New Genesis PSO2

So that was an unexpected surprise during the XBOX show wasn’t it? I’m not even sure I’m going to be able to put together a cohesive blog post sharing the news and my thoughts/speculations on things, but heck I seem to be in the mood for it so why not? Let’s talk about New Genesis.

Now I will lead this article by saying anything I speculate on is really just my own thoughts. I don’t know much more about this game than anyone else! I’m just some guy that likes to write about this game every so often, I’m not involved in anything official nor have the developers/staff ever reached out to me or anything. I do want this post to be informative as well, however, so I’ll try to keep information and thoughts as clearly separate as I can. To that end, let’s summarize the factual information that we know so far about the game:

So What Actually IS New Genesis?

Is it PSO3? Is it an expansion to PSO2? Well… turns out it’s both.

This video came with a blog post on the official site giving a brief rundown as to what’s what.

It should be noted that as this game is still in development some of these points could change! They make a particular point about this with regard to items that may or may not be transferable.

Information Summary

• New Genesis is a massive update and overhaul to PSO2, both graphically and in terms of gameplay/game systems.
• Unlike PSO2, it supports massive open fields instead of just smaller segmented maps.
• Set 1000 years after the events of Oracle (current PSO2 story), so it takes place in the same universe. We’re still ARKS, even!
• The game is 100% Free to Play with some monetization features. They haven’t said what these are yet.
• The game will co-exist with current PSO2.
• PSO2 will be uplifted with New Genesis. This means it’ll gain the graphics and Character Creation overhauls (though the exact details are sketch)
• PSO2 and New Genesis will have very different game systems. The PSO2 you know will stay the same!
• NGS will be released on all current and future platforms that PSO2 will be on. For NA this means Xbox and Win10, for JP this means this means PC(Win10 by now), PS4 and Switch. PSO2 is still set to arrive on new platforms (strong suspicion that a Steam version is on its way) and they assured us that NGS will follow suit.
• NGS is set for a global release (in both JP and NA). They didn’t say if this meant global servers, however!

• Arks Cash and Stargems are transferable/usable in either game
• FUN, Meseta, Materials and all other currency items are non-transferable.
• Characters and their cosmetics are transferable. You can swap back and forth between either game. Cosmetics includes costumes, hair, lobby actions, accessories, etc.
• Character gear is kind of transferable but will go through substantial changes to fit in with New Genesis’s systems. So stats, potentials, affixes/augments etc will be different to suit the new game. As far as I know the reverse isn’t true? As in gear from NGS may not transfer to PSO2.
• Character progression does not transfer between either game. This means EXP, classes, skills, Photon Arts, anything like that.
• Certain items don’t transfer – Includes things like Skill Rings, furniture, consumables.
• Mags are in, but this time they are cosmetic only. Your current PSO2 mags and their appearances will transfer, but will only have cosmetic function in New Genesis.
• Units are invisible including the ones you transfer.
• High rarity gear transferred from PSO2 may be unequippable initially – Either because they have a level requirement you need to meet first or because the classes that equip them aren’t released yet.

To my understanding that’s all the actual information we currently know. The rest of this post I’m gonna go over my thoughts and speculations so if you were just here for information alone, you’re pretty much done here! We’re about to get way less factual with a mix of the above and some trailer analysis.

Reveal Trailer – My Initial Reaction

So this is the trailer that they dropped during the show. At the time, I was kind of half tuned in so I wasn’t really sure what this Xenoblade Chronicles X looking game even was until I saw the character weapons and the UI popping up….

It dawned on me that this is indeed a Phantasy Star, but it looks completely different to the PSO2 I know so this can’t be an update, right? It has to be PSO3? That’s when the title card dropped.

This is a PSO2 game!? I’m so confused! Is this like a Phantasy Star Nova deal where it’s a side-story?

Anyway so that was more or less my initial reaction. After that video dropped the community kind of exploded and frantically clawed at all sorts of possible explanations as to what exactly it was that we just saw.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis will be coming in 2021! PSO2: NGS will surpass Phantasy Star Online 2 in every way, offering players limitless adventure and unparalleled character customization. The game has been redesigned as a best-in-class online action RPG experience!

Xbox Youtube channel

So we’d hit up the descriptions on trailer uploads; “newest game in the series”, “surpasses PSO2”, “redesigned”, “massive update”. The terms from official sources were all so confusing, they seemed to contradict each other.

These wide open fields for whatever reason immediately made me think about Xenoblade. It’s possible it was the sci-fi like tech and the animals they showed at the start of the trailer that did it.

They even have the weird faces from Xenoblade! Well OK maybe they look a bit less freakish than that..

I was so half at the wheel that I somehow failed to notice this bit of exposition text at the start… that would have made the penny drop far sooner than it did!

The North American version of PSO2 has only just been released, so the announcement of a sequel so soon caused a bit of an uproar. People had spent real money, afterall! Was PSO2NA just a quick cash grab before they released this game? Because of concerns similar to this I think the developers knew they had to clarify things quickly. The trailer at the top of the post as well as the official blog were released within a day possibly precisely because of these concerns. I’m glad they did that.

The Big Update to PSO2

So back in March, during the PSO2 Station Plus #5 broadcast it was revealed that instead of a new episode later in the year we’d get a major update instead. It was teased with the comical “NOT EPISODE 7” seen above.

Was this referring to New Genesis? Peronsally I’m not sure. Originally it was teased that this’d happen after August but they didn’t specify precisely when, it was kind of implied that it was happening this year.

Now naturally, a certain worldwide event may have delayed that! Perfectly understandable, of course! But see, if this is in fact the update they were referring to the fact its set to have a global simultaneous release presents a bit of an issue. NGS is going to happen after PSO2NA is all caught up to JP, which isn’t scheduled to happen until early next year.

Content road-map on PSO2NA.

To me, that left two possibilities as to what the “major update” for PSO2JP was going to be:

1. NGS is the update.
2. This is something different, but it was delayed due to world events

It also made me wonder if the big update for PSO2 was just whatever it is that makes it across from NGS, as in the character creation and graphics system overhauls. That, in principal, could still happen this year on the Japanese servers right?

Well later on we got a more detailed content road-map for the Japanese servers. This added some details for things happening between August and November. After which is a section simply labelled ??? with the (google translated) text “An unprecedented super-sized update that replaces the new Ep[isode]”

So I don’t know. It sure seems like NGS is indeed the major update the developers were being coy about the last three months but there could still be some surprises in store for regular old PSO2.

On Characters

So I have a few short thoughts on various parts of characters and how they’ll work between the two games…

First off, I’m thrilled that we’re getting a character creation uplift. Particularly with regard to accessories because I know I’ve bumped into the limitations of the current system way more than I’d like. While this does increase the likely-hood of seeing cocks in the lobby, it also means we could see some real interesting creatures and super-sized casts like we’ve never seen before.

The info trailer made sure to proudly announce that finger animation will finally make it to player characters. However, they did also state that older cosmetics could be used in NGS. I don’t expect them to go back and re-rig every single costume they’ve ever done because well, there’s just way too fucking many of them at this point. But the possibility exists that they could…

They demo’d character transfers by showing PSO2’s Ash in-game. Conspicuously, his fingers are not moving…

So costumes, accessories and weapon models will make it over. Cool! But I mean, aren’t they gonna look a little dated in the new engine? The new rendering tech will take some of the edge off them being models made back in 2011 but I still worry a lot of the old stuff is just gonna look out of place and weird in a next-generation game. It’s possible they could just re-export higher resolution models but I don’t expect them to go to that amount of effort somehow… Maybe up-res the textures?

Also how are old cosmetics going to work with the new character models and vice versa? It’s possible they won’t. The info trailer suggests you can “choose which system you prefer”, PSO2’s or NGS’s. To me this could indicate that old cosmetics are incompatible with new character models and new cosmetics in NGS are incompatible with old ones. They don’t show PSO2 Ash wearing NGS clothes nor do they show new Ash wearing PSO2 clothes, so it’s hard to tell.

They do however show what looks like old accessories being used on the right there though. I can’t tell if its a remake of the clinging rappy accessory or if it just looks nicer with the new rendering tech however so I can’t draw anything conclusive from this image personally.

This also begs a huge question regarding collaboration cosmetics. Those are certainly bound by licensing agreements, so will all of those make it across? Which ones won’t?

I am also deeply amused that it turned out that fashion was the true end-game all along!

On Character Classes

Well the classics are in at the very least. We see a sword user which is presumably a Hunter, a rifle user which is presumably a Ranger and a rod user which is presumably a Force.

They did indicate that transferred gear wouldn’t be usable if their class isn’t released yet. So clearly they’re going to stagger the release of the classes as they did for PSO2 but sound like they’ll all make it across eventually. Will this also apply to Hero, Phantom and Etoile? How the heck is summoner gonna work in this regard? I guess we wait and see.

One part of the trailer also showed the character switching from a Sword to a Rifle. That might just be cutscene magic, but maybe it hints that classes are fundamentally different in NGS? Maybe the classes are more fluid in what they can equip like in PSU? Maybe it’s that there is just some base class that can use those weapons? Maybe it’s something like your weapon determines your class and you can always freely swap? Or maybe its just a demo class for the sakes of the trailer. I don’t know, just speculating.

While MAGs may be gone, Photon Blasts are still with us but now they seem to function more like ultimates that our characters use. Well I mean I guess functionally speaking Photon Blasts were always ultimates? Well either way it’s coming from our character now instead of our mags and also has a cooldown applied to it after use (in this case 2 minutes). Unknown if these will replace class-based ultimates or what of course.

Both the “Ranger” and “Force” demos show a grey icon on their weapon pallets. Force’s looks like some kind of shield, but it’s never used in the demo so no clue what that might do (aside, presumably, some form of protection). The one on the assault rifle meanwhile makes it do some kind of elaborate sliding attack. I wonder if the spinning attack that Sword was using multiple times in the trailer is Sword’s equivalent of one of these moves? They never show an icon for it if so.

I’m not entirely sure what the special function of these actions are, all I can tell is they don’t use PP and they don’t appear to have charging or cooldown mechanics applied to them?

Also sword gear is missing! Is this finally the end of that ball and chain for Hunter sword? It’s that or for whatever reason they didn’t take the skill yet.

On Gameplay

Still got good old Just-Attack circles!

So it’s definitely different but also when you look at it pretty closely it’s still largely the same game we know. The action is more or less happening at the same pace, its using the same kinds of attacks we know (although clearly with significant modifications). More or less, it feels like they took the lessons they learned with the later classes in PSO2 and applied them to the older ones.

There is however a completely different sense of scale in NGS – not just due to the size of the map, but the sizes of the enemies they showed and the much greater verticality present in the game.

The game boasts a day/night cycle and even evidently provides an in-game clock to let you track it. The red tick appears to be the current time, the icon in the middle might indicate the weather (though its only ever sun/moon in the footage I’ve seen) and the yellow portion of the bar indicates when it’s day time. Exactly what impact day/night and weather will have on gameplay or if its just for immersion purposes isn’t clear.

While the maps are open, much more open looking than PSO2’s, it doesn’t seem like the game is as open as the likes of FF14 or WoW. There’s a pair of numbers in the top-left corner of the radar. It’s always x/4 in the shots I’ve seen. The x appears to indicate the number of players around, with it turning orange at 8. In PSO2, that number turning orange indicates that the Multi-party is full. That to me says the game is still instanced, so these large fields probably work more like Guild Wars and Monster Hunter World than World of Warcraft. It could also be tied to the encounters themselves of course.

As for the number on the right? I’m not sure. At first I thought it was the number of people in your party (making the number MPA/Party) but it seems to always be 4 even when the player is solo. It could be that this is just an indicator for the maximum party size or it could have some other meaning.

Honestly? I’d prefer it to be instanced for various reasons but I’m not against the idea of it being truly open either. I’m also fine with them reducing the MPA size from 12 to 8, cause it should result in slightly better scaling/balancing. Basically an issue PSO2’s had since the start is it’s hard to balance things for the widely varying firepower that 1-12 people can bring to an instance. The more people you add in a game like this as well, the less of an impact an individual player feels like they have which has soured many a quest for me. So if reducing the cap from 12 to 8 reduces the amount of times I have a strong feeling of “why am I even here” then it’s definitely for the better.

I also hope this isn’t the end of corridor dungeon crawling because for me thats where some of the most fun content is in PSO2. The hand-crafted dungeons anyway, not the random MPA run-in-circle murder trains.

On Enemies

Gilliam giving some stellar advice.

They’re big, they’re glowy, they’re stretchy. Not an enemy type we haven’t seen before in the series by any measure.

They’re called “DOLLS” as if the Xenoblade comparisons didn’t need more fuel and they seem to be NGS’s main antagonistic force akin to Darkers/Falspawn in PSO2, SEED in PSU and D-Cell monsters in PSO.

Bujin

Nagrus

They don’t actually show us many enemies but they do only show big ones which makes me wonder if the emphasis is on larger encounters rather than waves of lesser monsters like in PSO2. It could also just be that those were the only ones they wanted to demonstrate (the original PSO2 trailer focused pretty heavily on Dark Ragne). They did show some endemic life, so I’m sure we’ll be murdering some of those too!

It seems like every DOLL shown so far has a calm and enraged state, incidated by the color of their er, jelly parts? Nagrus above gets considerably more swole when red but it seems like all “enraged” DOLLS may gain new attacks in this state.

At least they’re keeping enemy names short and sweet, so I guess they learned from their mistakes in Episode 3.

Unknown DOLL on the left from NGS. SEED Venas from PSU on the right

This last paragraph is mostly for fun. I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between how some DOLLS look and the SEED and Stateria from Phantasy Star Universe. Does this mean there’s a connection between PSO2 and PSU? Of course it doesn’t. I’m pretty sure all it means is the same designers from PSU are still working for the team.

Final Thoughts

True adventure starts now (in 2021)!

It almost feels like the PSO2 developers played Xenoblade Chronicles X one day and were like “Man remember when we wanted to make PSO2 like this? Maybe we should do that..”.

So it’s a sequel but it’s also not a sequel and monetization currencies count in both games. I’m not sure how to feel about it being a kind of non-committal version of PSO3 but I’m still on board for now. It’s a little concerning that it seems like a kind of “have their cake and eat it” sort of deal I guess.

I still think NGS looks like it could be really good! After playing Monster Hunter World I tended to feel like that was a game which got Free Fields “right” where PSO2 didn’t. Similarly, a friend of mine was hoping for PSO2 to be more like Xenoblade and it looks like we both may have gotten our wishes. Of course we don’t know if our ideas for dream versions of PSO2 will be as fun as we imagined but…

Some of that is just gonna depend on how well they pull off the function of an open world. Is it going to feel good to move around in? Will it have enough things to do to justify the size of the maps or will it feel barren?

There’s plenty of remaining questions concerning the itty gritty of what transfers between the games and what overall impact this is going to have on PSO2 moving forward. Is that it for new PSO2 stuff or is it also going to get an Episode 7 anyway?

Some stuff I’d like to see

While it’s indicated that all of PSO2’s classes may make it across (though how exactly Summoner is gonna work is a huge question) I kind of want to see them come up with new classes and weapon types all the same. There’s a few weapon types from PSO and classic PS that they still haven’t done in PSO2, like claws, slicers, handguns, shotguns, whips, the piles and halos from Nova, sabers and possibly other things I’m forgetting. With the exception of slicers and shotguns (mostly), most other types got re-imagined into other weapon types which is mostly fine as PSU’s large array of weapons resulted in a lot of redundancy. That said, it’s an area they could expand into and definitely something I’d like to see them do.

Other major things I’d like to see them do is to abolish the server structure they have in PSO2, or at least limit the old lobby system to just the social lobbies and have everything else act a bit like their PVP matchmaking system.

I’d also like to see them finally add a re-join match feature so that disconnecting randomly isn’t so devasting!

Also no more Urgent Quests. I hate them.Make the game worth playing and progress-able at all times rather than randomly selected half-hour segments of the day. God do I love putting together a group to run specific content only to have the group fall apart to a UQ announcement because there;s no way to complete what we want to do before it starts… Admittedly this will create a design/incentivization issue if they want to do raids in NGS and honestly for that I don’t have a good answer. I liked the way FF14 handled it that’s about all I can say.

There’s probably other things I wanted to say that I’ve forgotten about but this blog post is far too large as it is. If additional things come up that I can’t just summarize in a twitter post then I’ll do then in future blogposts. I anticipate we’ll hear a few more tidbits about NGS in the upcoming August 7th PSO2 Station.

Also who is gonna be the great great great…. great great grandson of Dudu?

Towards the Future: Datamining

The Battle Arena patch was the first one in a while to contain any potentially interesting tidbits about what might be being added to the game in the future in a long time. Sega have generally been more careful about not giving the game away (or they’re working on less stuff…).

Anyway just gonna go over some of the things that were found by myself and others in the community. As always, remember that data-mined content is not representative of content that will be released, as the content might change or might never be released.

Super Yamato?

“PhantomShipEx” was spotted in the client. The reason why it’s signficant is “Ex” was used to denote updated versions of old bosses, including Elder, Loser and Profound Darkness (DpFishElderEx, DpBirdEx and DpAbyssEx respectively). Like the others, it appears to have updated attacks, but there’s no real details as to what these might be.

If this is coming out, it’s not on the current long-term schedule at least. I suspect it’s either going to arrive in the gap between the arrival of Deus Esca and Episode 5 or possibly even happen after Episode 5 is released. I guess this also potentially means that Hagito isn’t dead afterall…

PSU Collab Part 3

It seems that Laia and Lumia will be joining us in the Arks lobby for part 3, if the text files are anything to go by. So with that information i guess we can speculate what kind of items are gonna be added.

Lumia sports the Guardians Uniform F, which is an outfit already available in the game. Lumia used a Rod, so it seems safe to assume that she’ll hand out some kind of 13* rod like Emilia did. Honestly not a heck of a lot to say about Lumia as she wasn’t a terribly interesting character in general despite getting such heavy focus during Episode 3’s story.

Laia on the other hand wears the Guardians Formal outfit by the end of PSU, which was one of my favorite outfits in the entire game. The outfit she’s wearing on the right was her original costume, but I assume that’s not going to be the one she’s wearing judging by the promo pic for the PSU event. Here’s a pic of Guardians Formal from PSU in case you’ve never seen it before. I kind of hope the PSO2 incarnation doesn’t look as tacky as some other PSU outfits ended up looking. I’m also curious to see how the physics on the outfit will end up looking; is the coat tail gonna be glued to the legs like in PSU or is it gonna flap wildly like a number of recent dresses in PSO2…

Laia is also a Beast, which is a race that PSO2 never got (even though it was in the data files here and there!), which has certain physical features not available to any race in PSO2. So I suspect what they’ll do is create a unique face model just for her, which is kind of nuts but they’ve done it before with Miku and Luka. I’m curious to see what she’ll end up looking like in PSO2.

As for her weapon…. she uses an axe and twin claws in PSU, so either a Sword or Wired Lance if I had to guess.

Future Enemies?

Occasionally, future enemies turn up in the data. The last major time this happened was with DPP1, which later turned out to be Escafalz Mother. There was also Ultimate Amduscia enemies which turned up in the data a full year before they were finally implemented.

Anyway so some new ones turned up with a completely new naming scheme:

• B1SkSw
• B1SkAr
• B1GoSw
• B1GoBo
• B1Min
• B1WoN
• B1WoF
• B1OrN
• B1OrBo
• B1CatsA

Completely unlike anything we’ve seen before. You’ve probably noticed there’s a pattern to the names, such as “Sw, Ar and Bo” and “Sk, Go, Wo and Or”. What could these mean? Sword, Assault Rifle and er, Bow or Boots? The next four are anyone’s guess and what on earth does the “B1” mean anyway?

Poking around in the AI files determined the following:

• B1SkAr has an attack involving arrows – So it’d seem the “Ar” may stand for “Archer”
• B1GoBo has a “Bom” attack. The Bo can be assumed to stand for Bomb, then.
• B1OrN has a “club” attack. It using a club makes me think it could be something brutish, so could the “Or” stand for Orc or Ogre?
• B1WoN has various biting attacks. Could the Wo stand for wolf?
• B1Min has various slashing attacks and has Warcry…

The rest of the files either have setup stuff or nothing terribly interesting. Remember, this is content that is likely still being developed,  so a lot of likely to be missing.

So what we see is seemingly a selection of enemies with primitive tech. To hazard a guess, maybe these enemies are based on western fantasy tropes? Perhaps the “Go” stands for Goblin, the “Sk” for Skeleton and the “Min” for Minotaur? This is just wild speculation of course, I might be miles off the mark but being wrong is often part of the fun of speculating.

As these enemies don’t really fit into Episode 4’s naming schemes and seeing as Episode 4 seems to be coming to a end soon it’s plausible we might be seeing the first hints of Episode 5 content here. Could we really be heading to a medieval western fantasy land? We could, but I feel like it’d be a bit weird going up against Goblins and Orcs while wielding laser swords.

This would also continue their departure from the science fiction-y setting that fans have missed since we went to Space Japan in Episode 3 then actual Japan in Episode 4. Like I’m sure people who were hoping we’d go back to space again once we were done with Earth’s bullshit will be disappointed if my speculations turn out to be right. Who knows though, even if it does turn out to be Orcs and Skeletons it might be Space Orcs and Space Skeletons! Or it could end up being something completely different.

BATTLE WARRIORS

The PVP arena has arrived and honestly overall it’s not that bad. It’s not terribly good either, but there’s a lot to appreciate about it I think. This post will be entirely dedicated to most things Battle Arena.

There’s still some information in this post that needs verifying, so bare in mind it may get updated in the future.

Da Rules

It’s a point race, essentially. You gain points by grabbing allied, enemy and rainbow emblems. You’ll also earn points for killing enemies and lose points for getting killed.

The breakdown works something like this:

• Allied emblems are 1 point each.
• Enemy emblems are 5 points each
• Rainbow emblems are 10 points each
• The team’s score is the total of each of its member’s individual scores.
• The team with the highest total score is the winner.
• Killing enemies gives you 10% of their individual points.
• Dying (including by suicide) causes you to lose 10% of your points.
• Lava is bad for you. Don’t swim in the lava.
• You’ll only earn Battle Coins for doing Ranked games
  • You can only solo queue for ranked.

Ranking

Your rank is entirely dependent on what your current “Arena Point” score is (ARP). You will only gain Arena Points when you win matches and beyond a certain rank you’ll lose some when you’re defeated. The lowest rank is D5 while the highest is Legend.

Rank ARP requirements:

• D5 – 0 ARP
• D4 – 20 ARP
• D3 – 40 ARP
• D2 – 60 ARP
• D1 – 80 ARP
• C5  – 100 ARP
• C4 – 140 ARP
• C3 – 180 ARP
• C2 – 220 ARP
• C1 – 260 ARP
• B5 – 300 ARP
• B4 – 380 ARP
• B3 – 460 ARP
• B2 – 540 ARP
• B1 – 620 ARP
• A5 – 700 ARP
• A4 – 800 ARP
• A3 – 900 ARP
• A2 – 1000 ARP
• A1 – 1100 ARP
• S5 – 1200 ARP
• S4 – 1360 ARP
• S3 – 1520 ARP
• S2 – 1680 ARP
• S1 –  1840 ARP
• LEGEND – 2000 ARP

Rankpoints lost on defeat:

• D5-D1 : 0pt
• C5 – C1 : -5pt
• B5 – B1 : -6pt
• A5 – A1: -10pt
• S5 – S1: -15pt
• LEGEND: -20pt

So in terms of rank progression, you’ll only progress if you’re exceeding a certain win percentage. For each rank:

• D5-D1: No loss in progress, so any win-rate.
• C5-C1: Greater than 20% win-rate
• B5-B1: Greater than 23% win-rate
• A5-A1: Greater than 33% win-rate.
• S5 – S1: Greater than 42% win-rate.

There are titles for hitting certain ranks that reward Stargems.

• 20 Stargems: Play a ranked match.
• 30 Stargems: Reach C-rank
• 50 Stargems: Reach B-rank
• 100 Stargems: Reach A-rank
• 300 Stargems: Reach S-rank
• 500 Stargems: Reach LEGEND rank.

Your rank points are reset every month. At the end of the month your rank is set to:

• Legend -> S1
• S1-S4 -> S5
• S5 -> A1
• A1 – A4 -> A5
• A5 -> B1
• B1-B4 -> B5
• B5 > C1
• C1 – C4 -> C5
• C5 -> D1
• D1 – D4 -> D5
• D5 -> D5.
• So if you’re B1 at the end of the month, your rank is set to B5.

There are apparently monthly prizes for whatever rank you managed to get. As far as I know there’s no details as to what these prizes are.

General Tips

This is just gonna be a few things I feel is generally good advice when playing this mode. While you’ll still get Battle Coins for losing (and not much more for winning), it’s a competitive mode so come on. You wanna win. Bare in mind this is largely gut feeling and personal experience, though.

Because it’s a team score, not an individual score, dying is a pretty big deal. Like it costs your team possibly more points than they’ll be able to make back in a reasonable time, so playing overly aggressively is a bad idea. You want to pick your battles carefully. Look for enemy players that are way out of position/too far from allies that can be picked off while being wary not to wander too far from allies yourself!

In particular on the Volcano stage, do not try a jump you don’t think you can make. Dying costs your team points, so every time you fuck up a jump and end up in the lava you put your team at a real disadvantage.

Tokyo map

Volcano map

Forest map

The most valuable spot on the map is the area the Rainbow Emblems spawn. If your team manages to control this spot you’ll be at a major advantage. On the maps pictured nearby it’s on center-left in Tokyo and middle on both Volcano and Forest. As stated though, don’t be reckless and just throw yourself at this area, because you could just end up feeding if you do. If the enemy are guarding this area too well, consider hunting stragglers/respawners but you really want to try to join a group push to re-take the rainbow emblem area because its a very lucrative spot.

The top 3 players on each team are marked on the map and visible by an emblem over their heads. They’re worth more points for your team, so use the fact you can see them at all times to your advantage to set up an ambush. Beware that this cuts both ways, as in when you have an emblem over your head you’ll no longer be able to pull off a sneak attack. Additionally, when you’re in the top 3 your team loses more points when you die.

Spending time farming for weapons is time you’re not spending collecting emblems. However, this mode isn’t terribly well balanced and some attacks are just significantly better than others. It might be worth farming nodes for replacement weapons if the one you have will put you at a significant disadvantage. For example, if the enemy are all camping an area you really want to have some ranged pressure to apply, which a sword won’t allow you to do.

Positioning is relatively important I feel. Like if you have a melee weapon you really don’t want to be out in the open, you want to be around corners and in places where you can get the jump on an unsuspecting enemy. You’ll generally want to try to use cover to your advantage, however you’re less vulnerable if you have a ranged weapon. If you have a teching weapon, charge your tech from behind cover then jump out to fire it, as charging in the open is risky.

If you respawn and the weapon upgrade message happens, you’ll want to get a new weapon quickly unless you have something like Onepoint or Rising Edge.

I feel like prioritizing kills over emblem collection might actually be worth it, because enemy deaths cost their team so heavily. Going for enemy emblems is generally too risky to be worth it, as you’ll be at re-spawn disadvantage and when you die you’ll lose more points than you gained.

Those are my thoughts at least. Hopefully they work for you but I’m promising nothing!

Weapons and Photon Arts

For now there are only three weapon types: Sword (Nova Break, Rising Edge), Assault Rifle (One Point, Piercing Shell) and Rod (Foie, Zonde, Megid). I’ll go over my opinions of each of them.

Nova Break

It’s a kind of short range, slow but fairly hard hitting attack. If you follow up with a step attack fast enough, you’ll kill the enemy player before their ground i-frames kick in. It does have a short wind-up time that leaves you vulnerable, however.

Rising Edge

This unique version of Rising Edge has extended range and deals a huge amount of damage; enough to one-shot most enemy players. Its not a terribly wide attack however, so some accuracy is required. It also locks you in place, so if you miss the enemy do not spam the PA button or else you’ll end up missing again. This attack does leave you sort of vulnerable while using it.

One Point

Deals consistent, easy to apply damage at long range. Its damage is kind of low, however and while using it you’re either staying still or moving slowly which makes you an easy target. One Point also doesn’t flinch, so combined with its low damage it is possible to run up to someone using One Point and melee them to death.

Piercing Shell

Deals low damage and inflicts a heavy injury debuff on enemies it hits. It can pierce enemies, however its a pretty small projectile so it’s not going to happen often. The projectile is slow moving however, so it’s hard to hit moving targets with it unless they’re moving directly at or away from you.

Foie

Foie is as solid as ever. Fairly quick charge time and hits hard. You can also graze enemies with it, allowing you to hit multiple enemies at once. Beware that you’ll need to lead shots with it if the enemy is far enough away.

Zonde

Deals moderate damage to an enemy at kinda medium range. Takes a long while to charge but is actually pretty difficult to miss with if the enemy is in range. Charging it up from behind barriers can be an effective way to snipe unsuspecting players. You won’t kill them in one hit, but you’ll weaken them significantly.

Megid

Deals good damage in a large explosive area. The projectile travels very slowly however, giving enemies plenty of time to avoid it unless they’re lagging. Works well on enemies in areas where movement is restricted like corridors.

Overall, I feel One Point and Rising Edge are the most effective attacks in the arena however if used right all of the attacks can be pretty effective. It’s just personally I feel like Megid and Zonde are a little too niche and Piercing Shell a bit unreliable. Zonde might see more use if its charge time and range wasn’t so restrictive. Megid just needs a faster projectile.

Battle Coins – Prizes

So after every game you earn a varying amount of battle coins, with bonuses for winning, getting MVP in various stats and for being the underdog in an uneven match. For your trouble, you can get a selection of cosmetic and functional items.

Unlimited Shop

There is no limitation on the items you can buy in this shop. Buy as many as you like!

• 2,800 coins: Sword Camo, Rifle Camo and Rod Camo for
• 2,800 coins: Rappy Make-up
• 1400 coins: 4-slot Vraolet
• 2800 coins: 6-slot Vraolet
• 250 coins: Arena Booster
• 200 coins: Lambda Grinder
• 200 coins: Extreme Pass
• 200 coins: 15000 EXP Ticket.

The Vraolets include Phrase Receptor and Sentence Receptor, allowing you transfer the Special Ability Factors of Gix and other weapon series (such as Astral and Fornis) without having to sacrifice another +35 of those series to do it. I see it as more of a future proofing mechanism so you can still use those affixes long after the Collection Files have disappeared.

Arena boosters are used to unlock Arena potentials on certain weapons. So far the only two series to have Arena Potentials are Revolucio and Aura weapons. As with other Potential unlock items, you’ll need 12 of them to max out your weapon. This means you’ll need 3000 coins for every weapon you wish to unlock the Arena Potential on. Their potentials are as follows:

Aura

• Power and passive PP recovery increases depending on how many abilities are on the weapon. It also boosts PP recovered on attack by the number of abilities.
• Numbers are per ability on your item.
• Lv1:
  • Power : 1.25%
  • PP recovered on attack : 2%
  • Passive recovery : 2%
• Lv2:
  • Power : 1.5%
  • PP recovered on attack : 2.5%
  • Passive recovery  : 3%
• Lv3:
  • Power : 2%
  • PP recovered on attack :  3%
  • Passive recovery : 4%

A curious potential indeed. It means to get the most out of it you’re going to need to raise the weapon to 8-slot which is going to be tricky. If you do manage it however, you now have a weapon with a 16% power boost with 24% additional PP recovered on attack and +36% passive PP recovery. That’s pretty solid, overall! I mean heck, that’s 12%/18%/24% if you go for a more modest 6-slot.

That said, you do actually want to put decent affixes on your gear, so it’s not wise to just up-slot the weapon for the sake of having a stronger potential.

The Aura Collection File is set to return in the near future.

Revolucio

• Increases power every time you deal a certain amount of damage, take a certain amount of damage and use a certain amount of PP
• Lv1:
  • 1% increase for every 150,000 damage dealt, 750 damage taken and 250PP used
• Lv2:
  • 1% increase for every 100,000 damage dealt, 550 damage taken and 175PP used
• Lv3:
  • 1% increase for every 50,000 damage dealt, 300 damage taken and 100 PP used
• To a maximum power increase of 16%
• Resets on weapon swap

This potential really only suits builds that only use one weapon and can play very aggressively. However, the damage dealt part of the potential should get you to max power fairly quickly so this at least negates some of the reset issues this weapon could have. Overall not completely sold on this one, but 16% damage boost is pretty nice and if you haven’t gotten a 13* yet this wouldn’t be too bad.

Limited Purchase Shop

Most items in this shop are limited to a certain number of purchases per week. There are also items that are only temporarily available in the shop.

• 200 coins: 10 Star Gems (5 per week)
• 200 coins: 5 Star Gems (10 per week)
• 11000 coins: Blue Rapid Suit, Blue Rapid dress, Red Rapid Suit, Red Rapid Dress (1 per week)
• 5500 coins: Winner Dance (1 per week)
• 3300 coins: Rear / Shine Blue (1 per week)
• 3300 coins: Rear / Shine Red (1 per week)
• 2800 coins: +2% Element (1 per week…)
• 1100 coins: Affix success rate boost +40% (1 per week)
• 50 coins: +20 Mining Stamina Drink (10 per week)
• 50 coins: +20 Fishing Stamina Drink (10 per week)
• 50 coins: Advance Capsule d, e and f (50 per week)

Rapid Suits, the Lobby Action and the Shine units are available until the 20th of September because… I have no idea why honestly.

So yeah, probably the most interesting items there are the units and the Stargems. It doesn’t take that long to earn 1000 Battle Coins so an extra 50 gems per week isn’t too shabby (or 3000 to get the rest for a total of 100 Stargems per week).

The two units have very different stats. The blue unit gives HP and PP while the red unit gives stronger attack and defense stats. Here are the known numbers:

• Rear / Shine Red –
  • +80 all attack
  • +80 DEX
  • +3% strike/shoot/tech resist
  • +10% fire resist.
  • 337/330/334 S-R-T-def at +10.
• Rear /Shine Blue –
  • 150 HP
  • 5 PP
  • +3% strike/shoot/tech resist
  • +10% ice resist
  • 323/319/322 S-R-T-def at +10

Not completely sold on either of these units, honestly. The lack of HP and PP on the red unit kinda hurts it and the complete lack of attack on the other makes it fairly lackluster too. However, these are 12* units still and they’re significantly easier to obtain than other 12*s for now. They might be worth getting if you really need the additional Ring slot.

Overall Thoughts

It’s surprisingly fun. I thought it would honestly be a lot more frustrating than it is but the mode works well enough that it feels good to strike enemies down through careful positioning and mind games. Of course you can also get killed because someone ran up to you with Rising Edge.

My main beef with it is how it handles latency, as my connection is bad enough that some attacks are outright impossible for me to use. For example, me using Megid is almost pointless as the enemy can easily dodge it, while I can’t dodge enemy megid because even if I jump behind cover the server will still register the hit. I’m often getting killed without any damage numbers at that, which feels so bizarre. However, this is the kind of thing I did expect going into an action-based PVP game hosted in Japan. For those having a similarly lag filled experience, I advise sticking to Assault Rifles, Foie and Zonde if you can as these seem to be the most lag-friendly weapons.

Will this mode last? I think it might, though I suspect it’ll be a lot less active once people have gotten the cosmetics and units they wanted to get. Beyond the weekly Stargems and possibly Receptor gear though I don’t think there’s enough reward for it to be really active longterm.

That said, the game uses a cross-block matchmaking server to create games and it seems like they might be hosted on a different server. This will help its longevity somewhat. My only beef with this system is why isn’t something like this present for the entire game at large? Removing dependency on parking in blocks for content would alleviate so many issues the game has it’s kinda unreal. Aside technical issues, I suspect the main thing holding them back is the existence of Premium block space, as losing that incentive might not be worth it to them…

Anyway that’ll do for one post. There’s a few more non Battle-Arena things I want to go over but I think I’ll do those in separate posts.

December Catchup Post

So yeah, I’ve been away for a while. The main reason is I wanted to focus all of my attention on creating a game for a month-long Game-Jam. I won’t detail as this blog isn’t for promoting myself, but suffice to say it’s my primary hobby and it’s something I wanted to put some serious energy into getting better at. It was a good month, honestly, so fair warning I may do stuff like that in the future. Hopefully I’ll get better at managing my time as I improve but we’ll see.

But yeah, a fair amount happened since my last post. For one thing, pretty much everything from the first PSO2 Station is now live and the Famitsu Cup came and ended. I’m not going to cover everything that happened, but I will go over the things I had thoughts on and any recently useful information I’m aware of.

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December So Far

Christmas is here, which for the Arks means killing things but with Christmas-y music in the background. Hey at least it actually is Christmas music this time around and not the Nights credits theme (thank goodness).

Merry Christmas on Ice 2016

The quest itself is the standard fare of run around and kill things to make your points go up. The spawns are slightly mixed up by throwing in special bosses from various seasonal events during this year.

You have the standard PSE Burst from wearing the right costumes, but as usual you really just want to clear the quest as quickly as possible. Bursts slow you down, so you’re better off not wearing your Christmas garb for this quest.

What’s potentially interesting is that it seems the callback bosses drop their unique items from their respective events, such as Rainy Day’s Fang Banther dropping Hyper Sunlight. Other drops include:

• Garel Stones and possibly Nemesis weapons from Diabo
• Asta Unicorn from White Day Quartz Dragon
• Eggscarpe from Easter’s Falz Hunar
• Aura weapons from summer’s Chrome Dragon
• General Mutation II items from the titled Gal Gryphon
• Bloodspear Vlam Bram and Raygun Barrel from Halloween’s Zeta Guranz
• Apparently Dio Hunar can drop items from the current collection file

It’s not terribly great EXP but the quest provides shots at a large variety of rare drops, which may be helpful for those who have unfinished weapons from previous seasons. It also seems to have a pretty decent rate of 2016 Weapon Badges, which well this is basically your last chance to do anything with those before presumably 2017 badges are introduced.

Izane Units

Additionally, it has a small chance of spawning Emperappy or Izanekazuchi. The former is useful as ever for its Emperembrace grind fodder but the latter can drop a solid set of units.

Izane’s unit stats at +10 are:

• 361 S-Def
• 340 R-Def
• 340 T-Def
• 150 HP
• 4% Strike, Shoot and Tech resist
• +20 all attack
• +20 Dex
• 6% Lightning Resist
• 4% Light Resist

These are the same for all three units. They provide no set bonus either, so you can freely mix and match them with other units as required which is nice. Otherwise this set is clearly defense oriented, providing a large amount of HP and general damage resistance as well as higher defensive stats than any unit in the game so far. The major downside to these units is they provide no passive PP bonuses at all, which may put a lot of people off wanting to use them.

With units of this caliber coming out, it could well be the death of Unit crafting. Arguably that’s been dead for a while but chalk up yet another craft skill that’s becoming useless I guess.

Collection Files

This season offers a small but interesting selection of items.

Astral Blaze

My favorite Twin Sabers from Phantasy Star Universe are back. What’s interesting about these weapons is they’re equippable by Fighters, which sorta revives the classic Fighter Bouncer from the Gran Fol days. It’s also usable by Forces and comes with a modest amount of T-Atk (1012 at +10). Has Heavenly Kite as an innate Photon Art.

The potential does the normal thing of boosting damage (11% at level 3) but it also has a curious way of doing PP regeneration. It has two separate rates; one for automatic recovery while in the air (100% at lv3) and another for attack recovery while on the ground (40% at lv3). Given normal attacks don’t stop automatic PP regen, it kinda effectively boosts it in both states. In any case, its high base attack and decent unconditional modifier alone makes roughly on par on Austere (it might be slightly stronger), which makes it a pretty nice weapon for Dual Blade mains.

Its Special Ability Factor is Modulator.

Fornis Ogend

The Talis has a curious Potential wherein it boosts damage against enemies weak to Lightning or Light attacks, or the attack’s own element by 14% if the enemy is weak to it. The weapon gives 1% of the damage dealt in healing (up to 50HP) to indicate the potential was active for that attack , much like how the Gryphon NT weapons do.

The power boost on it is slightly conditional, but it’s a significant portion stronger than Austere when active. This is a very strong Talis.

It comes with a Special Ability Factor (need a shorter name for this, maybe just “factor”?) which boosts damage dealt for hitting an enemy with an element they’re weak against by a whopping 2%. While a small number on its own, it does make this weapon a pretty good target for those wanting to min-max elemental damage (though I still think you’re crazy to do this if you’re not a Force!).

Rose Skewer

This tact allows people sub-classing Summoner to summon pets. It also has a whopping 40 more attack than your regular Talis, making it the best Talis in the game so far! This is arguably the most interesting item in this Collection File as it allows you to try other combinations of Summoner with pets out. Ever wondered how TeSu with a Shifta Strike Marron would perform? Now you can find out! It also makes raising your subclass easier seeing as you don’t need to go grab extra gear for it.

Related to this. Summoner’s Skill Tree has gone through some changes that open up some interesting options in general. I may go over this in its own post.

13* Maron Egg

Useful for those of you who missed out on the Ultimate Lilipa train and still don’t have a 13* Maron. It’s a useful spike damage pet, though it takes some getting used to. I’m a terrible Summoner so I’m bad at using it.

Necky Collection Files

Seeing as we’re talking about collection files I just wanna share a couple quick thoughts on this set too.

Necky’s Challenge is gone, possibly for good. Despite this, his collection files are gonna persist for another week or two, which seems a little odd. You can’t make progress on certain parts of the files without actually running Necky’s Challenge. So the only people who can start or clear Necky files are those with access to the relevant Quest Triggers, but it still feels like a wierd setup.

I also gotta say that I’m not a fan of the temporary nature of Collection Files in general but it feels extra shoddy when it ends up splitting up weapon series. This happened with the Seiga and Quotz series before; where some of the weapons can be obtained via stones but the rest of the series is now confined to drop-only forever. I don’t know why they can’t just leave the files up or at least make the rest of the series available via stone grind.

This is also kind of a shame for Form Weapons, whose files were made unavailable after the last maintenance. Form Weapons have one of the most interesting potentials in the game so it’s a shame to see them relegated to drop-only in a quest that few people run anymore.

At least the recent change to NT weapon drops where weapons can drop with higher element and grind cap does mean you’re not cursed to finding 5 of your desired weapon anymore. That does take a lot of the burden out of completing them, but to me this doesn’t really make up for the temporary nature of Collection Files particularly when they have such potential to give incentive to under-run content.

2nd Broadcast Catchup

To be honest, there wasn’t really a lot that happened during the second broadcast to talk about. It mostly showcased some Christmas stuff which we already have and a bunch of costumes, including a collaboration with Persona 5. It did at least show us a bunch more about the upcoming raid-boss “Esca Falz Mother” and the trinkets she could reward us with.

In any case, in this section I’m going to go over things that were revealed during the broadcast. Seeing as new information has come out since though it’d be inappropriate to go speculating just on the broadcast content alone, so I’ll be including whatever has been revealed since.

Raid Details

The raid itself is a two-part quest, with the first part seeing us chasing Esca Falz around with our Rideroids. The Rideroid automatically moves forward and shoots bullets, but the player will have access to two active skills so you won’t just be spending your whole time dodging obstacles. You’ll have access to a homing missile attack which shoots at desired targets and a spinning melee attack which you can use to hit parts which she er.. offers up to you I guess. You also have access to an “Overboost” which speeds you up if you end up falling behind for whatever reason.

You can take damage from obstacles and her attacks, which can be recovered by flying through the green rings from Las Vegas. As far as I know it hasn’t been said what happens if you run out of health, but presumably you’re given a respawn timer much like with the AIS portions of Magatsu and Yamato.

Here’s the  most recent trailer from the official Youtube channel (includes the Persona 5 collab):

The developers have since revealed in a tidbit that your performance in the Rideroid section won’t affect your access to the 2nd part. You’re there to either “shave off her HP” or just wait until time runs out. I’m not sure if this means that your performance in part 1 affects how much HP Mother has in part 2 or if it simply speeds up part 1.

For those unaware, you can actually fight Esca Falz Mother right now if you run the most recent Story Quest (Episode 4 Chapter 7). While naturally she has much less HP in this state, it does at least give you some indication of what to expect during the fight.

Mother uses many mechanics that resemble moves from other Dark Falzes. The two I saw in my encounter were Elder’s arms and meteors as well as a ring of walls from Double. The Double-Wall ring has one open gate which you need to find and exit through quickly or else you’ll take a moderate amount of damage. Datamining suggests she has moves from Apprentice (she does seem to have the bomb-bugs from Mining Base: Demise in the trailer) and Loser, both of which seem to be absent in the single-player version.

She summons Falz Arms during the fight, which act roughly independent of her. They act much like Profound Darkness bits in that if you break all of them, Mother will be stunned for a while and expose a weak-point. She increases the number of Arms each time.

The trailer shows what seems to be your regular raid-wipe move which seems to be absent from the solo encounter. While hard to tell from the limited footage, it seems like you can attack the cubes that are slowing moving towards the epicenter of the attack. It’s possible that this is a DPS check of sorts, but the actual mechanics are unknown for now.

So yeah, kinda neat that we got an interactive preview of the raid this time around!

14* Weapons

Mother will be introducing the first 14* weapons, with the Katana “Kasami Notachi” (reminiscent of PSO’s Kasami Bracer ), the Assault Rifle “Spread Needle” and the Rod “Eternal Psychodrive”. These weapons will not have collection files and so will be drop-only. The drop rates are expected to be very low (lower than Austere!), however interestingly they’ve engineered it so you’ll only ever need to get one drop to complete the weapon. They will drop with a +35 grind limit and max element, which means you won’t need to feed it additional copies of itself to finish it. You will need to grind them as you would any other NT weapon otherwise.

Kasami Notachi

Additionally usable by Hunters.

Spread Needle

The devs noted that this is also Gunner equip-able, which is kinda a moot point given Gunners can use all Rifles…

There’s an unconfirmed rumour that this weapon may be able to fire multiple bullets per normal shot. If true, I assume it shoots in a spread pattern much like the original Spread Needle.

Eternal Psychodrive

Usable by Techers.

In essence, these weapons feel like the spiritual successor to the 12* drops from Elder way back in the day; Ultra rare drops that you might only see one of every so often across the entire server! However, they did also say that 12* units would drop less often than Saiki units which much of the player-base came to doubt rather quickly whilst farming Ultimate Amduscia. Of course, we don’t actually know the metric they were using to compare the drop-rate to because if it was comparing it to Giguru Ginnegam’s drop rate…

Assuming the rumour about Spread Needle turns out to be true, I can’t help but ponder if the other two weapons will have unique abilties as well. I couldn’t hazard a guess as to what they’d be, but I’m all for more interesting abilities on weapons that aren’t just power boosts. We need more weapons like the Form series, because it offers up shifts in game-play and increases the functional diversity of weapons in general. If this means fewer weapons that’s fine because PSO2 has too many weapons as it is…

Astra Weapons

Mother’s collection file introduces an entirely new weapon series to the game; the Astra series. Presumably these can also drop. According to recent information from the developers this series is intended to be a replacement for Austere. I know I’ve defended Austere in the past mostly due to the sheer number of steps you had to go through to get one, but the weapons are now a year old so it really is time to move on. Whether or not they will be a true Austere killer all comes down to their stats and potential of course, which regarding that…

It seems its potential may be as follows:

• Lv1. Boosts damage by 6% and increases PP recovered by when attacking by 20%
• Lv2. Boosts damage by 9% and increases PP recovered by when attacking by 30%
• Lv3. Boosts damage by 12% and increases PP recovered by when attacking by 40%

This data was mined from PSO2es by someone from the Arks Visiphone site. If correct, that does make these weapons particularly useful for the PP-heavy but slow-recovery weapon types such as Sword, Partizan and Knuckles. It’s less useful for those who have no issues recovering PP, although these are still solid weapons in terms of overall damage.

Are they an upgrade from Austere? Well assuming this turns out to be their potential, I feel like if you already have an affixed Austere weapon I reckon you’re fine to stick with what you got unless you main any of the three weapons mentioned earlier. They’d be an upgrade but it’s such a minor one that I’d question if it was worth putting in the Meseta for a new round of Affixes.

We’ll see. I remember speculating that a completely unrelated potential was going to turn out to be for Gix weapons. That’s just one of the pitfalls of Datamining, sometimes you’re left guessing.

Incidentally, much like with Austere weapons, the Collection files will require you to run content outside of the raid to complete. We can see a blurred out Vegas Illusia in the trailer, but according to the update page it involves various enemies from Earth. At the very least you might have to hit up Riding Quests or Vegas Free Field or something.

Mother also drops a unit set, but there’s currently no information about them at all. Hopefully they’re not as rare as Invade units…

The End – For Now

That’s all for now. I was going to write up some stuff about the PVP mode coming up because boy have I got some opinions on that but I’m holding that back because we’re apparently going to get a live demo of that sometime soon. If so, I may as well wait for that to come out before I really talk about it at any length. I will say, my gut feeling is that it’ll be an unbalanced mess but something completely optional that shouldn’t have any major impact on the game as whole. I’m just hoping nothing too valuable ends up attached to it.

Come the 17th, we’ll have the 3rd PSO2 Station. Assuming I’m in good health then I’ll be doing my usual write-up of it when it hits. This one is a potentially interesting one as they’ll be going over some of the January updates as well as I believe they’ll be revealing the next long-term Schedule. Given Episode 4 may be coming to a close in the coming weeks, we may start to see the first shreds of Episode 5 peeking their way around the corner. There’s been nothing mentioned about Episode 5 yet, nor has there been anything particularly tantalizing from data-mining in that regard. This could mean Episode 5 is further off than Episode 4 was this time last year.

 

Ultimate Amduscia: Thoughts and Tidbits

Today saw the release of Ultimate Amduscia. So was it worth the year long wait? Is the gear any good? This and other important life questions will be considered momentarily, while also throwing in some actually useful information.

Note that the community is still figuring a fair amount of things out. As such, the contents of this post may change in the coming days.

On an unrelated note, WordPress seems to kill the contents of

tags now. That’s why this post lacks the black bar titles that are in most of my posts these days. I can’t figure out a way to prevent WordPress from modifying my tags, so for now I’m having to use the default headers. Custom CSS is a paid feature so..

The Quest Itself

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So rather than do the circuit-style of the other two quests, we instead have semi-randomized spawns with a fixed layout. The map is split into sections which you teleport to randomly, which then chooses from a small selection of fixed spawns.

One of these sections is guaranteed to be a Box Duvals and it seems like every run has at least one spawn of Darker Abberations. There’s a chance one of the spawns will be replaced with an additional shot at a  boss.

After going through 4 different sections the big forcefield is dispelled and you’ll face off against either Gruzoras Drago or Drago Deadlion. After defeating them, the new Anga Fundarge spawns and after defeating that the quest is clear. So yes, you will always get an Anga Fundarge and at least one boss here, unlike in previous Ultimate Quests.

An average run should last between 6 to 10 minutes, depending on MPA quality and a bit of luck. Rank is based on time, with an S rank requiring you to clear the quest within 7 minutes. If you manage to do this, you’ll earn a title that rewards you with a Gix unit.

This room full of archers is arguably the biggest obstacle to getting an S-rank. The archers are spread throughout the room, far beyond Zondeel range. The MPA will need to split up ideally one person per archer.

So yeah, I actually like this approach to the quest to be honest. It’s random enough but it gives you fair shots at just about everything the quest has to offer. This makes filling out the collection files much less frustrating than the Vegas files ended up being.

In terms of difficulty, it’s a little lacking for end-game players. Players at the top end are so well geared that very little gets to live long enough to do anything, but an average MPA may find things hectic enough that you at least don’t feel completely safe. I feel like most deaths will come from getting randomly combo’d in all the chaos.

Oh, and you’ll need to be lv75 on both Main and Subclass in order to participate. I’m not really sure why as the quest’s overall difficulty really doesn’t warrant it, but it’s there so you’re gonna have to deal with it.

New Gear 

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The arrival of the Gix series, 12* units and a few other bits and bobs. I’ll go over what’s known here, but be aware that this is still being researched.

Collection Files

Ultimate Amduscia’s collection files all offer similar sort of gear; an 11* Sun God weapon matching the weapon class of the file and various 11*/10* junk. Each part of the file requires kills of a specific boss in the quest to progress. Essentially, only boss kills will progress you towards completing these files.

Summoner gained collection files for eggs, which is interesting in its own right. It’s also fair, all things considered, as pets are essentially their weapons.

Zinga, Aero and Popple require the same things as the Gix weapons do; kills of various Ultimate Amduscia bosses. They give out various candy board items, including a Spirita Cookie + 3, rolls of various types, 2-layer pancakes and candy canes.

Synchro was added to the Trick or Treat files, offering a 2-layer pancake, Technicookie and Stamina Cookie.

As for wether or not the new pets are any good I’m the wrong person to ask. I simply don’t play summoner enough to say.

Gix Weapons

The Gix series boasts he highest base stats of all weapons in the game. On initial thoughts, the potential was unnerving but as it turns out it’s actually a strong set of weapons overall.

• Gain a damage bonus that increases in power over time, up to a maximum of 20% at lv3.
• The base power boost is 6%, though it may he higher at higher levels (up to 8% at Lv3)
• Weapons that belong to a given attack type all have a mechanism that will reset the currently gained bonus to base.
• Damage bonus resets to base if a mate item is used. This includes through Automate skills. Takes 70 seconds to fully charge.
  • Sword
  • Wired Lance
  • Partizan
  • Twin Daggers
  • Double Saber
  • Knuckles
  • Katana
• Damage bonus resets to base if you take any damage. Takes 50 seconds to fully charge.
  • Gunslash
  • Dual Blades
  • Assault Rifle
  • Launcher
  • Twin Machinegun
  • Bullet Bow
  • Wand
  • Jetboots
• Damage bonus resets to base if you use any evade skills. Takes 60 seconds to fully charge.
  • Rod
  • Talis
• Swapping weapons will reset the bonus.

These are all conditions that are likely to happen very frequently making it overall impractical to stay at maximum power. That said, due to their high stats their base effectiveness is actually pretty close to Austere (within 2%) and you won’t have to wait too long before the weapon actually out-damages them. You may have to change your game-play approach in order to get the most out of them.

Should you upgrade from Austere? That’s up to you, personally I’d say refrain if you’re really comfortable with your playstyle. If you don’t have an Austere yet then I’d recommend getting one of these over it as they’re almost as strong at their worst and they’re much, much easier to get.

Due to the mechanics of the potential, melee users who only use one weapon type now benefit greatly from having a dedicated healer in the party. Keep the Gix using melee train topped up with Resta and they’ll be able to maintain max power for longer. The value of support-oriented Friend Partners may have increased a tad…

Of course the fact you can’t swap weapons is a bit of a liability if you’re aiming to keep max power up.

Less mainstream combinations can make use of these weapons; such as the self-healing HuSu as well as HuTe. Any melee combination that has access to Resta, Megiverse or some auto-heal that doesn’t consume Mate items essentially. I guess it’s nice they got chucked a bone, eh? Even with a weapon as strong as this behind it though, the likes of HuSu and HuTe would not be able to compete with HuFi for damage, so it’s really not recommended.

 

I still personally think they look like poorly made hunks of plastic…

Boss Weapons

Names are my own interpretations. Let’s just say I’m no translater, so awaiting better names for em.

Gruzoshoes

• Drops from Gruzoras Drago
• Lv3 Potential boosts damage by 6%, reduces incoming damage by 20% and makes you immune to knockbacks.

Deadliogridda

• Drops from Drago Deadlion
• Lv3 Potential boosts damage by 6%, reduces incoming damage by 20% and makes you immune to knockbacks.

Box Duvleos

• Drops from Box Duvals
• Lv3 Potential boosts damage by 6%, reduces incoming damage by 20% and makes you immune to knockbacks.

Kind of a nifty potential. In fact, the wand would have been pretty amazing were it not for the addition of Form Wand with Vegas a while back. If you missed that gravy train however, this would be a solid wand to pick up. Knockback immunity would be pretty handy for Knuckles too, with the damage resist making you that bit more durable while using Limit Break. I’m not familiar enough with Jet Boots to say if the protection from knockback would be that helpful.

Units and Set Bonuses 

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12* units are here and they’re also remarkably underwhelming in terms of stats. We were told a little bit back by the developers that Austere units would not be becoming irrelevant just yet!

Ray Units

• Individually, they provide 50HP, 9PP, 25 all attack, 2% all resist.
• They can be dropped by Profound Darkness Lv76+
• Ray units have a set bonus with Ray weapons, granting you an additional 60 Dexterity…

Gruzoras Unit

• Rear only.
• Can be dropped by Gruzoras Drago.
• Provides 40 T-atk, 15PP, 1% strike resistance and 2% fire resistance.
• Gruzoras’ unit pairs up with the Jetboots it can drop, granting a measly 40 T-def…

Deadlion Unit

• Arm only
• Can be dropped by Dragon Deadlion
• Provides 150HP, 40 S-Atk, 3% Strike Resist, 2% Fire Resist, 1% Tech Resist.
• Set bonus currently unknown.

Gix Unit

• Arm only
• Title reward for clearing Ultimate Amduscia with an S-rank
• Can apparently drop, but source is unknown.
• Provides 50HP, 10PP, +30 all attack.
• The Gix unit can pair up with any Gix weapon to give you 20 Dex and 2% Light and Dark resistance…

What’s with these limp set bonuses? I know they don’t want to make Austere irrelevant yet but jeez this is treading just a tad too carefully! The bonuses are so bad they may as well not exist. The base stat bonuses they provide are actually pretty alright, with the Ray set being particularly decent.

The main draw to 12* units is of course the ability to socket L / Skill Rings into them, allowing you to effectively equip 5 rings at once (including your R/Ring). While an alluring prospect, it does mean actually obtaining a full set of 12* units, which means you’ll need to re-affix the lot of them. Add in that you’re also losing a potentially decent set bonus and the whole thing is a lot less attractive. It may be better to hold out for a bigger upgrade if you’re already sporting a good set of units (Saiki, Orbit, Austere and a select few others). Again, like with Gix weapons, if you lack such gear then go for it.

So yeah generally an underwhelming update for those ready for the next tier of gear.I mean we don’t really have a new tier of content to use this gear on anyway, but that hasn’t stopped them before!

Thoughts 

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So yeah, overall it’s a fun enough quest. I like the approach they took with this one it’s just a shame the gear in it is considered underwhelming for those at the upper end of the gear spectrum. The enemies are fun enough, the bosses are particularly decent.Hopefully the quest doesn’t suffer the same fate as Riding Quests and end up near impossible to get runs going in the near future. However, the quest isn’t so difficult that you couldn’t just get a group of 3 or more people together to get a good clear. That’s at least one positive note with regard to the quest’s overall lack of difficulty.

Let me know if any information is wrong in this post. There was still some unknown stuff as of writing this, so as said at the start the post’s content may change.

TGS Day 4 Trailer Analysis

The 4th day of TGS saw the reveal of a couple of new trailers for content coming up in October. I’ll be going over the bits I’ve got any thoughts on. The complete summarized rundown is on Bumped as always. Despite there being only two trailers (of the main things, anyway) there’s quite a lot to go through.

The Trailers

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Just including the main two  trailer that will form the bulk of this post in this section. There’s a third more minor one I’ll go over at the end.

Early October Update:

Late October Update:

PA/Tech Customizations

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While only the usual handful they add in these kinds of updates I think they’re an interesting handful in my opinion.

Sacrifice Bite Type Zero:

Speeds up the photon art and strengthens normal attacks. It seems like normal attacks gain an extended photon blade during the attack animation, though it’s hard to tell from the demo if this actually increases range or if it’s just for show. It would have been nice if the demo had used it on an enemy that didn’t have super-armor frames on to see how the full charge looks now.

If it does significantly increase normal attack range, then this is a good buff for swords in general as their normal attacks always had plenty of power but surprisingly small reach for how large the weapon is. This would also greatly help with the PP issues that sword can have, as you should more reliably tag enemies for PP recovery as long as the buff is up.

Straight Charge Type Zero:

Hold down the button to go sailing through enemies. It drains PP as you’re channeling it, so it’ll possibly last as long as your PP does. It’s one of those silly looking customizations that I can’t help but like.

Strike Gust Type Zero:

Kick up and up and up and up. Holding the button down extends the length of the rising part of the attack, which could be very irritating for other party members.

Parallel Slide Type Zero

Finally you can be like Giliam in the original PSO2 OP movie. Aside that, having a controllable high-mobility PA on Rifles might be interesting. Might look a bit derpy on non-cast characters, mind.

Sharp Bomber Type Zero

No longer launches you backwards and greatly increases its power when charged. Bullet Bows are still lacking in good AoE attacks, so this should be a welcome addition for those specializing in them.

Safoie Type Zero

Moves you towards the target before casting and is more powerful when charged. That’s about it, not a hugely interesting customization on the surface of it. However, it may be useful for melee-Techers as a gap-closing skill as presumably the gap-closing part won’t require you to charge the PA. If it does then it’s a bit less useful for that.

Ramegid Type Zero

Surrounds you with dark orbs which deal pulsing damage to enemies on contact. Could be a interesting addition to a melee Techer’s arsenal, though it depends on how long the orbs persist for. The orbs do flinch enemies, so it may also be a handy protective barrier against trash mobs for all casting types.

I think Ramegid and Sacrifice Bite got the most interesting changes, because both of them will potentially have a large impact on game-play. It’ll be more clear when these are released and we can experiment with them.

New Skills: Summoner Quality of Life.

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Summoner will be gaining two new skills; Share Assist and Long Distance Love (daww).

Share Assist appears to allow support effects to transfer between pets when you swap pets or weapons. Not sure how big an issue this was for Summoners, but it may mean you won’t have to re-cast support techs as much.

Long Distance Love is probably the most major one, as it allows you to initiate Pet Sympathy without having to recall your pet to you to get it inside Shifta/Resta range.

Another major quality of life fix is your pet’s HP and status effects will display on the palette. I’m not sure why this wasn’t a feature from the beginning, as you’d think this is the kind of thing that’d come up during play-testing. It’s great that they’re finally implementing it, but all the same it’s baffling that it took them this long to do it.

I’m not sure if this is the “Skill re-balance” they were hinting towards on the long term schedule, but if it is I’m kind of disappointed. Not because these are bad changes because Summoner needed some help and I like what they’ve proposed. It’s just the name indicates that there’d be changes to most if not all classes, not just the one. We’ll see I guess.

Evolved Summoner Pets

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The three basic pets; Wanda, Torim and Ceri will be gaining upgraded versions of themselves.

Jinga, the upgraded Wanda. It appears to gain a zig-zag motion, possibly extending the width of its dashing attack.

Aero, the upgraded Torim. Aero Spiral seems to have a larger range than Torim Spiral.

Popple, the upgraded Ceri. Popple-plode seems to have a larger radius than Ceri-plode.

Beyond that, it’s not really known how these pets are superior to the old versions. I’m not sure if you can just consume the upgraded egg or if you have to feed it to the base version to “evolve” it. However the demo shows them using a 7* Jinga egg to upgrade a 6* wanda, so it may have similar restrictions to the pet-ability swap/rarity upgrade mechanic. That is to say; you may need an egg of equal or greater rarity. If this is true, it’s going to be awkward to upgrade any 13* pets you currently have.

Skill Ring Update

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There’s a couple of parts to this; one is the addition of 4 new rings to go with the addition of Caves and Tundra as gathering spots. Gonna go over the new rings here, with descriptions sourced from Bumped’s post:

L/Jet Boots Tech Arts SC

• Reduces charge times when you combo from a PA to a Technic.

I can’t see this being terribly useful for BoHu or really in general. Seems like a waste of space, but maybe Jet Boot mains can correct me on this.

L / Air Reversal

• Allows you to perform an air reversal in the air.

This could be really useful. While Just Reversal is trivial enough with practice, its main weakness is it leaves you vulnerable to being juggled to death. This ring should prevent that, by turning a knock-back into i-frames, which mechanically should greatly increase your survivability as long as you’re paying attention.

L / Slow Dive Roll

• Extends the duration by slowing the Dive Roll speed.

I’m not sure of the use of this ring, unless it’s just to extend the i-frames on Dive Roll. Lord knows Dive Roll needs all the help it can get…

L / Step Jump

• Increases movement speed if you jump during the [Step] action.

The video demonstration shows it’s a fairly large increase in movement speed. Could this be the return of step-jump for faster movement over long distances? Hopefully not, but the increase in melee mobility is always welcome  It’d be a fair boon if this ring allowed you go skip straight to maximum running speed upon landing, mind! Unfortunately the demo doesn’t show this either way.

Ring Selling/Trading

The other side of this is you can buy and sell skill rings, which is interesting. I’m not sure what kind of restrictions might be put in place on them, if any. This could work out great for players who are willing to spend the extra time gathering for profit and for those players who just plain don’t want to gather. Given the cost of creating and upgrading rings however, it remains to be seen what kind of profit margin people might be able to make with this.

To The Moon! -Story Board Chapter 5

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Rejoice, those who despise Episode 4 for going to Earth because we’re heading back to something resembling the science fiction setting again. The next chapter of the story quest is set on a moon base, where Hitsugi is currently being held captive. Battle your way past Mother Cluster apostles such as Phul and Och, possibly Kohri based on the data-mining and who knows who else!

The moon base itself doesn’t seem like a terribly complicated map, given it’s just a straight corridor. That said, I guess it’s reasonable for a field that’s only going to be available in a story quest. The background music incorporates Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”.

The quest will see Mother’s face finally revealed. I’m surprised they showed it in a teaser trailer really, as I’d figure this kind of thing would be better saved for the actual quest itself. Still, it does confirm that data-mining was right about her appearance at least. She also doesn’t seem terribly perturbed that her sworn enemies are bashing her door down…

Later on in the month, additional story board events will be added including a fight between Huey and Phaleg and finally re-uniting with Matoi.

This reminds me, I am actually considering doing story summary posts now thanks to story translation efforts by multiple people. More details on that when the time comes.

Ultimate Amduscia: New Info

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The second trailer showed some new bits about Ultimate Amduscia.

Quest Teleporter.

Boooo. The inclusion of a teleporter is bad news in my opinion, because with it the quest will likely never get started once interest wanes over time. Initially it won’t be a problem because people will be running them a lot, but let’s see if that’s still the case 3 months down the line.

Presumably they felt the need to include this because they wanted to prevent the return of Anga farming. By syncing up all the players at the start, you can put Anga at the end of the quest, making sure you can’t just shortcut your way to it. The downside however will be you can’t join the quest once its begun, nor can anyone join you after you begin it. The result is if your MPA isn’t full you get to sit there and wait, which is something you don’t suffer from for the other Ultimate Quests. Good luck getting randoms to agree to go in with lower numbers! Anyone who’s had issues getting Riding Quests, Challenge Quests or the recent Odin Limited Quest started should know what I’m worried about.

The Quest Itself

It looks like it might be a fixed-layout quest, which I don’t mind. It does run counter to the spirit of the other Ultimate Quests however which functioned more like free fields and it may have the unfortunate effect of making the quest much more repetitive. However, a fixed layout does give them the potential to engineer more interesting encounters than a random number generator could create, so I’m interested to see how it all works out. Curiously, if you follow the trailer you’ll note that they’re at varying point totals at different parts of the map between obviously different runs. Maybe the route through the quest is randomized even if the map isn’t?

The main enemies are weak to lightning element. 

Much like the other Ultimate Quests, you’ll need to amass around 2000 points to clear. It seems the encounters during the quest are randomized enough, though the demo seems to show that a boss encounter happens in the same place (the center of the map) with Deadlion, Gilzoras Drago and the new Anga Fundarge. These all seem to occur around the 1200 point mark. It may pick a random boss to have as the final encounter in the quest if defeating it earns the rest of the points, which should be OK. I don’t think we’ll be in danger of people abandoning the quest if Anga doesn’t spawn as long as the collection files are relevant or their drops are decent.

New Gear

Speaking of drops, this is no doubt what a lot of people were most eager to find out. What kind of gear can we get?

As was expected , the quest will come with a new collection file with which you can obtain the “Gicks” series of weapons. Though along with these, apparently other 13* weapons will also drop from the quest.

Gicks Sword comes with a rather impressive 1333 attack, though it’s unknown exactly how much of that is made up by affixes. If we assume that Deadlion Soul comes with the standard +35 S-atk then its +50 attack with Ability 3, bringing it down to an estimated 1283 attack which is still huge. Austere Calibur in comparison has 1161 S-atk at +0, so its looking like these will be making the Austere series obsolete if they come with a solid potential.

12* Units

After many years of 11* units, we’re finally making the transition to 12*. It appears that there’ll only be 1 complete set and a bunch of boss parts for others. While their stats are unknown, the blue-wing unit appears to start with 225 S-Def which puts it on par with the Tagami units if so. This potentially makes Saiki and Austere units superior for defense in terms of raw stats, but of course we don’t know what set bonuses they may come with or what inherent bonuses they may have. What we do know if that even if they’re statistically weaker they come with one very important mechanic that makes them blow all 11* units out of the water; you can slot L / skill rings into them.

Take one ring, 100,000 Meseta and 1 Lambda Grinder to fuse a ring with your unit. Once you fuse the ring, the ring is consumed and you won’t be able to get it back. Note that this only works with Left rings and it will also bind the unit to you.

This is a game-changer in terms of the builds that people could go with, as it allows you to essentially equip up to 4 left rings at once! The big issue is going to be that you’ll need to do an additional upgrade step every time they release a new unit set now, which will be irritating as you’ll have to re-gather and grind up a new ring each time. Though I guess the ability to buy and sell rings may help in that regard…

As an aside, the blue units appear to be Ray units. They’re similar to Ray weapons in appearance and have “ray” in their names. As far as I know it isn’t confirmed if they’ll have a set bonus with Ray weapons, but even if they do the presence of the Gicks series may topple the urge to wear them together…

Phantasy Star Universe Part 2

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Alright, there’s one more trailer to go over quickly! The 2nd part of the Phantasy Star Universe anniversary crossover thingamajig was revealed.

This time, the focus is on the Phantasy Star Portable games mostly, also featuring a shirtless Howzer because why not. Shirtless Howzer is kinda awesome to be honest, he reminds me a bit of Liquid Ocelot  You’ll be able to get Helga, Vivienne and Emilia costumes and accessories. Howzer and Helga’s costumes will be layered wear.

This time, the lobby NPCs will be Emilia and Vivienne. They’ll come with the usual Client Orders, obtainable Partner Cards and  obtainable 13* weapons, with Clarita Visas NT and Vivienne. Both weapons will have editable photon colours.

What’s new and fairly interesting about this pair is that they both seem to come with their own fully voiced cutscenes. I’m not sure if these will be special story board events or what triggers them. I’m interested to see what they have to say, mind, though I’m not expecting them to do something silly like trying to make a canonical link between PSU and PSO2…

Anyway, looks like that’ll be all for the Phantasy Star Universe anniversary. Kind of a shame we didn’t see anything Laia turn up but that’s how it goes. I originally thought there were going to be three parts based on the fact that we had three major characters on the promotional artwork, but there’s nothing on the schedule for it. Kind of a blow for fans of the Guardians Formal outfit.

That’s finally all I have to write about! Long post, but there was a lot of stuff they revealed on the 4th day of the TGS. As far as I know there’s nothing else to announce, but i could be wrong. Let me know in the comments if I got anything wrong or if you have any observations of your own you’d like to add. Thanks for reading!

Upcoming Event: Famitsu Cup

The Tokyo Game Show has seen a few tidbits released for PSO2, including a couple of collaborations no one cares about (alright, the Persona 5 collaboration has stirred up a bit of a reaction..) and the announcement of a classic Phantasy Star event, the Famitsu Cup. This event will be a full on web-event and is starting some time in November. Reposting the trailer:

That thing that looks like a failed attempt at a 90s console mascot is Famitsu’s own mascot “Necky”. Unfortunately you’re presumably going to have to interact with it during the event.

Details are a little thin on the event for now, but it does seem that it’ll involve the gathering system at least. Gathering items net you “Gabasu Tickets”, though it doesn’t give any indication what these tickets are for. If it’s always 4 per gathering attempt, that is quite a lot of tickets you could acquire if you have a large number of alts…

Special Mining Base Defense

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The Famitsu Cup will come with a slight new twist on the all-star style of event quest by setting it in Mining Base: Invasion’s map; an Emergency Quest named “Challenges from Necky”. You’ll need to fend off Gal Gryphon, Kuronites, Lilipa Mechs and even Aberrations. We’ve only been shown a tiny snippet of it, but it seems hectic enough.

Update: As pointed out, it’s Invasion’s map not Despairs. Guess I’m the one despairing.

Aside the towers being threatened by enemies they’ve never seen before, it seems at least one new mechanic is added as well in the form of a barrier. This barrier seems to be protecting AIS Exoda as they charge their cannons, which makes it a significant threat.

I’m pretty interested in how this quest will play out, as I’ve pondered before how some non-darker enemies might function mechanically in a tower-defense style quest. Barbarillipas for example could be pretty destructive if ignored, what with their very long range and constant attacks. Gryphon tornadoes, lightning and general charging about could be tricky to deal with. Falka Leopard and Zeta Guranz with their huge amount of missiles and potential for collateral damage (especially Zeta Guranz’ spinning laser attack) present a potentially interesting positioning problem. I also can’t help but ponder what might happen if the attacking waves end up turning on each other (as Darkers and non-Darkers will fight each other) but I kind of doubt they will due to how the aggro mechanics work; it can be hard enough for a player to peel mobs off the towers and they do a lot more damage.

The quest will apparently award collaboration items.

So far, that’s all the information about the event that I’m aware of. Not much to go on, really, but at least the emergency quest looks like it’ll be fun. Kind of hoping the rest of the event isn’t based on gathering items, mind…

45th Live Broadcast

In hours of the day I’d like to pretend don’t exist, the 45th Broadcast took place. In this post I’ll go over some of the stuff I found interesting and as always you can find a complete summary of things over at Bumped. It was also the last time we will see the likes of Ichitaro. He will be missed.

Some other people are leaving too but who cares about them.

Trailers

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Las Vegas Update Part 3: Including seasonal Bingo (boasting a 20SG reward) and the ability to bribe the Profound Darkness to show up… Paid shortcut to Austere weapons eh? Hm. Also includes upgraded versions of Gal Griffon weapons via Collect File and the next part of the story. Och Miller gets her purple demon out for us and Huey shows up more bad-ass than ever.

Due early September.

Las Vegas Update Part 4: Orga Cats shows up along with their mousy friend that no one cares about. The audience flips out over Phaleg’s dress and eyestyle, which no one is going to be able to afford ever. Giliam fucks up again.

Due late September.

 

Long Term Schedule

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Gonna do a rundown and post brief thoughts on the new long-term schedule, at least on what I can comment on. Bullet-point translations taken from Bumped.

Autumn

New Ultimate Quest – Guess.

Episode 4 Chapter 5

More PA & Technic Customizations – The cynic in me is expecting maybe one tech and three Photon Arts much like last time. Still, nice that they’re still planning on doing stuff with this system. 

PA and Skill Balance Adjustments – Interesting. Genuinely curious to see what they’re going to do with this. Maybe Gunner and Bouncer will get the attention they’ve been needing since Episode 3?

Pet Egg Added

Collaboration Interlocking WEB Event – More Bingo! More Dudu christmas! I have no idea what the collaboration might be.

PSU 10th Anniversary Project Part 2 – Was sort of hoping the next event would be PSU themed seeing as PSO got an event. Still kinda glad to hear that there will be more to this, as while what they showed was cool it still felt like it was lacking a certain… something. Also showing Laia and not having Laia there was kinda mean.

Famous Game Collaboration Scratch

Seasonal Franca’s Cafe – Franka magically able to move her entire business at will. Either photons or the power of capitalism.

New Team Room

PSU Anniversary

Winter

Episode 4 Chapter 6

New Type Grinding System Expansion – Curious what this could be about. Maybe it’ll include Units?

Appraisal Shop Expansion – Presumably the bulk untekking that people have been wanting for forever. 

Pet Egg Added

12 Player Raid Boss – The tradition of the Christmas raid seems set to continue. Presumably something phantom related, but there’s little in the data to suggest what this could be (unless it’s DPP1 of course). Doubtless it’ll become clearer as the story progresses. 

SG Scratch Volume 2 – :( Hope I got the costume I want before this happens! Then a brand new round of pain and disappointment awaits those that end up wanting something in the next batch. Personally, I hope it sucks!

Famous Game Collaboration Scratch

Seasonal Franca’s Cafe – It’s a Christmas miracle. 

Notably no new fields (aside Ultimate) and, honestly not a lot of tangible mew content in general for the rest of the year. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some interesting stuff coming up as I noted, but given it’s meant to cover half a year it just feels a little thin to me. Guess that’s par for the course though. These days I don’t really mind if I run out of things I want to do in PSO2 as I can just play something else meanwhile.

Least the story seems set to move at a good pace.

New Time Attack

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The next time attack will be set in Tokyo. Unlike recently released Time Attack Quests this one is not just a kill-fest. Nothing wrong with a straight up kill-fest of course, just wouldn’t be interesting if that was the only new type of Time Attack they did. It releases with the late September update.

Players are instead greeted with something akin to an obstacle course, where they’re going to have to utilize the run-boosters and platforming skills in order to get the shortest time possible. Of course there are enemies to slay along the way and potential mayhem awaits at the end of the quest with Ghidoran, T-54 and a slew of other enemies.

Also unlike recent Time Attacks, enemies do actually give EXP it seems.

While it looks like they put a fair amount of effort into this quest, I’m not really looking forward to doing platforming in PSO2 again. I spent enough time falling off the platforming section in Amduscia (more-so since they buffed running speed!)  to learn that platforming in this game feels stiff and awkward. That said, the run-boosters do standardize your motion so perhaps it won’t suffer from the same pitfalls that regular platforming does. We’ll see when it’s released I guess. Overall, it’s good to see them trying more unusual things out.

In terms of if it’s worth running? That’s going to be impossible to tell until it’s out. As it stands though, it won’t be because getting your weekly Time Attacks done is much more efficient if you just run Harukotan. This doesn’t look like a quest you can clear in a comparable amount of time, so I’m not sure how they’d give incentive for people to run it.

Phantasy Star Universe 10th Anniversary

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It’s great to see this game getting some love instead of the original PSO for a change, however much of the meat of it is going to be behind Arks Scratch it appears.

As datamining found earlier, you’ll be able to get Ethan’s Illuminus outfit and Mirei’s dress. Surprises include Kakwane Suit and something from Project CUTE. Seems Ethan and Karen’s original costumes will be getting a revival as well.

Ethan and Karen are set to appear in the lobby as temporary NPCs. You know the drill by now; run their Client Orders and get their Partner Cards. Additionally, you can get Huge Cuter, Daggers of Serafi NT and Crea Doubles as 13* weapons. Datamining suggests at least two of these are obtainable by completing their Client Orders but this hasn’t been said officially.

Kakwane is watching…

So far, that’s it. There is however a part 2 to this on the Long-Term schedule, which hopefully does something a little more interesting. Otherwise for what’s meant to be celebrating the 10 year  anniversary of a previous game in their own series this feels barely more than a generic collaboration. I’d at least like to see Laia or something, though not sure how they’d pull her off with the lack of Beasts as a race. Ear accessory perhaps? Along with some unique face model…

The first part of the Phantasy Star Universe 10th Anniversary will go up on August 31st.

Ultimate Amduscia

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Yes, they finally revealed it. We first saw snippets of the area in the data way back in February 2015. To give some perspective, this was before Ultimate Lilipa was even out!

It’s due for release sometime in October.

In terms of appearance, it does somewhat fly in the face of recent mining which suggested the area would resemble Caves 3 from PSO. Instead, it seems like it’s set deep underground in crystalline caverns. The color scheme seems to change dynamically which is pretty nice, though its hard to tell how nice the area looks from the low-res video. If it’s anything to go by though, those boulders look horrendous…

Enemies

Amduscia’s native fauna seems to have become crystalline, some even more so than before. The Dinians themselves have been entirely consumed by crystals. They seem to have the trademark aggression of Ultimate enemies, though they seem to be less aggressive than the pre-nerf Naberius ones. Dinians still seem susceptible to being stun-locked to death.

Taken some shots from the trailer to have a look at the various enemies shown. As usual, it’s from a recorded live-stream so the quality is going to be muddy.

A Dinian that decided that one wand was not enough.

A bunch of badass bow-wielding Dinians lookin like theyre about to rain down arrows on the nonbelievers! It’s a shame you don’t see more spawns like this.

Ult variant of Sil Dinian, with a pretty nice looking sword.

 

This Dilandarl seems to have asymmetrical arms. Perhaps they can transform, allowing it to have swords or a lasergun or goodness knows what.

An Ultimate variant of a Pendran

 

Darker Aberrations show up of course, with Goldrahdas being the most visible in the trailer. You can however see the tell-tale red blades and ground effects of Luda Sorcerer which confirms that an ultimate variant of those will be showing up. Again, it’s too blurry to get a good visual on them from this trailer.

Box Deuxbles

Finally, we get to see what the heck the “Dragonmizer” might even be. Looks pretty cool, though it seems to lack the transforming ability that Tranmizer does. Not too surprised as er.. flesh and bones don’t really work that way.

I don’t really get its name at all…Aside the “box” part referring to its boxing glove like arms.

Drago Deadlion

True to its name, this Ultimate variant of Dragon Ex has a lion’s mane. It uses much of the same attacks that Dragon Ex does though it doesn’t have the transforming wings anymore, instead it wields a very large lance-like thing which seems to grant it enormous reach. Its sword-stab into the ground now creates a large frontal-cone AoE attack.

Gilzoras Drago

The ultimate variant of Quartz Dragon and it’s the bling-iest dragon yet. Adourned in gemstones and shards of gold, it’s a fairly shiny creature!

It looks distinctly more like a traditional image of a European dragon than a wyvern, with its sizable fore-arms and long neck. Much like Quartz, it boasts a large number of swooping and laser-based attacks. It seems that its lightning crystal array now fires in front of it in a large area rather than just immediately around it.

So yeah, it seems that much like Ultimate Lilipa that Amduscia will have two bosses instead of one. Unlike Lilipa, I imagine it will have Box Deubles as its mini-boss, though they usually spawn in pairs or triples when that many players are around. Either way, there are three new enemies that are likely to have new Soul affixes, which may mean the long awaited R-Atk+35 PP+3 soul may finally arrive.

Anga Fundarge!?

What if Fang Banther and Anga Fundarge got together and had a baby? Your sick fanfiction fetishes aside, the new variant of Anga boasts a large array of new attacks and is a lot more nimble than its old self.

In terms of plot significance, as Anga Fundarge is essentially the harbinger of the Profound Darkness and the vehicle through which it spreads its corruption this could only mean that at some point in the story it’ll become active again. Right now, the Profound Darkness is stuck in a time loop, I believe owing to the influence by Persona and Xion. Perhaps this will be related to certain events speculated upon in the previous data-mining post?

Also have to wonder what it’s going to drop. Ares weapons are a little out-dated now…

So yeah, Ultimate Amduscia looks like it’ll be hectic fun. Aside some enemies that have yet to be revealed, there’s the big question of “how will they incentivise running it?”. Stones like with previous Ultimate Quests seems unlikely with the arrival of Collection Files, but Collection Files are temporary while the stone exchange is permanent…

There’s also the question of who is it aimed at? Is it aimed at players who are loaded up with 13* weapons or is it for anyone? Is it going to introduce the next tier of gear or add yet another stepping stone towards Austere?

For that matter, will some kind of rejuvenation effort happen for the other Ultimate Quests? They kind of need it if they want them to stay at least somewhat relevant.

Also with that revealed, I guess we’re waiting on whatever crazy thing is found in the data next for us to speculate on for the next year and a half! Maybe some Ultimate Harukotan enemies will show up next and then finally appear sometime after Episode 5 is well underway.

44th Broadcast Writeup

The 44th broadcast happened today so let’s get this opinions machine rolling again.

Bumped has its bullet point write-up here as always. As usual, I’ll generally be sharing my opinions on the stuff I care about as well as a gathering spot for the various videos captured from the stream.

GODZILLA

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Las Vegas Update Trailer 1:

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Arks League

Seems to be a new ranking system in which you’re matched up with 19 other players. If you score well within your league, you can earn prizes like Stargem Tickets and Tri-boosters.

It’s nice that at least casual players will stand a hope in hell’s chance of actually competing as opposed to a ship-wide ranking. That said, I’m curious if there’s any matchmaking involved or if it’s just completely random.

SG Scratch Recycle

So this was finally shown and no surprise it’s a disappointment. For one thing it requires 40 Stargem Scratch items to be exchanged, which is a huge number of items. Secondly, the selection of items you can exchange for doesn’t include every item in the scratch. In particular, you can only exchange for the default variations of the Dark Falz costumes excluding the battle damaged Apprentice costume. So if you want any color variation or that, you’re still at the mercy of RNG.

To illustrate, you will need 3600 Stargems total (80 * 40), which means you need to be earning 21 Stargems per day (153 days until the scratch expires, so 3600/21). If you’re not, you don’t stand a hope of using this exchange unless they get very liberal with Stargems down the line.

As someone who has been wanting these costumes for nearly 4 years, this system continues to be an insult.

Chat Commands

Chat commands to change your facial expression and your fashion preset will be added. Not sure why it took them this long to add these, really.

New story stuff

Seems we’ll be learning more about “Earth Guides”, the resistance force against Mother Cluster. New Unite E-Trials will appear on Earth featuring members of the Earth Guides battling against Phantoms.

During the events, we meet yet another Mother Cluster Apostle, this time an Apostle of Fire named “Phaleg”. She’s demonstrated to have considerable power, which surprises the player even after the tough enemies they’ve had to deal with in the past. Not sure why we needed another apostle introduced so soon seeing as we’ve barely gotten to know the 5 they introduced all at once last time.

Bikini Scratch

Normally I wouldn’t write about this kinda stuff but it’s interesting because the three costumes on the right are the first conversions of old outfits into the Layered wear system. So it seems they are willing to do this after all, which naturally makes me ponder what other outfits are due for conversion.

Las Vegas Part 2

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The two main things of note with this update are the new pet and selection of skill rings.

New Pet – Lucari- er Synchro

The main gimmick of this pet is essentially Tech-Arts, in that the pet’s power rises as you combo different PAs together.

Might be interesting, I just personally have no interest in playing Summoner myself so I’ll likely end up sticking to easy-mode Wanda whenever I’m on that alt.

Skill Rings

These are the skill rings shown so far (with credit to Bumped for the names).

• L / Bullet Bow Homing
• L / JB Elemental Keep
• L / Standing Sign
• L / A Launcher Mode
• L  / Short Mirage
• L / Wand E Change
• L / Mate Lovers
• R / J Reversal Cover

Ranger finally gets some skill rings!

Another Launcher Mode changes Launcher’s basic attack to be like that of PSU Grenade Launcher weapons. Not sure why you’d do that seeing as I’m fairly sure that would make the weapon much more inconenient to use. Standing Sign on the other hand shows an effect when Standing Snipe is active which… why is this even a ring? Sure, it’s useful but this is a basic gameplay feature they’re relegating to something you have to grind for. I genuinely feel bad for Rangers right now unless those rings have some other bonuses.

Bullet Bow Homing sounds like it might change up Bullet Bow gameplay a bit, depends on how accurate it is.

Mate Lovers has a kinky name, but it’s hard to guess exactly what this ring will do. May be use-time, may be boosted heals, may change the animation, it could be all the above and other things I’m too dumb to think of.

Wand Element Change could be potentially interesting, enabling Wand users to get away with just having a single Wand rather than a rainbow selection of them. Kinda sucks for those players who already gathered a rainbow selection, but at least they have a ring-slot freed up.

Rider Quest

Kill enemies to get points, collect emblems to get bonus points. Try to get as high a score as you can within the time limit!

Enemies will still reward drops and exp, however all drops will be pooled into an end-crystal like with the current Odin Limited Quest and Mining Base Defence. The higher the score, the better your rare drop rate will be.

An emergency trial can occur during the quest which is essentially a giant Independence Day reference. Destroy the UFO’s shields before it annihilates the city!

This is a new type of quest which is separate from the Free Field. I don’t know what kind of limitations there’ll be on it if there are any. There is however at least a Klotho Client Order associated with it, though it only pays out a measly 10,000 Meseta. Sugar daddy letting me down.

Las Vegas Field

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Las Vegas will first be appearing in story mode, which is slightly unusual for the release of a field but they did do it before with Kuron in Episode 3.

Aside the verticality of the map, the free field seems to be mechanically identical to the Tokyo field in that enemies are pointed out on the radar and you need to grind out quest points to clear. This may, much like Tokyo, make the field tedious to complete solo due to the smaller spawn sizes. The lower point requirement may ablate this somewhat, I also ponder if the boss may be guaranteed to spawn at a certain point quota as with recent event quests.

The map looks alright enough, albeit embarrassingly low poly in places. The most striking thing is how small it feels while riding around on the Rideroid vehicle. On foot, the map feels spacious enough but in the air it ends up feeling really small. It does also seem like it won’t be using the old map-generation system present in other areas.

Other Trailers

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Es Update: Starring the new character EDGELord and a badly drawn weaponoid made by someone who has never seen a woman in real life or has no understanding of anatomy at all (Whipblade Paratizel). Some pretty dang nicely drawn ones in there as well.

 

Arks Festival Items: WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB

 

Live Concerts: Featuring Dark Falz Loser as an old woman firing lasers into the Arks Shopping mall.

I’m afraid this was the surprise trailer, so no grand surprises to talk about this time.

 

Question and Answers

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Once again, thanks to Kami_Pepe on twitter for posting summaries of these. These are interpretations based on machine translation, so please please get in touch if you can provide something more accurate or if I’ve gotten something horribly wrong.

Q：武器迷彩を複数装備できるようになる？
A：元々武器迷彩自体がイレギュラーでしてシステム上難しいので今後も絶対にないです。

Q: Why can’t we have multiple weapon camos at once?

A: The original implementation of the weapon camo system was clumsy, so we can’t do this for now.

This is reminding a bit of the problem they had back in PSU when they wanted to expand the number of Photon Arts a character could learn but couldn’t due how the game was programmed. One day, Sega will learn how to do basic software engineering I’m sure…

Q：一括鑑定できるようにしてくれない？
A：前々から試行錯誤してまして、早くても年末や年明けになりそうです

Q: Is it possible you could allow for bulk weapon appraisal?

A: It’s something we’re currently doing a trial and error approach for, we may have something for the end of the year or early next year.

Nice to hear I guess, though I’m not sure how they’d handle the element portion unless people would be fine having bulk appraised weapons all having the same element. For the most part, I would be anyway.

Q：ラスベガス実装にともなってロケとか行かれたのですか？
A：行ってないですよ　Googleストリートビューを元にしました

Q: Did you go to Las Vegas to do research for the new field?

A: No, we just used Google Street View.

Astounding.

43rd Broadcast Thoughts

As always, you can read the bullet-point rundown on Bumped here. I’m just gonna be sharing my thoughts on any particular part I feel anything about. So I’m not going to be talking about PSO2es and the additional lolis it’s gaining or the Anime character CD. That said, still quite a lot I want to talk about so strap in and get comfortable if you want to come along for the whole ride.

To start off, here’s a trailer for content coming up in July

Includes a new casino game,  yet more Gunner themed outfits and this year’s Beach Wars quest which sees the return of Emperappy as well as a titled Chrome Dragon as its end-boss.

Casino Coins for Star Gems

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What’s that? 1 Star Gem per day isn’t enough for you? Fear not, as you’ll soon be able to buy Star Gems with Casino Coins for the following amounts:

• 5 Star Gems for 5000CC
• 10 Star Gems for 9,800CC
• 20 Star Gems for 19,400CC

So you’ll be able to have a free roll at the Star Gem scratch for the low low price of 77,600 Casino Coins! Who knows, you might even get Casino Coins as a prize from the Scratch! You’re always wanted some of those!

So yeah, fairly obviously this is meant to be a bonus and not so you can use the Casino to gamble your way to victory on the SG scratch. That said, it still feels like a steep price for what it is, but I admit that even I’d be tempted to drop excess coins on it unless some good rare-boss triggers came up.

As an aside, in late July it seems you’ll be getting 1 more Stargem per account per day for simply logging into PSO2es. So they do seem intent on adding extra ways for players to earn gems, so over time the scratch may become more viable for free players. Right now the odds are still stacked against you if you want a particular outfit from the scratch.

 

Final Fantasy 14 Collab Stuff

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Miqo’tes, Relic Weapons and more!

Most of the cosmetics stuff looks great and I’m sure this is going to be a popular scratch when it’s out. Again, it’s a bit of a shame there was no female armor among this lot but that would have been a mere cherry on top of a great cake for me.

The Limited Quest

The center of this update is going to be a quest set in the Ruins that’s essentially another all-star dungeon-style quest with set encounters. Featured enemies include Dark Falz Angel, Anga Fundarge and Guar Zigmorde among many others. Odin awaits at the very end of the quest.

Enemy drops are all pooled into a crystal at the end of the quest, much like with the recent Easter quest and the Mining Base Defense quests. That means you must clear the run in order to get any items at all.

Odin

Odin himself works much like he does in FF14, with all his AOE and spear mechanics in place. He also retains his Zantetsuken ability, which is an outright DPS race. If the MPA fails the DPS race and Odin gets to use Zantetsuken at all, the quest immediately fails.

Weakbullet is jammed on Odin, which is fast becoming the standard for PSO2 bosses it seems like. Really if they feel that strongly about Weak Bullet I’m not sure why they don’t just give the skill itself a direct nerf, except perhaps because they’d need to rebalance a bunch of existing content which expects Weakbullet at full strength (such as Magatsu).

Healing effects are also reduced during the fight, which I assume is an attempt to make the encounter feel a bit closer to how it was in Final Fantasy 14. If it’s just using the same method they use for Extreme Quests however the likes of Megiverse and HP-steal weapons shouldn’t be affected. Automate Users may want to be aware, however.

I’m really not a fan of the way this guest is engineered. Because the quest fails when Zantetsuken fires and because items are only handed out for clearing you will lose an entire quest’s worth of drops. Given this is a DPS check right at the end of the quest, for me this seems far too punishing. My worry is if the DPS check is too brutal, then after a short while it’ll be extremely difficult to actually get a run going at all as people furiously check each other’s gear and quit out of panic.

Could you blame people if they did that though? It’s not a short quest, so embarking with a group you know might fail the DPS check is a potential complete waste of your time and boosters! You will gain no items for doing so and you will make no progress with Collection Files either. If the DPS check is brutal, this is a disaster waiting to happen. If it’s forgiving however, it might be alright. The encounter looks fun enough without the DPS check. Yeah, you may argue what’s the point in a DPS check you barely notice as why have the check at all and I actually agree with you! Mostly because I detest DPS checks, however. For PSO2, this normally boils down to “how many people can get away with carrying the entire MPA”, as in how many people with the optimal builds and great gear are needed before the quest isn’t doomed from the start. Or I suppose the inverse question would be “how many people in terrible gear can the DPS check tolerate”?

In short, Sega better be careful about the design of this quest as could create an extremely toxic environment with the wrong numbers.

Comes complete with FATE JOINED message. FATEs are essentially FFXIV’s equivalent of Emergency Trials, so it’s a nice touch.

Odin will also spawn outside of the quest in regular Free Fields. Not sure if his Zentetsuken remains in-tact and I certainly hope it doesn’t retain its quest-fail mechanic! As someone pointed out on Bumped, it sure would suck to spawn into a map where a random Odin somewhere in the area uses Zentetsuken, resulting in an instant quest fail the moment you warp down there. I mean even if it doesn’t fail, getting randomly one-shot because an Odin across the map got to use the move would still be very irritating.

Weapons

The relic weapons themselves are going to be camos, not drops. There is going to be a weapon collection for this quest however and it’s a new weapon series called the “Aura” series.

What’s interesting about these weapons is more the implications it has for the game than their power. In terms of attack, they sit about the same level as Revolucio weapons. I judge this based on the Wired Lance shown, which boasts 1350 S-Atk at +35 (after removing affixes). Their latent is entirely focused on bosses however, offering a 12% boost to damage dealt to and a 15% damage reduction from bosses.

As you can imagine, this makes them relatively useless weapons in general but the interesting part of this is that they directly compete with Ideal weapons. In the case of the wired lance, the difference between Ideal Scissors and Aura Wired Lance (can’t interpret its name) is about 142 S-atk. Of course, the Ideal weapon latent is 18% damage to bosses vs Aura’s 12%. So does 142 S-atk cover the difference of about 6% damage? I’m not expert enough in the damage formula to say, but gut feeling says that the two weapons would end up fairly comparable. That fact alone is interesting, because it makes Ideal weapons redundant; at least for as long as this collection file is active (until late August it seems).

While challenge mode has had a bit of an incentive issue for a while now (Ideal weapons are already outclassed by other weapons even for bossing) to have yet another thing come along and erode it even further is kind of sad. Some of my fondest memories of PSO2 come from Challenge Mode…

 

AMERICA – FUCK YEAH

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So yeah, they teased the next field and it turns out it’s Las Vegas in the good old USA. I’d joke that PSO2 is finally coming to America but I already did that. So did literally everyone else so… ahem.

Based on the enemies we’d seen in the data, Las Vegas was a strong guess and it turned out that one was correct! Other guesses were just America in general, Paris and Akihabara. I would not have been surprised with any of those outcomes.

Anyway, it’s just as crazy as the Tokyo reveal and I adore it, check out the trailer:

The music is “Neon Days” by a group named Rumblebee, who seemingly previously did music for Sonic Riders.

The chief thing you’re going to notice (besides all the FREEDOM) is that this map has more vertical space than any map released so far. Seeing as the ARKS can’t fly, in order to facilitate this they’ve introduced a chicken-walker style mech called the “Rideroid” that you can use to fly around the map. Vegas also seems to be enormous compared to what we’ve had so far, though that may be a misleading artifact due to the way the trailer was shot.

Notably, but not surprisingly, the Las Vegas field has an ESCA tower just like Tokyo. 

Given the nature of the map, I’m pondering if it might not have the same random generation that all maps have had so far or even any at all. I’m not against this idea, as a properly hand-crafted map would be a refreshing change for PSO2, it’s just this seems like it might be the death of the old style of Free Field quest.

I should say, I don’t think the old style of Free Field quest is perfect by any stretch. I always felt like a free field shouldn’t even have a boss and should instead just be about freely wandering an area til you get bored. The boss arenas should go to a set map like they did with Train Ghidoran’s Arks Quest. In my opinion, the Kuronia and Tokyo fields becoming point grinds was not the right direction to take them as it runs counter to the philosophy of “run at your own pace”, never-mind the really irritating way Tokyo handles its spawns. Hopefully Las Vegas doesn’t handle its spawns in the same way, and with the shift from grinding stones to doing collection sheets there should be no need for a point system.

Enemies

As is tradition, let’s take still shots from the best video we can find and have a look at the enemies and, where possible, try to match them to data-mined names. As is always the case, these are caps taken from a live-stream so the quality of the images is going to be very muddy.

Let’s start with the first enemy shown, which is a thing walking on a ball. There is one enemy with AI that has a ball and that’s Phantom Pierrot A. The AI file suggests it also has a knife attack.

That thing in the bottom right seems to be a cow’s skull. While this could be Phantom Buffalo, it seems Buffalo’s AI includes the ability to stomp. I guess a skull could stomp, but these are phantom enemies so for all I know the little guy could suddenly grow a ghost body or something.

Clowns and Jesters

 

By appearance, I would assume this pair of clowns are the two Phantom Pierrot variants. There do seem to be two different enemies here, with the red jester in both of them.

Judging by the AI, however, it seems that both of them are in fact Phantom Pierrot B, as it’s the only one with a chainsaw attack and balloons. Unless one is a rare variant or they decided to split this into two enemies I’m not sure why the two are different colours.

In case you don’t know, a “pierrot” is essentially an old pantomime character which was a kind of sad clown.

Phantom Sniper

I did not expect this to be a rabbit riding the sign for a gun shop, but then who would have? There are two variants of this little guy, one of which  seems to be the sniping variant we see above and the other can fire rockets. We only seem to see the sniping kind in the trailer.

Phantom Biker

Big beards, mullets and leather. Just about everything I wanted out of this enemy.

The AI for this guy is surprisingly complicated, but despite  this there’s only really a couple of methods that stand out. It seems to have dashing attacks as well as the attack it uses in the trailer, which I assume is it’s “drift cutter” ability.

Phantom Caravan

Now, I’m making an educated guess that this enemy is caravan as it aligns with the overall circus theme the map seems to have going for it. Do a Google image search for “Circus Caravan” and you’ll see what I mean.

It has an attack where it fires something, a “cracker” attack and some slashing attacks. It also may be able to grab the player. It’s possible that it’s using the firing attack during the trailer, where it seems to be shooting balls all over the place.

Phantom Goddess

The boss is Lady Liberty riding a Sphinx. I mean, we had various guesses as to what “PhantomGoddess” would turn out to be but I don’t think any of us expected this! It’s dumb as hell and I love it.

Now, PhantomGoddess is one of the earliest datamined enemies for this area and is in fact the source of the speculation that this field would take place in Las Vegas. In particular, she has a number of attacks based on Roulette, attacks involving the Eiffel Tower (seemingly using it as a lance) and of course the Sphinx. These and of course the statue herself were all things present on the Vegas strip, which is where the assumption that the next field may have been Vegas came from. From the AI I’ve seen so far, I don’t see any suggestions as to what status effect it might be weak to however it’s a boss so naturally its AI is long and complicated so I may have missed something. It does appear to have a phase shift at 60% HP.

The rest of the enemies in this section are enemies that are presumed to belong to this field either thematically or because they arrived in the data at around the same time. However, they seemed to be missing from the teaser.

Phantom Maxwell

Has “red shot”, “blue shot” and it may have some self destruction mechanic. Beyond that, I really don’t have a clue what kind of enemy this could be. I just can’t associate “Maxwell” with anything related to the theme of the field and googling so far hasn’t turned up anything.

At least, it didn’t turn up anything for those themes. What it did turn up however was a scientific concept known as “Maxwell’s Demon“. I won’t detail too much, but the important thing is that it’s concerned with violation of thermodynamics by way of separating out hot and cold particles. There was a game based on this concept called “Maxwell’s Maniac” in which the goal was to separate red and blue molecules into color coded chambers. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that this enemy has red and blue shots!

Phantom Laplace

Again, much like Maxwell, “Laplace” as a name just doesn’t ring any bells for the overall themes of “America” and “Circus”.

Laplace does seem to have quite a number of abilities however, including a barrier of some kind, slashing and shooting attacks, the ability to summon things (summons “N” and “B”) and routines to keep track of and to go to its summons. It appears the summons are either Maxwells or it’s just that it has special routines for Maxwells in particular, I’m not sure. The complexity of its AI honestly puts it as a fairly good candidate as a mini-boss or even a boss.

So yeah, evidently Laplace and Maxwell are fairly closely related. So the question is raised, “Does Laplace turn up when I search up scientific stuff?”.Well, it doesn’t turn up in science (outside of the concept of “Laplace pressure”) so much but it does seem to come up a lot in mathematics. In particular, probabilities and statistics.

So we have potentially a  mathematician/scientist theme with Laplace and Maxwell. This seems to be a fairly sharp departure from the overall themes in Las Vegas which makes me ponder if this pair of enemies may actually belong to a future field. Notably, Laplace has some routines specific to story mode.

Notably, Och Miller is a member of Mother Cluster who is a progeny mathematician. So odds seem pretty good that this pair of enemies are related to her.

Phantom Vulture:

Seems to have the ability to stick to targets and may include group-AI abilities. It contains a few grouping methods, but it’s possible that instead of having an enemy with actual flocking behavior it may be.that it’s spawned by a commanding enemy, similar to how Vardha summons Kindidds and Angel summons birds which he subsequently commands to explode.

Phantom “Track”

I guessed a long time ago that there was a good possibility that this would be an american themed field. With that in mind, I figured “track” was meant to be “truck”, especially given we already had a train in Tokyo. Its just “a” in Japanese sounds more like the “uh” sound in how most english speakers would say “Truck”, hence why they might spell it as “track”.

However, I didn’t take into account that roller-coasters were a thing, and seeing the focus on one during the trailer did make me consider the possibility that it’d be a bunch of rollercoaster cars attacking us or something. However looking at the AI it does seem like it is indeed a truck, in particular a circus truck.  Its AI file is big compared to regular enemies, suggesting it may be a mini-boss. It attacks with its “carrier car”, has a “horn bazooka” and can drift. It also has methods “Circus” and “Circus Attack”.

Phantom UFO

Las Vegas is a city in the state of Nevada. Another thing that exists in Nevada is “Area 51”, so yes UFOs are quite thematically appropriate for this field. So while no UFOs showed up in the teaser I’m fairly sure this will be in Vegas.

Phantom UFO has a number of abilities, including multiple laser attacks, a method named “UFOCatch” and a “LittleGrey”. In case you’re unaware, Greys are very much a pop-culture icon in the US and the most common depiction of aliens in that region. Though the greys themselves don’t seem to be separate entities from the UFO,  they do have attacks and theres a few routines for their height as well as “greydown”. Given how a common depiction of flying saucers has them grabbing things with tractor beams  I’m surprised there don’t seem to be any grab or hold attacks.

Phantom Dog

Bark! The AI has a dash attack and a “fire” attack.

Phantom Roach

It has an AI file but it’s completely empty. While it’s true that Goldrahda-type enemies are all labelled “Roach”  as well, it’s likely that in this case it means an actual cockroach. This enemy was only recently added, so there’s a chance this won’t show up in Vegas.

 

 

Questions Corner

 

Much like last time, Twitter user @kami_pepe reposted the summaries of the questions and their answers. Special thanks to Mewn and Espiokaos for help interpreting these. Let me know if theres anything drastically wrong.

Q: How do you know the breast-size of characters for the Arks Report?

A: It’s stored on characters as numerical data, so we just calculate the size based on that!

I’m glad the Japanese are asking the important questions.

Q: Sachiko has moving fingers! Will you be adding finger posing to PSO2 anytime soon?

A: There are no plans to implement this. 

Presumably the main problem is they would have to add finger bones and rigging for every single outfit in PSO2, which would be a massive undertaking for such a relatively minor feature in the grand scheme of things. They’d also have to animate the fingers for most existing animations, which is a fair amount of work in its own right but not as taxing as rigging the 100s of costumes they’ve released. This I’m afraid is just going have to be something you’ll have to hope is present in PSO3 instead, whenever that happens.

Q: Why can’t we trade SG items?

A: There are two reasons for this.

1. Because if we didn’t, people with multiple accounts would take advantage of it given we distribute SG for free.
2. SG Scratch is aimed at only a portion of the userbase, so allowing trades would go against our intents.

Their first reason seems a little nonsensical to me. For one thing, you can already do this with FUN points. I mean, I guess FUN Scratch doesn’t typically last for 6 months, nor does it ever contain costumes but it can occasionally contain desirable haircuts, accessories and such, all of which are trad-able.

For the second reason, it’s possible that the system is engineered so that people are meant to log in every day. Letting people trade would mean people would just buy what they wanted instead. If this interpretation is accurate, it’s an irritating reason indeed especially given that right now even if people did log in every day they wouldn’t have nearly enough Star Gems for the amount of attempts they’d need to get what they want.There is of course the possibility that it’s aimed at whales which has its own unfortunate set of implications… Either way, I’m more convinced by their second reason than I am their first one and indeed I feel it explains their motivations for the first. A system that wants you to log in every day would potentially fall apart if you allowed people to trade.

Q: What are we supposed to do with duplicate items from the SG Scratch?

A: We plan to implement a way for you recycle duplicate items at a later date. For now,keep any spare items you have in storage! We’re sorry about this, there’s no excuse for expecting you to hold on to duplicate items. 

So yeah, if you have any duplicate items or just generally SG items you don’t want I guess, hold onto them! I mean goodness knows what the eventual recycling items will end up being, but it’s better to hold on and be disappointed than to destroy your items and regret it later.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what items they’ll introduce into such a recycling shop however. I severely doubt it’ll result in a trade-in for additional Stargems, but hey that’d be appreciated!

Q: Why is there a 120 Casino Coin ticket in the SG Scratch?

A: The scratch will be up for six months, so it’s going to be a long-term thing. As you can get SG for free, you’ll have plenty of time to amass the Star Gems you require.

This is a particularly funky answer as it doesn’t really address the question at all… Assuming interpretations are correct it seems that the intention is for you to take an exceedingly long time to get what you want from the scratch. Unfortunately, as I’ve pointed out many times now, if you’re depending on the login bonuses logging in every day will give you an uncomfortably small shot at getting what you want.

Generally,  I’m not at all satisfied with their answers justifying this terrible system they’ve concocted. However, as said elsewhere in this post, it’s plausible we may gain more ways to get Star Gems at time goes on, which may bring things into the realms of obtainable for dedicated players. As of right now, it doesn’t matter how dedicated you are as even if you used all the currently available methods to get Gems and logged in every day for the whole 6 months, you still basically have a small chance of getting what you want. That alone is criminal, and I hope the Japanese continue to pressure Sega over this system.

 

Ultimate Amduscia!??!?

 

There was no mention of Ultimate Amduscia, but fear not because it definitely is not canned.

As of the latest patch, PSO-World user Shadowth117 was able to piece together this shot by swapping out some of the client’s files with some recently added assets for Ultimate Amduscia.

As you may recognize, it seems to resemble Caves 3 from PSO. Of course, this is a work that is still heavily in progress and the file-swap may have altered the look of the area in unintentional ways, so this does not represent the final product at all. The little glimpse is appreciated, however.

Another thing that was added which suggests they’re working on it still is a new enemy showed up in the client, named “ult_waker_beast”. “Ult Waker” is the internal name given to Anga Fundarge, which may suggest that Ultimate Amduscia may arrive with a brand new variant. All the data can tell us is that it has a tail, has biting attacks and still uses bits like Anga Fundarge does. “Beast” is normally used to describe creatures similar to Rockbear (such as Wolgahda) but given it has a tail and bites, it may not be or resemble a Rockbear re-model at all.

So yeah, it’s still being worked on. Who knows, we may well be getting a teaser trailer for it in a live broadcast or two! Will be interesting to see what they intend to do with it with the apparent death of the stone grind post Episode 4.