well as variations of the planet’s natives (reskins).
- New Bosses: Snow Panther and Snow Banshee (possibly a duo boss), De Malmus and King Yede – King Yede may or may not actually be a boss, while he seems to be big enough to be one, in videos there is no event on screen that suggests he is in fact a boss or mini-boss.
- 3rd Stage Mag Evolutions. – You can find images of them here. Mags need to be lv100 to evolve to the third stage.
- Level Cap Raised to 40.
- Time Attack Quests.
- 3 New Chapters Of The Story – Venture to the snowy tundras of Naberius, investigate Lilipa’s small furry natives and actually try to talk to the dragon tribe you’ve been slaughtering the members of.
- Cash Shop Open – Details of how to actually buy Arks Cash should surface when it’s available. The cash shop itself will open for business on July 3rd, 3:00pm JST.
With the cash shop opening, new items will become available to players, including Lisa’s outfit, Xeno’s outfit and Echo’s outfits. As well as the wedding dress and suit displayed below. All costumes are available through Scratch and can’t be bought directly. Sucks, but if you want them you’re either gambling for them or buying them from player shops.
Sega also uploaded a video to YouTube, but most of it is footage you’ve seen before if you’ve watched other videos from them. The Time-Attack Quest footage is however new I believe.
Didn’t think they’d wait too long to roll this out, though I did expect a bit more notice than 2 days!
Towards the Future
Well that’s PSO2’s future set, at least on the Japanese side of things. On the western side of things there is still no word, unfortunately. The @phantasystar Twitter, Sega of America’s official Phantasy Star Twitter account, has gone eerily silent. They only had Phantasy Star Portable 2 left to go through before whatever it was they were gearing up to announce, so seems something might have gone awry there. Of course it feels pretty certain that they were going to be announcing PSO2 in some form, so I am eager to see what they were set to say. Hopefully that silence won’t be permanent.