YMMV / Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis

• Abridged Arena Array: Retem Alnothe is a very popular farming spot in specific scenarios, even with the advent of higher leveled areas such as Kvaris and beyond with theoretically superior loot. Alnothe is relatively small for a combat zone, reducing the amount of travel time between spawns, and because of the area's unique platform-based layout, some enemy spawns can be bunched together fairly tight; spawn a PSE Burst on one of these platforms, and the entire mass of mobs that constantly spawn in can be hit by Talis' Spread Feather bullets or Waker's Fredran Breath. It is the second best spot in the game to farm for raw Meseta drops, and unlike the best farming spot (Dext Base), the requisite equipment and multipliers needed to get consistent one-shots on enemies to speed up enemy spawns is much lower.
• Angst? What Angst?: The revelations of Chapter 5, from all of Halpha being a wargames experiment to raise stronger ARKS, to all of the deaths happening for this purpose, to even the sheer Cosmic Horror Story of the Starless, horrified players anticipating where the story would go. The cast, on the other hand, only see a violent amount of anger in Glen given what happened to Hibana, whereas everyone else is either mostly worried about Manon or don't even seem to comprehend the scale of what they're repeatedly told. It's to the point that Aina has Sympathy for the Devil with Zephetto and seems to not be bothered by the implications of everyone being an Artificial Human in an artificial war, or that her Doomed Hometown and deceased father happened solely for improving the ARKS. The only other characters to actually be bothered by any of this are Manon and the Meteorn, who actually seems genuinely pissed at the reveals in certain dialogue choices and can outright call Zephetto insane.
  • Chapter 6 highlights that there's still some hard feelings over the whole situation. The DOLLS are still active and still need to be shut down but the teleporter to Leceil isn't working, frustrating everyone, and the surviving Resurgent ARKS have drawn the ire of the survivors of the war due to their role in perpetuating it, even if all of them didn't know any better and both Manon and Pharia acted to end the cycle. And the first encounter with the Starless hits home that things are not going to get easier from here.
• Awesome Music: It's Phantasy Star Online, of course the music is gonna be great.
  • As of the second major Retem update, concerts came back, and with it came Nadereh singing the Songs of War and Mourning. The former is a jazzy and upbeat Dare to Be Badass song (complete with Nadereh's CAST lieutenants on instruments, with Hadi using multi-weapon to switch between a guitar and clarinet), while the latter is a somber and ethereal ode to the warriors who have fallen in battle against the enemy.
  • The Urgent Quest against Dark Falz does not disappoint. The announcement music makes it clear you're up against a grievously powerful opponent, the actual battle starts with an epic and dark theme that emphasizes that you're not fighting to win, you're fighting to buy time for Central Cannon to charge, and the second half as Dark Falz enters its second phase, "Meteorn's Song", is a call to arms for all Meteorn to fight for their new home, in spite of their lost memories.
  • "Our Life, Our Scars" is the second phase theme that plays against Dark Falz Aegis (which the story fight skips straight to). It begins with a battle-mix of the first few lines of "Song of Mourning ~ The Eternal Wind," following with lyrics that seem to reflect Manon's slow-burning Heroic BSoD before a second singer joins in creating an epic four minute harmony. It foreshadows the weight of the knowledge Manon carries surrounding the war, with the second singer reflecting Aina, and how she's become a Living Emotional Crutch for Manon. In the final stretch of the fight, a remix of the main theme, "A World Beyond the Sky" plays for your victory lap as it prepares its Desperation Attack.
• Best Boss Ever: Dark Falz by its name alone has a high bar to clear. It does not disappoint. And for the first time, you're stepping into the fight knowing that you're not fighting to win, you're fighting to keep it at bay so Central Cannon has enough time to charge up and take it out. And it is basically Dark Falz Elder on steroids, moving around the arena and attacking far more aggressively than Elder ever did. And when you think you've depleted its health bar, it just regenerates its health and moves into its second phase, becoming more feral in a fury that screams Why Won't You Die? to the ARKS Defenders fighting it. Coupled with the fantastic theme tunes accompanying it, and you have a recipe for a fantastic boss fight.
  • The rematch with Dark Falz as Dark Falz Aegis is basically Dark Falz finally taking you seriously, since it no longer has the luxury of just retreating to repair itself. It starts as a grand siege on Dark Falz at Halpha Lake, wearing down its defenses as it tries to keep your party at bay with summoned enemies and its massive armor plates. Once you've worn it down enough, Dark Falz takes you to a ringed arena where it goes on the offensive with everything it has, even resorting to summoning something incomprehensible through portals to power its final attack that you need to destroy. And finally, once its health is depleted? ARKS finally finishes it off with three cannon shots and the player character punching a hole right through it. No more running away, Dark Falz is finally dead. What a spectacular end to the Halpha saga.
  • Chapter 5's end-boss is the true mastermind of the entire Halpha saga, Zephetto. To take you on, he deploys a mech several times larger than you are, the Venogia - not only does Zephetto Venogia lift attacks from every regional boss and Dark Falz, but he also feels like you're fighting Falz Hyunal on steroids (he even has Hyunal's dive-kick attack). It's an insanely cool and fun fight that finally caps off the entirety of what is basically "episode 1". For those who can't get enough, there's always the Urgent Quest "Remnants of Ambition", where you face off against Venogia Vera, who has all of these same moves, for you and your friends to face off against.
• Broken Base: The way combat is handled in New Genesis has a variety of reception. Players who enjoyed the twitch-action gameplay of the Scions, particularly Hero and Luster, have pushed back against the gameplay of New Genesis, complaining about its relative lack of speed and fluidity, with many weapons now having slower animations and animation locks that prevent the user from cancelling them. Defenders point out that this is an intentional decision to bring the weapons in line with each other and dial down the extremely fast pace of gameplay after Scions heavily skewed both enemy design and gameplay design away from the base classes, thus creating a balance between the slower pacing of pre-Scion PSO2 and the mechanical enhancements brought on by Scions. Further still are players who disliked the Scion Classes, who dislike New Genesis for designing the whole game around Scion mechanics, such as the overwhelming prevalence of Counter-Attack on every class that is basically mandatory for maximizing damage output.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The reveal that Halpha is an artificial planet made by ARKS was extremely telegraphed considering the massive amount of foreshadowing plastered on the entire map. The actual reveal is what Halpha was created for.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: On the whole, the most common Subclasses in the game are Force, Bouncer, and Fighter. Force provides Natural PP Recovery bonuses and is great for mobbing sections due to its Killing PP Gain skill, Bouncer is a great subclass for boss battles due to speeding up Down Accumulation and is used by Techters specifically for Jet Intensity, and Fighter boosts burst in boss fights by increasing damage during Downs. Gunner is used occasionally due to being an Active PP Recovery boost, and Ranger suppresses the afflictions that crop up with regularity in Leciel, but all other classes are considered niche or near-useless as Subclasses.
• Demonic Spiders: Equalizing enemies are barely a nuisance in normal gameplay, but in Trinitas, they become the most aggravating enemies that can possibly spawn. Equalizing enemies grant very high damage reduction to all other enemies around them, requiring you to take out the buffer first before dealing with the rest. Trinitas tends to spawn Equalizing boosts on enemies who already have high HP and/or have very annoying gimmicks, such as the Gororox and the Brancles, meaning that not only do you have to whittle down the tanky mobs first, you have to do it while avoiding getting swarmed by the other mooks attacking you at the same time.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Bigg Frogga, an ALTERS boss that resembles a Bloomegara, quickly caught on with fans due to its ridiculous name and funny sound effects.
  • Kanui doesn't have much story presence compared to her commander Glenn, and she mostly serves as Ms. Exposition, but she's arguably the most popular NGS character. Between her attractive design and performance from both Akari Kitou and Laura Post, she quickly becomes famous after the Stia Region update. In the official NGS Character Election, Kanui wins the first place, beating out Zephetto, the Big Bad, on 2nd place, and Manon, one of the main heroines, on 3rd place.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • With the fact that the game is explicitly a Distant Sequel, many fans are wondering just how the story (and maybe even the character transfer of your ARKS Operative) ties into the original Phantasy Star Online 2, some even taking it to believe the new protagonist to be a descendant of some sort. Given the thousand year time gap and the fact that the enemies are referred to as "Dolls" that happen to be giants compared to the main cast, some also wonder if it will tie in with IDOLA: Phantasy Star Saga at all, too. The events of Chapter 5 strongly imply RA9G3-T909 is a clone fashioned after the previous Guardian.
  • Also, the thousand year time gap being a series tradition directly tied to how often Dark Falz is resurrected is causing fans to speculate that the main antagonistic force will once again be an iteration of Dark Falz. Although the heroes destroying the Primordial Darkness at the end of PSO2 does throw a wrench in that theory, as its destruction would theoretically prevent any iteration of Falz from ever returning. But then the first big threat that turns up annihilates Aelio Town is Dark Falz anyway. And Chapter 5 reveals that Zephetto made Dark Falz so powerful on purpose.
  • A main character in each region possesses a weapon imbued with a core that resembles the ones seen in Cosmogenic Arms, such as Garoa's Partizan and Nadereh's Jet Boots, leading to many theories about the origins of the weapons and how the characters are related to those of PSO2.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: A retroactive Happy Ending Override for PSO2 is the source of this, as everything the Guardians and ARKS of a thousand years ago did manifest in 500 years of peace. Everyone you knew in the series short of very questionably mortal entities and certain CAST would've had multiple generations of descendants or long since passed. But then the Starless wiped out so many star systems and so much of the ARKS fleets that beyond the technology, legends and very language they carried, everything the heroes of old worked for is effectively space dust. And now the Starless are back, and the Halpha ARKS have to fight them. There's a reason why Episode 1's Chapter 5 is a Bittersweet Ending.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Prior to its official reveal, New Genesis was called "Not EP7" by fans in reference to SEGA teasing a new update for PSO2 that would not be an "Episode 7" in terms of traditional updates.
  • Some popular nicknames for New Genesis include "PSO3", "PSO2 2", and "PSO2: A Realm Reborn".
  • The structure floating above Lake Halphia, officially named Leciel as of Chapter 5, has been dubbed Aincrad by the fans.
  • "One More!" for PSE Burst Encores, since they are essentially just the One More feature from base PSO2 but reworked to fit NGS's PSE mechanics.
• Funny Moments:
  • If you take the Central! webcomic as canon, basically every single named ARKS member is some level of weird, from Cloud Cuckoolander, The Ditz, Tsundere, you name it. It even manages to re-contextualize Glen as The Comically Serious, doing silly things like trying to figure out what outfit to greet the Aelio ARKS in (including the damn reindeer costume), or being willing to ride a sled on top of lava because he thought the snow-sledding dash animation was neat enough that it might allow for safe magma travels, and then complain that his butt feels like it's burning right after doing it. Yes, you can do the same and suffer only a gradual (if rapid) HP loss for it.
  • Amidst the large Wham Episode of Chapter 5, Aina and the Meteorn stumble into what seems to be the cloning room that all the modern ARKS are made in. Despite the tone of this being dead serious with the implications left hanging in the air, every row of pods has a diagnostic screen.. showing the original Ash in wireframe in a pastiche of character creation.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Double Saber PA "Julienne Dance" is extremely powerful. Prior to a bugfix, it was essentially the best PA in the game, having a first hit that was spammable and dealt more DPS than most attacks in the game (including some Photon Blasts), leading to Double Saber to becoming overwhelmingly popular. Despite the bug now being fixed, it is still incredibly strong, with Skip Arts Julienne being used instead due to the majority of the damage being rebalanced to the final hit instead of the first.
  • Wired Lance received the PA "Hellish Fall" in the April 2022 update. It is a Charge Attack that grants the user Immune to Flinching and damage reduction while charging. The trick with this one is that unlike other Hunter PAs, Hellish Fall has a gimmick where if you tank two attacks with it, the charged variant comes out instantly and gains the benefits of Photon Arts Avenger. The damage on its charged variant is so incredibly rewarding that it's both safer and more effective to just barrel your way through enemy attacks by charging up Hellish and tank the damage, to the point where a common player complaint is that Hellish is vastly overtuned for how much it decreases the skill floor for Hunter gameplay.
  • The Kvaris update brought with it new skills and Photon Arts for the classes, including a brand-new finisher skill for the Katana Braver that replaces the old counter. Now, after three PAs in a combo, or after any counter, "Katana PA Combo Finish" briefly turns your normal attacks into a three-swing combo that not only can attack at a range and hit weak points with precision even through a target, but also has an area-of-effect and gives you invulnerability frames the whole duration on top of being the strongest non-Photon Burst or Brave Finish attack Bravers have. It's incredibly easy to just buzzsaw enemy groups down with minimal risk when used right, and counter-crazy players can outright cheese excess amounts of damage with no downsides besides if a boss moves out of their range. The result was a massive upsurge in Katana Bravers, even just as a Sub-Class.
  • In more of a limited-use case for PSE Bursts, having a Force Sub-Class that has a fully maxed out "Eradication PP Gain" skill became the go-to for burst farming. By simply having this skill, enemies dying around you will roughly give you a full Photon Art's worth of PP back even with the subbing reduction, and with Rangers spamming Homing Darts and Divine Impact, the aforementioned Radiant Lilac and finisher Bravers, and Technique-casting Zonde users that all start frying entire waves of bursts within seconds faster than any other classes can keep up with, you basically cannot run out of Photon Points and can end up killing hundreds of enemies in a single burst alone! Even outside of bursts, the sheer extra PP gain that Force provides made it a Complacent Gaming Syndrome and a top Sub-Class recommendation solely for this reason, especially when combined with "PP Recovery Boost" speeding up normal attack PP gains significantly to boot.
  • Talis has carved itself a niche as the single best mobbing weapon in the game, a far cry from its neglected identity crisis disaster of a weapon in the original game. The main culprit is a PA called Spread Feather, where the user sprays a blast of energy in front of them, followed by a blast of energy around them. Cancelling the PA after the first part summons three Talis cards that hover in front of your character, and using a Technique converts it into three elemental bullets that spread shot forward and pierce through enemies. The piercing property is unique to Talis' Spread Feather and makes it vastly superior to similar tools like Homing Darts, Fredran Breath, or Zonde, as it cannot clank or multi-hit foes and just cleaves through them like butter, mowing down large swaths of enemies with more efficiency than any other weapon could hope to achieve. This is in tandem with Talis being innately usable by Force, whose Eradication PP Gain skill gives effectively infinite PP during a PSE Burst.
  • The Dive Attack Damage Boost buff added to Leciel in the December 2023 update is disgustingly overpowered. Once the buff is obtained, you will get a purple energy ring around your character every several seconds that allows you to perform a massively boosted Dive Attack once, creating an explosion at the impact point. Not only is the damage for this effect disproportionately high for how frequently you can use it, the attack also inflicts every element of Element Down simultaneously. If you get the Level 2 buff by slaying the mid-boss, virtually every remaining room yet uncleared as well as the final boss fight becomes a complete joke as even Starless will be stunned by a single hit of your boosted Dive Attack, allowing a mob of players to mow down hordes of enemies with comical impunity.
  • Thanks to the Tech Arts Customization, Sword's Spiral Edge Type 2 becomes the most damaging PA in Hunter's arsenal. Simply put, the customization increases the charged Spiral Edge's damage up to whopping 35% at the cost of doubling the charge time. However, since the charge time is pretty fast already, in the hands of skilled players, it becomes a small price to pay for the damage increase. Combine it with Overcharge and it even replaces Streak Calibur as the down/break burst damage tool, and with Hunter Arts Avenger it becomes one, if not the most powerful counter-attack in the game. To prove how significant the customization is, Sword Hunter often gets on the top of time records against aggressive bosses (Duel Bosses, Trainias, etc) after the Tech Arts Customization is introduced. Unsurprisingly, SEGA nerfs the PA customization in the April Update, reducing the damage increase to mere 15%, but compensates it by reducing the charge time increase from 100% to 40%.
• Goddamned Bats: Even all the way up to Kvaris, most normal, Former and Alter enemies generally die fairly fast so long as your gear and level are up to snuff. Most, except the DOLLs. They have at least two to three times the health of most other enemy types, and at least early in the game they're so basic in aggression that they really just serve to be damage sponge shields to distract you while other enemies attack from off-camera. By Kvaris they're far more aggressive and still retain this tankiness, to the point that it's common for PSE Burst farmers to move onto the next enemy group ASAP rather than deal with the DOLLs that are almost always the last foes standing in the current one.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • While most of the bugs introduced by New Genesis have been detrimental in some way, one particularly interesting bug crops up with using Blight Rounds on destructible environmental objects. Normally, Blight Round timers are synced for all players in the same room as are enemies; using a Blight Round on an object will eventually cause it to expire, while using it on a breakable enemy part then breaking it will cause it to disappear for all players. However, destructible environmental objects like mineral deposits and Item Containers aren't synced; using a Blight Round on one and then destroying it will cause the Blight Round icon to disappear like usual for the player who fired it, but for everyone else in the same room the Blight Round effect will desync and persist indefinitely until the object is destroyed. This can be used by Rangers to invoke Video Game Caring Potential by using their Blight Rounds to mark objects for other players in the room to break, saving them the trouble of finding it themselves. There is nothing to indicate that this behavior was intended, but it's one of the few oddball interactions in the game that has been officially recognized by the devs. This was eventually patched out in the ver 2.0 update due to a mechanical change to Blight Rounds that fixed a notorious Scrappy Mechanic with them dating back to the original game.
  • There was another bug with the Blight Rounds that did get patched by the Retem update, however, where players could fire one — and then jump cancel out the animation to be able to immediately chain another shot with it, allowing a player to unload all three Blight Rounds in the span it took to recover from the first shot normally. Given the high damage each individual shot does on impact, having three of them back-to-back essentially gave Rangers a consequence-free, extremely high burst damage every ten seconds once their rounds recharge, which allowed them to out-damage most other classes with one basic trick.
  • There was a pretty funky Multiweapon interaction with Soaring Blades on launch where (assuming sufficient dexterity) one could cancel out the endlag of Photon Blades by inputting a Glide, cancelling the glide with a PA with a very short animation (mainly Twin Daggers PAs), then following up immediately with another Photon Blade salvo, resulting in disproportionately high DPS. This resulted in Photon Blades being reworked to be rendered virtually non-functional as a Multiweapon tool, while buffing them to be more useful for Bouncer mains.
  • Surging Impulse is a Jet Boots PA added in the April 2022 update that summons a Damage Over Time effect when cast charged. This ring deals minor damage to enemies in close proximity until it explodes after a set number of hits, and since it is a charged Jet Boots PA, it also activates Jet Boots Element Set and builds elemental passives on hit. Due to an oversight, not only could non-Bouncer classes gain its benefits and full damage with Multiweapon Jet Boots, Element Set would activate and build passive stacks for any Tech class. This was quickly exploited by various players (mainly Wand mains) to gain a massive DPS advantage by setting up Surging Impulse then playing as normal, with the advantage of the PA automatically setting up their passives for them in close range and being able to use their full-power Techs substantially more often. On the flipside, the PA existing bungled Jet Boots, since its Element Set activations would prevent its other PAs from triggering Element Set due to the skill's internal cooldown and effectively rob them of otherwise free damage. Both interactions were fixed a week later by neutering its Multiweapon interaction and increasing the hit interval so other Jet Boots PAs have time to proc Element Set.
  • A July 2022 update added a second Ryuker Device to Central Kvaris, in the process inadvertently introducing a minor bug where Emergency Trials will automatically generate in Central Kvaris without user input^note Normally, Trials can only be generated if a player in the area slays an enemy, which has a random chance to spawn a Trial. This seems harmless on its own, but players discovered that Central Kvaris can spawn a Cold Photon E-Trial in exactly one spot in the entire map, which happens to be about 323 meters east of the new Ryuker. Cold Photon Trials have a rare chance to spawn three waves instead of the usual two waves, whereupon the third wave is a guaranteed Captan. This immediately gave rise to a new form of Captan farming, which is less effort and easier to do in large groups over the standard Alnothe farm method, causing players to abuse the crap out of the bugged trials and drastically crash the price of Mastery III and Mastery IV capsules.
  • It is possible to clear the final checkpoint of a Field Race at roughly the exact time that the timer hits 2:30.00, resulting in a final time of 2:30.01. This went unnoticed until the first Field Race ARKS Record in September 2022 due to the mode's relative unpopularity, but players discovered that upon doing so, their score would round up to 4,294,967,295 points due to integer underflow shenanigans since you get 1 point per millisecond left on the timer and it was never intended for the score to count negative points.
  • When Waker was added to the game, one of its skills, Treble Clef Ignition, was bugged in such a way that its damage was unaffected by a large portion of damage-increasing multipliers, rendering it significantly weaker than what it should actually inflict. When the October 5th, 2022 patch was added, this bug got fixed... and replaced by a different bug which caused Treble Clef Ignition to instead double the intended multipliers, causing its damage to skyrocket. It became very common to see Ignition deal several thousand damage each time, even moreso if using it during a Break.
  • There's a trick you can do in The Battle of Halphia Lake where summoning a Mobile Cannon M2 with very specific timing right as Dark Falz Aegis transitions into the second half of phase 1 lets you keep your Mobile Cannon even though it is supposed to instantly go away at the transition. This lets you resume attacking its shield immediately after it uses its Desperation Attack rather than having to wait for the Mobile Cannon nodes to respawn.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Compared to the rather lukewarm reception at launch, the Retem update was considered a substantial upgrade over Aelio. The region is more visually interesting and functionally diverse, has an improved enemy pool, and generally more to do. Mechanics were also improved with updates to existing systems, more Anti-Frustration Features, and the awaited return of missing PSO2 features. The region's story is also a major improvement, with a tighter, more concise plot and new, likable characters that get meaningful but not overly intrusive development.
  • The story hit this again with the Chapter 5 update in April 2023, where a massive Wham Episode of the floating island, Leciel, not only finally explains just what the war on Halpha really was, but also sets up the next episode while effectively piecing together all of the story's reasons and circumstances in short order. To give an idea of how big of an impact it had, before the update the story was seen as a Cliché Storm that most people barely even cared for; once this update hit and people played through it, discussion of the plot and its implications skyrocketed with the potential for what it may bring, as can even be noted by the character and fridge pages here.
  • It is generally agreed that the game has improved substantially compared to its lackluster showing at launch, with a solid variety of areas, content, and gameplay, as well as ending its first story arc on an exciting hook. How much it has improved by, however, depends radically on who you ask.
• He's Just Hiding: This is a common theory for Garoa's fate, as he is touted by official media and the prologue as being about as important as the main characters, or at least a supporting character, only to be immediately vaporized by Dark Falz 10 minutes after he is introduced. Since Never Found the Body is in play, many fans expect to see him return in some way, either having miraculously survived getting blasted point-blank by Dark Falz's Wave-Motion Gun, or possibly assimilated into Dark Falz itself. With Dark Falz destroyed and its true origins revealed in Chapter 5, these theories have mostly died off.
• Heartwarming Moments: After the fight with the Nogleth, Aina calls over Manon and the Meteorn and finally breaks down, admitting that Garoa didn't want her to be part of ARKS and she realizes he was right all along. However, Manon reassures Aina that they were going to do this together, as a team.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • You have Katana, near-unaminously considered one of the best, if not the absolute best, weapons in the game. Compared to the relatively slow and stiff weapons of New Genesis, Katana brings to the table a rapid-fire, no-holds-barred melee weapon that can do it all; fantastic damage output, equally useful PAs with distinct utility and extremely flexible cancel timing, super generous Guard Counter window, one of the best counters in the game that boasts excellent range, speed, and power, decent crowd control ability, superior mobility thanks to one of the only gap-closer Photon Arts in the game, and a relatively low skill floor. The Kvaris update additionally gave them their single most powerful tool that is considered a borderline Game-Breaker: a follow-up that can be triggered off any Guard Counter or PA combo finisher, costs no PP, triggers natural PP regeneration upon activation, and hits everything in front of you up to ~20 meters with four ranged pseudo-hitscan slashes that deals heavy damage. It's not uncommon to hear players of more struggling weapons like Bow and Wand complaining about both the developers and the playerbase playing favorites.
  • Waker has gained some ire simply because it's just plain good; they have quite a few different attacks thanks to having only one weapon available, a Focus Gauge where all the base classes lack one that can build up to powerful damage output, and don't even have to be directly in a foe's face to launch some of their strongest attacks. In a game where melee usually hits the hardest and ranged attackers suffer from lacking in every way but burst, Waker managed to stand atop by hybridizing both. The Slayer ended up much the same as a hyper-aggressive Glass Cannon that has tools for virtually any combat situation and can outshine even the Katana Braver if one takes the time to master it. Some have ended up feeling like these classes are effectively the Scion 2.0, albeit with Slayer being Difficult, but Awesome whereas the Waker is far more cheesy.
• I Knew It!: Fans had speculated that since NGS takes place a thousand years after Oracle that the game would follow the series tradition that Dark Falz would return after a thousand years. This ends up being played with, as while there is an enemy called "Dark Falz", it's really just a training course for the actual foe, a completely new threat called the Starless. The Starless have their own Dark Falz, Dark Falz Solus, although whether or not this is a "real" Falz in the context of the PSO2 setting has yet to be revealed.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A common complaint about the launch is that launch content can be completed in essentially three days or less, after which the player ends up grinding out EXP and Preset Augment drops on equipment while waiting for Urgents to show up. Some players (mainly longtime players of the Japanese version) defended the game's launch state by claiming that there's still more to do than PSO2 did when it came out 9 years ago, but some players have noticed that a bunch of features like the Title system, Gigantix enemies (which were in the beta), and Mag appearance inheritance (a feature advertised before the game's launch) are in the roadmap but not in the game at launch, leading players to complain that the game launched too early and SEGA should have taken the time to have more content.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: NGS is a bizarre case in that the similarities being complained about are not to some other game or property, but within itself.
  • The most common complaint is that aside from snippets of limited time seasonal/event quests and the Dark Falz Urgent Quest, the only real unique bits of content are each region's bosses. Otherwise, what you do from the first region of Aelio is what you're doing in the region of Stia, from level 5 to level 70: circling combat areas, killing enemies, doing Trials and getting PSE Bursts for dailies and augments. No personal quarters or Alliance rooms, no real social element besides chatting and emoting in the small town areas, no variety besides gimmicks like the Kvaris Floating Boards. Combine this with the level scaling that makes your gear have a lot less influence than in the original game, and even the grind doesn't feel worth it to many players, never mind the severe lack of combat variety that results from using the same handful of attacks from the start of a class to the level cap, skills aside. To give an idea of how deeply-rooted this problem is, the ability to finally make your own spaces and areas for personal homes or alliance houses — which would effectively be the first truly unique piece of content to dabble with that wasn't the same combat or hub chats every single day — was scheduled to release two years after the game's release, from 2021 to 2023 and after all the Halpha regions were finally finished.
  • On a lesser degree, the enemies themselves. In vanilla Phantasy Star Online 2, every particular world had its own dedicated enemy types, and while Falspawn were shared between some of them, certain planets had more of a focus of particular types. In New Genesis, regions post-Aelio have certain unique enemies and DOLLs, but they're generally surrounded by tweaked variants of the exact same enemies you've been fighting since the very start of the game. This includes entire bosses: the Ancients in Kvaris' Rayjord Gorge have a spawn of either a hyper-aggressive Ams Vera from Kvaris, or the same giant Sword DOLLs you've been facing since Aelio, just with nastier attacks. Even the Mining Rig Defense bosses are mostly variants in their own right, save Destragras and Vardias. To say a number of fans are disappointed with the lack of variance would be an understatement, as even the new regional foes are generally less common than the reskins everywhere. While the story of Episode 1's Chapter 5 does imply this to be intentional in-universe as part of the training experiments, this was shortly following Stia receiving a "new boss" after the region's release that was literally just the Quartz Dragon, wholesale, from base PSO2, that only appears in the region's second combat area that is explicitly designed to reuse nearly every single potential past enemy and boss so far..
  • And perhaps one of the more infamous content criticisms is the overuse of Cocoons / Towers for everything that isn't a new Urgent/Event Quest. Much like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's numerous shrines, they're a simple, reused aesthetic that allows new content to be generated more easily. But in this case, since everything is either platforming or combat challenges, it all mulls together combined with a digital aesthetic that almost makes them look like no-budget developer areas. With the smattering of new "major" grinding content all using the exact same assets over and over, many players are upset of how little unique quality any of them have. Even the quests with more unique objectives, like Trainia or Cannonball Strike, fall into the same trap.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Ranged weapon type classes (Ranger, Gunner, and Bow Braver) are often derided as a wasted slot in the harder content besides for the Ranger's Blight Bullet. While the Gunner has use with doing more burst damage on downed foes and the Ranger has great mobbing capabilities, all three can be tough to use for a real solid "punch" of consistent damage on enemies thanks to how situational certain skills and photon arts are, compared to how much damage both the Melee and Technique classes can dish out more regularly. Bow Braver is often completely disregarded by more serious players that think it's particularly lacking, which isn't helped by sharing a class with the Katana Braver's Game-Breaker status; the Bow ends up being little more than a compliment weapon to the Katana than anything that can stand on its own, which flies in the face of the multi-weapon decisions of the rest of the classes. That being said, when the classes are in those right situations, some of the damage they can do versus the PP costs is absurd; a Ranger with a well-timed Fear Eraser or some precise Revolt Aim usage can do thousands of damage as among the highest Boss Break DPS in the game, and the Gunner Chain Trigger is as potentially high damage as ever with far less micromanagement and a better on-screen way of telling when they can go all out. Perhaps the biggest sticking point amidst all of this, however, is the Slayer class and its Gunblade being classified as Ranged — and it has none of the damage penalties the other options have because the game scales it like a melee in DPS output, inherently making it stronger yet riskier than every other ranged option. It is only fitting that Ranger and Gunner received general buffs and additional skills in early February 2024, after the Bouncer got its own to retune Soaring Blades.
  • The Fighter seemingly pales in comparison to the Katana Braver, but the reality is that in the right circumstances, they have the highest DPS in the entire game alongside the Waker and Slayer classes. The problems are that the biggest amounts of this damage requires a foe to be downed, and that both the Twin Daggers and Knuckles have a rather painfully short range with a notable lack of tools and options, moreso than any other melee; they're Difficult, but Awesome, and don't have the whole pretzel fingers of the Slayer, but might be a bit too awkward in regular combat to make the most of them without substantial mastery, much like in base PSO2.
  • When scaled on the overall DPS charts, the Force ends up turning out the single lowest class in the game. While a Talis can utterly chew through mobs like nothing else and are great for PSE Bursts, their actual focus of delivering elemental weakness techniques is slow, awkward and inefficient. While they have a higher chance of causing an elemental down on tougher foes and bosses than any other class, they don't have a Skill on their own to capitalize on it unless you pair with another Class that does. This actually makes them one of the worst picks for high-end bosses because they just can't keep up with any other class, even the Ranged.
  • In a case where it occurs during a single Urgent Quest (The Battle of Halphia Lake), Glen is hated as his support buff (Increase natural PP recovery) is considered to be the most useless compared to the others. ^* Aina and Manon's support buff increase attack and movement speed. Nadereh's lowers Dark Falz's defenses and stops the Darlett mooks in their tracks. And Ilma's adds an additional attack in addition to your regular ones. It's to the point where players will outright abandon the quest if it's Glen who provides support.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The creepy look of NGS Ash's face led to fans immediately cropping or photoshopping his face onto various memes and other characters.
  • While Ash's face was eventually fixed, the hosts of the NGS Prologue 1 stream editing Ash to the point of sheer absurdity for the sake of demonstrating their upgraded character creator was memed to hell and back on its own.
  • And their fingers can move!^ExplanationAmong other things, the original game is notorious for the fact that the hands for character models were apparently never rigged with animation bones (despite being developed during a console generation when rigged hands had become commonplace), meaning hands don't move at all in any circumstance, leading to copious amounts of Narm. The trailers pointing out that the fingers move in this game has been taken by fans as acknowledgement of the aforementioned, which has resulted in some Mundane Made Awesome reactions.
  • Bigg Frogga ^ExplanationAside from the global version's official Twitter memeing on Bigg Frogga, leading some to joke about Big the Cat and Froggy being in the game, the NGS Prologue 4 broadcast had the English dub-over had the hosts overreacting to Bigg Frogga in a comedic tone
  • Foie Me Rappy ^ExplanationA Black Comedy Black Friday joke on the PSO2NGS Twitter feed involves a toy Rappy with "8+ phrases" like "Why am I sweating?" and "Why are we here? Just to suffer?" The responses were littered with desires to throw money at Sega for it.
  • X and Y are Nadereh fanboys.^ExplanationLike with Quna before her, Nadereh's concerts are followed by Urgent Quests within the half-hour. This includes Dark Falz, who was announced at the same time as the concerts.
  • "I'm moving to support." ^ExplanationDuring the fight against Dark Falz Aegis, if Glen's buff is triggered, he will say this line. Due to the relatively useless nature of the buff (doubling up on PP recovery) compared to the others (providing additional DPS one way or another) Glen quickly became something of a Memetic Loser, with players dreading the buff getting used along with the line itself.
• Mis-blamed: Game Navigator Hiro Arai has received backlash from players in regards to the issues with the game, despite the fact that he's essentially the messenger and has no involvement with the game's design.
• Moe:
  • NGS Rupica's design has been very well-received by fans, as they find her new outfit to be even cuter than her PSO2 design.
  • The Region Mags are insanely adorable for being giant round robots. As they hop around after being fed
  • Manon and her Form-Fitting Wardrobe is considered by fans to be as cute as she is sexy. Depending on one's opinion, her second wardrobe, a Minidress of Power, may or may not add to this factor.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • When taking down the boss DOLLS, a big crackling crash sound plays when you've successfully toppled and downed them. There's crystalline-sounding ice version and the electrical-surge of the lightning version that plays when you've immobilized them by status infliction instead.
  • For the Urgent Quest bosses, though, there's a glass-shattering sound that happens when you've inflicted Break on the boss. Whenever that plays, there's your chance to go all-out and throw everything you got before they get back up.
• Narm:
  • In the big fight's finish against Dark Falz Aegis, you get the requisite everyone cheering on the Player Character, but while Crawford and Ilma each get voiced lines in a central room, Dozer subsequently does an arm pump being completely mute. This is after he had an entire Character Story series of conversations and plot emphasis putting him alongside the other major characters as the pseudo-head of Aelio, so they just didn't get his voice actors for anything here.
  • The way character dialogue works seems to only have one character saying something at a time, requiring a voice line and text dialogue to go with it. So it's entirely possible to see characters like Aina start to cry in a more animated cutscene, or someone have a Stunned Silence, and it outright doesn't actually play any noise from the character until the text appears too.
• Obvious Beta: The game at launch was borderline unplayable for several players; in addition to being generally unstable and having jarring performance issues, there were tons of Game Breaking Bugs and oversights. Fortunately, most of these issues were quickly patched out within the month. Keyword being most.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: It's generally agreed that the lack of story makes it difficult to get invested in it, leading to most players just skipping it outright to get to the game. Even with the Retem update bringing on a better plot than Aelio, many still could not be bothered to care. While the release of Chapter 5 has gotten more people on board, subsequent releases have failed to fix the issue of the story's glacial pace with chapters now being released piecemeal every two months, causing even diehard story players to struggle to stay interested.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Katana, initially considered a Scrappy Weapon at its launch back in August 2021, received numerous buffs and Skill updates up to the Kvaris update, and has become one of the game's best melee weapons and one of the best weapons in the game overall. Although this in turn has caused it to garner a bit of a High-Tier Scrappy status (not unlike PSO2 EP2) due to its overwhelming strengths compared to other weapons.
  • For a long time, Bouncer suffered from long-standing accusations of the class's gameplay being clunky and haphazardly designed. The December 2023 introduces an overhaul to Bouncer specifically, addressing the aforementioned issue. This includes a complete visual rework of the class's VFX to make their attacks pop and give them additional impact, reverting the behavior of Photon Blades to their PSO2 incarnation, giving Soaring Blades back a powerful mobility and offensive maneuver, and overhauling several Soaring Blade skills.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
  • Affixing augments in vanilla PSO2 is still the most loathsome mechanics in the game, and the biggest money sink for players min-maxing their characters. Not so much in NGS, where affixing is overhauled and simplified. Weapons and armors already have their augment slots available depending on the equipment levels, forgoing the needs for upslotting equipment by affixing. Plus, affixing augments are simplified by the use of capsules only instead of having to fuse with other equipment that contains desired augment. And the atrocious success rate is now more manageable by using multiple capsules of the same augment to increase the success rate. And that's not to mention other minor improvements for affixing...........
  • After years of the archaic Skill Tree system left over from the vanilla game, where any points you spent could only be refreshed through a Skill Reset Pass which were either very rarely given out or had to be paid for, the same update retired this system in favor of being able to reallocate points freely. Given that Skill Points in New Genesis explicitly give you Battle Power, and certain skills could be rather useless filler (the Slayer has multiple skills that are wasteful past their first point, and some skills are nigh pointless to take for Sub-Classing), this helps take the monetized edge off of prioritizing which skills or passives to take. It also meant that players were now solely having to pay for extra Skill Trees as a matter of convenience for switching, rather than a necessity if you wanted to both main and sub a Class.
  • The Ranger's Blight Bullet had made it redundant to have more than one Ranger in a group, as an enemy could only be debuffed with it once and more than one Ranger were either refreshing the bullet timer or fighting with each other over where to place the bullet. Version 2 made it so while you can't stack bullets, you can put them between different weak points or attack spots on an enemy or boss; suddenly two or three Rangers became beneficial over night so everyone can readily attack more of a foe and Rangers no longer had to trip over each other, especially on the Dark Falz fights.
  • Summoner class was considered a Black Sheep class in base PSO2. While the class is Difficult, but Awesome (which is why this entry isn't placed under Rescued from the Scrappy Heap), the class is criticized due to its severely different mechanic from other classes that only adds unnecessary complexity. NGS simplifies the class mechanic in form of Waker, making the class more in line with other traditional classes. Gone are the raising pets and sweets mechanics, replaced with upgrading appropriate gear just like most classes, with the complexity comes from using different pets for different utilities to maximize damage output.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The forced install of Phantasy Star Online 2 is a point of contention for many people. While the games are meant to be played in unison, the vanilla game being placed on a maintenance mode where no more new content would be produced already made it uninteresting for many newcomers, but the mass bulk of the download is all in PSO2. While PC players can remove it via launcher settings (albeit only after a full installation), console players have no such option on hardware with much more limited space, eating up over 100 gigabytes. This is especially bad for players with internet data caps, as those only interested in New Genesis have to deal with this anyway. This was eventually changed so that NGS can be installed without PSO2, but this created another problem in that if you want to play PSO2, you must install NGS.
  • The lock-on in the vanilla game could be finicky but workable. There's even options carried over for locking on from the character's perspective or the camera's. And yet time and time again, the lock-on in New Genesis can be such a complete and utter nightmare to work with that it's almost not worth it. Enemies targeted well beyond what is directly in front of both you and the camera, the wrong targets at times that make no sense, and even occasionally just ignoring what you may be aiming at and targeting something that defies your settings altogether — you name it, the lock-on will probably stupidly do it. A later update tries to fix this by adding a "Type 3" lock-on option that will attempt to prioritize weak points in front of your character when possible, making it much easier aim at things you want to hit, but it doesn't stop the system from inexplicably locking on to weak points on the opposite side of a larger boss.
  • The gating of trading and use of a Personal Shop behind a premium subscriptions has gotten heat from players following the removal of the FUN Scratch, meaning that it's impossible to sell off unused gear and accessories without shelling out real money. SEGA has stated that this measure is designed as a safeguard against Meseta bots and hackers ruining the in-game economy, but this has done little to stop the Meseta bots from finding a way in to do their business of scamming players while making it incredibly difficult for F2P players to scrounge up the meseta to buy upgrades and cosmetics. The fact that SEGA has now decided to gate the use of a Personal Shop even further by requiring a specific mission to be completed first hasn't gone over well.
  • In response to the ridiculously broken economy of the original game, SEGA overcompensated by introducing severe market regulation mechanics and restrictions on Meseta gain. This includes a change to market price listing in which prices can only be incremented in multiples of 1000 and the seller gets less than the listing price rather than the buyer paying a shop tax, the removal of free Shop Passes to limit the number of players capable of running the market, no longer being able to see the Player IDs of both buyers or sellers, and "Recommended" items on Scratches having a fixed minimum market value of 500,000 Meseta. The restriction on Meseta gain comes in the form of Weekly Tasks; while you can get 500,000 Meseta from Weeklies, unlike PSO2, where ARKS Missions are per character, Weekly Tasks are per account. This makes Alt-itis extremely unviable, since if you aren't a Premium player and want to play multiple characters, you are essentially required to foot the bill for all your characters on an allowance of 500k a week plus a bit extra from Alpha Reactors and Daily Tasks. This also makes buying "Recommended" AC items extremely difficult since the fixed minimum price is equal to the amount of Meseta you get every week, forcing you to effectively choose between improving your gear or buying cosmetics since you don't have enough for both.
  • While the concept of Multi-Weapons has been well received by fans, the mechanics behind it has been criticized by the playerbase. The first issue is that two weapons can’t be combined if they’re not from the same family of weapons.^note For example, you cannot combine a Theseus Rifle with a Trois De Rod. This has made upgrading weapons difficult as it prevents players from switching to a more powerful weapon if they aren’t from the same family of weapons to form a Multi-Weapon. The second issue is creating a Multi-Weapon is expensive, costing 100k N-Measta. There’s also a 10% reduction in damage for weapons that are not associated with your main class for some inexplicable reason. There’s also the fact that PC players can just set up macros, so using those for quick weapon swapping makes Multi-Weapons pointless since the only benefit is convenience, as weapon swapping shortcuts are only slightly slower in terms of switching to the weapon you want on the fly without limiting the number of attack options available.
  • A holdover from vanilla PSO2 is that there's a grand total of one Hunter skill that prevents you from taking hit stun (Hunter Physique). It doesn't matter if you're max level versus a level one mob, or if you merely got scratch damage from a weaker attack in a boss fight, if you take a hit without that skill active or aren't locked in a Photon Art like Fear Eraser that can keep you in place, you're either briefly hitstunned or you're flung off your feet to the ground. While there's air recoveries, if you're too close to the ground or don't realize you were hit you're going to take a solid couple of seconds getting back up, and there's also a nasty effect exclusive to New Genesis in that certain enemies and bosses can juggle you with rapid hit attacks. In a game with slower attacks than the vanilla experience, this makes the slower weapons versus the faster bosses a real pain in the ass for no real payoff compared to simply sticking to faster weapons, which are far safer as a result and typically have little to no damage dropoff by comparison besides for Ranged or Force.
  • While Gigantix enemies are fine conceptually, they have the extremely frustrating stipulation of only spawning during a thunderstorm and despawning when the storm subsides. This effectively means that a Gigantix appearing at all is random, as it can take between minutes and hours for a storm to arrive, and it also means that the time before it despawns is also random. This is on top of Gigantix being extremely hard to kill and hit like a truck, and even if you and/or the players in the same room are strong enough to beat it, you still have to hope it will drop one of the shiny new gear pieces or rare capsules for you. The issue of Gigantix not staying around long enough for players to actually kill it was severe enough that SEGA pushed an emergency maintenance two days after Gigantix enemies were implemented specifically to fix this. An update made them only despawn when there are no active players fighting the Gigantix after the storm passes, giving much-needed reprieve from the DPS time crunch.
  • Preset Augments have been disparaged repeatedly by the community due to being the game's form of endgame grind. It is often compared unfavorably to the notorious Hit% stat from Phantasy Star Online in the sense that it is completely RNG to get on any equipment, there is enough variance in what results you can get on the equipment itself that even if something does drop with a Preset it may not be what you want, and the gain you get from it is large enough to not be considered a marginal upgrade but the difference between equipment with no Preset and equipment with is small enough for people to not consider endgame farming worth it. It's a stark contrast to PSO2 where the Rare Random Drop flavor of the Episode was generally of an objectively higher quality than gear you could get easier and the difference between having it and not having it was substantial enough that many players considered it worth the grind even if it meant going a long time without seeing anything meaningful.
  • The PSE system, despite being heavily simplified from its PSO2 version, is just as frustrating as ever. The short explanation is that whenever you kill an enemy, there's a chance^note estimated to be roughly 10% that you will get a PSE Level, but there's also a chance^note estimated to also be roughly 10% when in an "E" marker, and 20% otherwise that PSE will decrease by one level. Also, once PSE is at Level 4, you can only start a Burst by completing an E-Trial. It's extremely common for PSE to fluctuate wildly in combat and never hit and stay at Level 4 long enough for a Burst to trigger, and it's even worse when it hits 4 then drops to 0. The upshot is that there is a "pity" system that prevents PSE from decreasing if 10 minutes pass after a room is created or the previous Burst, but this requires waiting, and "storm" weather locks PSE at Level 4 while they are active, but this conflicts with Gigantix spawn schedule, forcing you to choose between farming Gigantix or farming PSE. The Retem update tweaked a few of these values to make Bursting more frequent, such as reducing the pity timer to 5 minutes and decreasing the odds of getting gauge drops, but it's still pretty frustrating watching the gauge fluctuate outside of pity.
  • The Kaizaar exchange does not carry any attributes over from the preceding Roks weapon. This was not mentioned at all by the game or by official sources, and many players were under the impression that it functioned as an upgrade (i.e. Atlas Ex or Ophistia-NT) and not a literal trade, leading to many players becoming furious over having kitted out their +50 Rox weapons with top-of-the-line Augments only for them to vanish upon trade. SEGA's official statement following the response didn't help much, essentially amounting to a "we'll tell you next time".
  • For all of the interesting exploration Kvaris had, you will not find many who commend the Floating Boards. They're both momentum-driven, in that they travel slower going uphill and go faster downhill, and yet not, relying on boosts and boost panels for any real speed and otherwise capping out fairly fast, but the real problem comes in with the precision; the boards can completely halt all movement if they so much as meet any uneven terrain that isn't smooth hills (despite being a floating board), their turning radius is absolutely untenable without using the brake turning, which then goes the other way around by being perhaps a bit too tight, and all jumps are swiftly met with being stuck unable to shift your movement mid-air, just which direction you move when you land. Annoying when chasing a dropship or trying to navigate slopes carefully, downright infuriating when the Board Races demand precision to maximize your points and the boards simply aren't pleasant enough for most players to hit that standard; some more difficult races can outright become irrecoverable and force a reset if you so much as miss a single jump! If the Alliance Quest for that week involves Board races, the general consensus is that it's Mediola Area 2 or bust.
  • The way damage scales is more than a bit awkward for some players who feel the min-max grind simply isn't worth bothering with. When your stats say you might have +50% Melee potency damage from all your various augments combined, the actual scaling going on in the background is far more understated, only adding up to miniscule boosts overall even if the damage gradually adds up; between the soft-caps to damage depending on your level versus an enemy's and the most effective sweet spot of damage requiring pushing your potency to at least 110%, it's damn well annoying to get everything together to reach that point. Even worse, most of a character's damage is in their Class Level versus the current enemy and overall Battle Power rather than their gear until that sweet spot, so while having a maxed out 8-Star weapon is obviously going to be much stronger than a base 1-Star, the individual gap with each new top-tier weapon tends to matter very, very little until the next Star tier of weapons comes out. Combine this with Meseta costs being split between upgrades and cosmetics for many players, with upgrades scaling to hundreds of thousands of Meseta racking up rather fast at the minimum and the best Augments being extraordinarily difficult to gain without playing the market (and unable to be brought to the inevitable next tier of weapons if you attach them to something, unlike base PSO2 at least letting you do that much), and it's not uncommon to see many people running with lower-tier gear in the latest content because it's a proverbial nightmare for gains that only really add up in the toughest content.
  • Battle Power itself is held in contention because of how it works. Your Class Level, Skill Points spent / Skills learned, and your current Weapon and three Units by upgrade level and augments (plus the individual tiers of the augments themselves) all bolster your BP. The problem is this and your Level are the only checks for content; it's entirely possible to cheese BP requirements by maxing out lower-tier gear and slapping on the oodles of later augments that get them extra high BP. This can result in the infamous Dark Falz Aegis Urgent Quest issue where numerous parties were having problems beating it fast enough for the S-Rank requirement, because entire lobbies might be filled with people packing old Retem or Kvaris items skirting by on inflated BP and thus couldn't do the expected damage fast enough.
  • Duel Quests sound fine on paper: Lv. 70 battles against each region's Big Bad, only able to be done solo. Except even if you have the best gear in the game as of its release in April 2023, you cannot complete it. Not only do they hit as hard as a Gigantix, but they have a comparable amount of HP that you're supposed to deplete in five minutes, or less than three if you want to S-Rank it, which is physically unfeasible unless you settle out a weapon with the corresponding Defi augments, which all individually pack +7% Potency and only work for Duel Quests least players run around with easily-acquirable, gaming-breaking augments. Except you should also be packing these on top-tier weapons and armor, and you can't easily switch back to any prior augments, meaning the most effective way to complete a Duel Quest is to make an entire extra set of endgame gear specifically for them, a crap ton of Arms Refiners and millions of Meseta included. Needless to say, for many players this is downright impossible to do, and encourages either sacrificing worthwhile augments just for this quest type or simply never doing it. The time limit was later extended to 10 minutes, making most of the bosses beatable even with normal gear, and the development team later went on to state that development priority for Duel Quests would be reduced going into 2024 due to negative feedback.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Creative Space is designed to be astoundingly versatile and unlimiting as a content creation tool. It's very easy to sink far too many hours building with it as long as you have ideas to execute.
• Special Effects Failure: The PlayStation 5 version and a strong enough PC can actually hit 4K visuals inherently, pushing the engine to its maximum graphical potential. Like with the Global release for the original game, though, the Xbox Series X just straight up runs the game on Xbox One code with only a boost in raw performance, while locked to middling visuals for seemingly no reason but Sega simply never updating and optimizing with better hardware in mind, resulting in a blurry 1440p image and lesser graphics settings.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • A small minority of fans were not impressed by the combat system in New Genesis based on beta impressions, given its attempts to slow down the pace of combat from current PSO2 but still maintain an overall increase when compared to the original launch of the game. The result is that a lot of formerly fast and fluid weapons now feel slower and heavier due to a lack of good cancel windows and flexibility, which upset players who liked the hectic pace of combat from the original game.
  • A few fans had also complained that the beta was small and lacked things to do, leading them to getting bored fast. This is despite the fact that SEGA explicitly stated that the beta had a very limited amount of content and that the main purpose of the beta was to stress-test the servers.
  • The announcement of Urgent Quests no longer being scheduled at all unless otherwise stated stirred up some controversy. Urgent Quests in the original game were notorious for how they effectively time-gated all the good gear, and this announcement worried many as it spurred fears that they would not be able to plan ahead for Urgents and thus miss out when they least expect it. Others are more optimistic, as SEGA had stated that they want New Genesis to shift away from Urgents being meta and are hopeful that Urgents will either be not as important for gearing or be frequent enough to alleviate the fact that they aren't scheduled.
  • The client being available a day before launch revealed that SEGA had put Daiki Hamazaki back in the director's seat for New Genesis. This caused a huge portion of the fanbase to become extremely worried, as he is commonly associated with EPISODE 5 of the original game, which became a Never Live It Down moment for the fanbase as he is considered directly responsible for many of the unpopular decisions that lead to the game spiraling into an Audience-Alienating Era. Hamazaki was never truly absolved of his bad rep even after EPISODE 5 was considered saved (partially the result of the dev team backpedaling on some choices and deciding to listen to their fans), and players are scared that Hamazaki's direction could cause a redux of problems that the game had faced before. With the game actually out their fears had unfortunately proven founded, although not all of the blame is laid on Hamazaki this time due in part to players being aware of Executive Meddling problems from upstairs overshadowing some of the game's less important flaws. By the release of ver. 2, Hamazaki was effectively Kicked Upstairs by being promoted to Series Producer.
• That One Attack:
  • Rest assured that you will grow to hate Garongos in the early game for their rolling attack. If you can catch them before they go into it, you can stun them to death easily— but the moment they start the animation to turn towards you and rev up a roll, they suddenly become Immune to Flinching for the entire attack's duration. If you're a melee that got too caught up in a Photon Art, prepare to kiss the floor.
  • Most of the region bosses have massive Area of Effect attacks that can hurt like hell. None are quite like the Nex Aelio / Nex Vera which has two of them back-to-back, with the first one having a prep time you need to know is coming if you hope to reasonably escape it, and the latter being so large that you might not be able to escape the radius on top of being all but an assured kill if you get caught in it without a guard or counter. In the 2nd Anniversary's Limited Quest, it became painfully apparent how many players aren't so well-prepared for dealing with the attacks in a notably smaller arena than usual for them.
  • Dustyl Vera is infamous in its own right for its mid-battle Desperation Attack — where it subsequently becomes armored as its Break gauge no longer depletes, and it subsequently spams attacks like no tomorrow. At the time of the content's release, most public parties couldn't even consistently break the phase by attacking its giant guitar axe, meaning the attacks lasted for an excessively long time and the boss ended up taking what felt like forever to kill. The sheer amount of attacks flying out all at once and back-to-back doesn't help either.
• That One Boss:
  • If your preferred weapon lacks a ranged option or a gap-closer, Nex Aelio (and its Urgent Quest equivalent Nex Vera) is going to be a friggin' struggle, and unlike the other two entries below you have to fight it to progress in the story and unlock the rest of Halpha. It has a number of ranged attacks designed to pepper player positions with damage, including a continuous spray of flaming breath, and loves to fly around and turn its entire body into wide slams, swinging its limbs all over the place; for Sword-exclusive Hunters or Fighters in general, this makes it very difficult to approach at lower altitudes without a high probability of getting smacked by empty air when it swings its entire body, never mind trying to pursue it into the air where the classes are often their most vulnerable and weakest. That's not to say everyone has it easy; get it in the Neusen Plant and you're likely to get a healthy helping of its target points clipping into the terrain, breaking your auto-targeting and making it extremely awkward to fight.
  • The Kelkundo is basically a Mirror Match against a Jet Boots Bouncer. This makes him very annoying to fight; many of his attacks have relatively low startup time, less noticeable visual cues, and janky hitboxes. Being a humanoid enemy not much bigger than the players themselves also gives it comparatively high mobility and makes it a very flighty target. The Gigantix variant is one of the most frustrating Gigantix to battle, as its attacks can one-shot or two-shot players on top of the above issues with them.
  • The Ikusa Bujin is what would happen if you took a Bujin and gave it triple the range and twice as much jank. It has enough range to punish even Rangers and Forces hacking away at it from afar, and once it Turns Red its moveset changes completely, including giving it a One-Hit Kill grab attack. Turning on the higher ATK settings in Trinitas also makes it possible for almost any of its attacks to one-shot, reducing the room for error to virtually none.
  • Malignant Dark Falz Aegis in Halphia Lake Interception Part II was the contender of the hardest boss in game for some time. It's basically Dark Falz Aegis' phase two but stronger, faster, has additional attacks, and also possesses attacks that ignores guard/i-frames. The Battle Power requirement of 3950 isn't just a fluke: the boss is the test of everything you have: skills, reflex, gears, and attributes. Much like Sign of the Planetbreaker, you only have death limits of 5, which you'll meet more likely than not, especially if you can't keep up with the attacks. Comparison with Twisted With Hatred, the hardest boss in base PSO2 is simply unavoidable.
  • If you think Malignant Dark Falz Aegis is hard, say hello to Dark Falz Dalion from Planetcrusher Blitz. Possessing even higher Battle Power requirement of 4050, this boss is way, way harder than most players expected. The boss summons Fragments, basically the pawns of the main thing, to battle you separately, and the party must be split even: leaving a fragment unattended will cause said fragment to nuke the players from afar. Not to mention that Dalion possesses even more unblockable attacks, one of them covers area so huge, if you start in the wrong position, you won't be able to avoid the attack in time. However, the most annoying part of the boss fight is the Mobile Cannon phase: you are forced to use Mobile Cannon on the second phase, and you have to keep up the DPS by keep holding the normal attack button^note The Mobile Cannon attack will have increased damage after being held for some time, but will lose it when you stop holding the attack button, being hit, or dodging attacks, which is essential for beating the boss within time limit. And the worst part, the Cannon Phase takes up almost the entiretiy of the boss fight, so those unfamiliar with Mobile Cannons will have very, very hard time keeping up. Unlike Dark Falz Aegis, which has an UQ so players will have some kind of preview of the boss' movesets, Dalion has no such thing, as it's a standalone Major Target Suppression quest, and the UQ version isn't released until sometime later in May 2024, meaning there will be lots and lots of trial-and-error runs, especially if you're playing with pugs.
• That One Level: Rayjord Gorge is the single most despised area in the game due to its resident Scrappy Mechanic: Cold Damage. Standing anywhere inside the area beyond the safety of the Ryuker Device without 100% Cold Damage Resistance will cause you to take periodic damage constantly and inflicts the Freeze status every three ticks, making combat a massive pain in the ass. Cold Damage Resistance is granted by Region Mag buffs, Quick Food, Augments, and booster tickets; the former two can grant up to 60% Cold Damage Resist on its own, but the rest must be filled out on your own. Booster tickets can only be obtained as rare E-Trial drops in Kvaris or from horrendously overpriced trades in Kvaris Camp, while the Decold Augments needed to gain resistance come in Decold Standard and Decold stat flavors; Decold Standard is completely useless outside of Reynold, making it extremely undesirable, while Decold stat augments are extremely costly and not very worthwhile for what is essentially a glorified single stat affix. You do get one of each Decold stat for free via Red Container Units, but it's not enough to bring you to 100%. Aside from this mess of a mechanic, Rayjord Gorge itself is a massive flat canyon that takes a while to traverse due to only having a single Ryuker, punishing you even harder for not having 100% Cold Damage Resist, and it is the only place where you can encounter the Ancient Enemy, a periodically-spawning boss that is a required kill to trade for the Kaizar weapon series and must be farmed multiple times, effectively forcing you to bend to the game's will if you want to get the best 7* weapons. When the Stia region brought 8* weapons of comparable power, especially with the Neos Astraean weapons from Dark Falz Aegis, Rayjord Gorge was abandoned immediately. When it was redone in February 2024, torches which provided protection from the extreme cold were also added, to the player base's jubilation; there was a brief period where the torches were bugged, at which point 100% Cold Resist items were handed out to all players as a workaround until the bugs were squashed.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • For players of the original who were attracted to the powerful Scion Classes, New Genesis scaling back the combat pace and making classes more rigid once again in exchange for more fluid battle options felt like a step back compared to the extremely flexible, rapid, and overwhelming gameplay that the Scions provided. Defenders of New Genesis's gameplay design choices point out that Scions were a huge reason why enemies started becoming increasingly unbalanced against the core classes and that the game really needed a blank slate than just pushing Scions harder.
  • Fans of Katana Braver in the original game immediately expressed disapproval with the New Genesis version of Katana, comparing it unfavorably to Phantom Katana (itself a High-Tier Scrappy) due to its overly flashy but Awesome, but Impractical loadout. Its bizarre counter disposition giving it the worst Counter in the game also baffled fans since Katana counters were the hallmark of its gameplay in the previous game. Of course, this all changed once they gained the "Katana PA Combo Finish", which replaces their counter with the game's number one Game-Breaker.
  • Players who liked playing through the story of the original PSO2 were pretty miffed that the plot of New Genesis feels incredibly scaled back by comparison, with main story updates being reduced to bi-annual updates (corresponding to map expansions) and being less substantial. The revelation from Word of God that this is an intentional design choice made to compensate for story being mandatory angered players even more as it came off to players as the dev team being incredibly tone-deaf as to how the fans feel about the separation of story and gameplay and listening to the wrong crowd about how they should approach the problem.
  • Techter players cried foul after the Jet Boots PA Surging Impulse was nerfed within a week of release in response to an oversight that made it extremely powerful when used in conjunction with a Wand/Rod/Talis.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Ams Kvaris, the Climax Boss of Kvaris region, doesn't have any connection with the story, either with the Kvaris siblings or the region as a whole, and feels like a Giant Space Flea Out Of Nowhere during the course of the story. This is rather egregious compared to previous region bosses which has significant impact on the story^note Nex Aelio is said to have ravaged Aelio and ARKS a long time ago, and serves as the major threat during the mission to rescue Dozer's squad; Renus Retem is responsible for countless deaths in Retem and the main reason why the region cannot assist Aelio against Dark Falz; Glenn has unfinished business with Nils Stia, who has previously killed plenty of ARKS members, including Hibana. There are several ways to integrate Ams Kvaris into the story, such as being the powerful threat researched by Ilma, thus responsible for his disappearance, or being an unseen threat that prevents Ilma from contacting his siblings during his research, or both; but Ams Kvaris has no such role. Ironic, considering its humanoid appearance compared to other bosses' more animalistic design.
• Too Cool to Live: Garoa, an absolute hunk of a man and one of the most powerful warriors on the planet. Granted, the game never explicitly says he's dead, but he clearly takes a Wave-Motion Gun to the face while fighting Dark Falz in single combat. Hell of a way to go out.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Even besides whatever abominations some folks might make for their Player Character, the actual cast in-game look more than a little off. Big anime eyes, exaggerated motion capture and realistic visual shading all clash to deliver an eerie look at times, and when characters aren't using expressions in some scenes, they look more like dolls than the actual DOLLS. It actually became something of an effort for a number of players to try to subvert this through articulate work on their characters. An optional cel shading feature was added to fix this by giving characters the option to use a more natural 2D-esque look.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Several 15* weapons from PSO2 have unique Potentials that specially distinguish them from NGS weapons. Although this seems like it would open the potential for them to be a unique weapon class of their own, 15* weapons are ultimately rendered useless after the first hour of the game as their stats and augments make them completely irrelevant compared to the superior NGS weapons.
  • An early tutorial blurb will go out of its way to tell you that specific enemies (the ALTERs) will change at night, getting stronger and more dangerous. If they do, it's so minor it doesn't matter. They die about as fast as they do during the day, don't really change in aggression or attack patterns, and effectively are just the same as always, just with glowing parts. The mechanics are there but they matter so little it makes you wonder why they bothered.^note ALTERS tend to drop Alts Soul during the day and Alts Secreta at night, but that's the only meaningful difference between the two.
  • The races certainly aren't underused in number, as all of the regions have a fair assortment of Dash (on-foot) and Board Races each. But no one actually raced each other competitively in them like the developers had expected; while you could do a weekly Alliance Task for three races to get requisite badges, the actual point of the races fell to the wayside and there was no meaningful items to farm from them. Continual ARKS Record competitions have put certain races up for their own badge earning, pitting players against other's scores and times as an attempt to salvage the mechanic, which ultimately means that unless you're a perfectionist or do Alliance weeklies, you might run a single race every once in a while and then ignore them for weeks on end again. There's also Mediola Outer Area 2: Board, which defied its original intentions and became a way to smash Complex Minerals instead of waiting for chunks of magma to start falling.
  • Multi-Weapon was a major selling point for the game, inclining players to be able to fuse multiple variants of the same core weapon class (ie. a Primm Sword and a Primm Rifle) into something that can be used in multiple Weapon Palette bars with just one weapon. Great on paper, incredibly arbitrary in practice. When it means two of a weapon class, that means for the rarest or hardest-to-earn, it was physically impossible for most of the playerbase to readily use the feature since it still meant you had to do the vast majority of the progression for having a second rare weapon copy and only took away the need to upgrade the spare; weapons like the Kaizaar and Neos Astraean got the Kaizaar Mk. I and Neos Justitean respectively that could Multi-Weapon into their bigger brothers solely to make this easier for those with one top regional weapon grinded. But then if you're playing any class that isn't Waker or Slayer, you're probably just going to Multi-Weapon your two class weapons together; all Sub-Class weapons get a 10% damage reduction, meaning the best use for this tool is entirely for certain class mobility options that help for traversal. Otherwise, Multi-Weapon is effectively little more than a convenience tool, and while a lot of players use it, the big billing use ended up nigh pointless as the game didn't at all develop any genuine dynamics for the mechanic. And when you consider it's entirely possible to just set up hotkeys for weapon switching, which is only a bit slower than multi-weapons, you can't really blame people for not considering it worth the effort and resources.
• The Woobie: Manon. Throughout the story it's clear there's something more than the Survivor Guilt following Aelio Town's destruction she's going through. It first comes to a head when the raid in Stia has a soldier die protecting her, causing her to absolutely lose it. With Chapter 5, Manon's bitterness towards Senseless Sacrifice is revealed to stem from the excessive guilt she carries with herself for her perceived part in the artificial war between ARKS and DOLLs. People dying for her sake when she holds herself to the reason that they're dying compounds her guilt to its breaking point. After ARKS finally achieves their greatest victory yet, she resigns herself to quietly disappearing and regretfully leaving her True Companions behind with just a few words to try and put an end to the hidden creator of the conflict before it can escalate any further, but Zephetto points out Aina and 909 won't let her disappear so easily, inevitably getting entangled with the mystery of Leciel. When Aina and Manon reunite, Manon can no longer maintain the veil on her emotions, collapsing into a crying mess, both desperately begging Aina for forgiveness while ready to bear Aina's ire. Thankfully, Aina's Character Development has let her process her grief and maintain a positive outlook, giving Manon the hug she desperately needs.
• Woolseyism: Jet Boots has a dedicated Limit Break Skill named after its strongest PA in PSO2, which reads as "シュツルムジーカー" in Japanese. Once again, this reads like complete gibberish, so the Fan Translation came up with the name "Sturm Gigue" in an attempt to produce a reading vaguely similar to what the katakana sounds like. The official translation again dodges the issue by simply renaming it to "Jetsweep Jolt".