PSO2: New Genesis is probably a misfire, but that didn’t stop me from having a great time with it
After Thanksgiving this year I got pretty sick. On the one hand it was a pretty nasty cold, and the cough didn’t completely leave after two weeks. (After that, family emergency followed, wiping my December clean.) On the other, I had just purchased a brand new gaming PC, and this unfortunate timing allowed me to play through Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, a whole damn MMORPG, in that disassociated, blurry period of time. (I wanted to experience the Dragon Quest III remake with a clearer mind, so I’ve put that off.)
Truth is, I wouldn’t play an MMORPG without a good excuse. I consider them too dangerous, too compelling, especially for my ADHD checklist-achieving ass. I’d get lost. I’d start living unhealthy… hey, wait a second. I didn’t like being sick, but being sick– and the holiday season following my sickness– definitely made for a fine excuse.
I like action games with satisfying combat, and I don’t like watching cooldown icons. So if it’s gonna be an MMORPG for me, it’s gonna be PSO. It helps that I’ve always adored the PSO Y2K sci-fi aesthetic— anime people wearing bright, sharp-lined outfits with the occasional day-glo stripe, utterly impractical swords that glow with screaming LED light, pearl white iPod architecture— and wish more games went down this road.
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New Genesis has been out since 2021, but it was a threadbare release (a possible Covid victim?), and as I just mentioned, I didn’t have a computer that was up to the task anyway. Showing up three years late to the party was actually quite a good idea, as today, the game's world map is finished, along with most of its content, and I got to play through just about everything in under a month (and about 60 hours). As I climbed and flew through each section of New Genesis’ massive, sprawling wilderness map, I noted by checking old news articles that it took two more years to implement the three more regions this game eventually added after its launch.
I can’t overstate how large the world in New Genesis is: it approaches the scale of the Hyrule seen in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with the exception that you can move through it much faster. Traversing and exploring this land is rarely an objective in the game’s rote checklist quest flow, but just like in the open-world Zeldas, it feels like you’d be missing out on most of the game’s appeal if you didn’t actually climb the mountains and explore the caves, and fly through the sky for its own sake.
The best of this game is hiding behind a waterfall. It’s the spectacular view off an impossible mountain peak. It’s finding a little tiny rock where there’s only space for you to stand, and when you do so, the game plays old Phantasy Star music for you, because it secretly wanted you to see this place and enjoy this view.
But why is New Genesis big? In what sense does an open world of untouched wilderness serve PSO2, the massively multiplayer online action RPG?
Well, that’s the thing: It doesn’t, really. New Genesis the world and PSO2 the MMO are kind of at odds, actually. The dungeon combat is as always a riotous good time, but as a loot game, New Genesis fails to even qualify. This beautiful massive world is full of materials to forage and mine, items that players never ever actually need to use outside of filling daily-quest quotas for their own sake. With no need to upgrade your gear nor any meaningful character customization, you end up forced to ignore the experience bar and the quest checklist and make your own fun.
What’s New Genesis?
As you’d expect from Sega, New Genesis is a weird, ambitious project. Sega had a big, profitable hit in Japan with PSO2 all through the 2010s (including a pretty large niche market of quietly tolerated players from outside Japan, among which was myself) and they wanted to keep their massive player base intact for any potential sequel.
So they decided, why do PSO3 as a separate product? Why not just make PSO3 an expansion of PSO2, and keep all those players by default? And that’s what they did.
New Genesis is a simultaneous sequel/reboot, though I suspect only those precious few players who played through PSO2’s optional story in its entirety fully understand what’s happened here. In any case, 1000 years after the original game, the player crash lands on planet Halpha on a pod like Vegeta, dressed exactly like they were the last time they played PSO2. (For me, this was Guilty Gear Xrd May cosplay.) The natives are used to this— they call your sort “the Meteorn”— and they quickly draft you into the planet’s endless war against invading monsters called, significantly, the DOLLS. Cue battling, leveling, and bosses.
PSO2 and New Genesis inter-operate a bit, and you can go back and play PSO2 any time if you have 100 more GB on your hard drive that aren’t doing anything. Even some of your fashion from PSO2 (like my aforementioned cosplay) carries over. But your hoard of loot from the previous game is useless, all of it superseded by even the weakest weapons and armor in New Genesis. Looking at my own massive hoard of rare PSO2 gear, now reduced to useless data points, made me really think about why I don't pick up MMOs very often.
This time the story is mandatory— and in my experience nobody played it last time— and unfortunately it’s quite flat. The player joins up with Aina and Manon, your perky girlfriend and your sad girlfriend respectively, and takes on various missions between the two tiny cities and the two tiny base camps that comprise the baffling whole of human society on Halpha.
The tension between the city and the base camp is one of the first weird things about New Genesis’ setting. The original PSO2 is a dungeon RPG with a single hub area inside a larger city— like a Y2K mall for space mercenaries— which contains everything players need before they step out into battle. New Genesis has small towns that serve only to replicate the features of this hub, which feels very strange when they are depicted as the only civilization on the planet.
(The player’s “hometown”, which is destroyed in the first hour or so of play, was, funny enough, the only suburban residential district that seems to have existed on Halpha.)
Aelio’s Central City, the capital of the game, is actually a pretty cute little town, a place you can imagine people living. But Retem City is no more than a small desert bazaar carved into the decaying body of some massive fallen spacecraft, and the “cities” in the later, more remote regions are just base camps with only the bare essentials in them. I’m not opposed to the PSO2 hub, or to keeping missions and quests all in one place, but it felt weird to me from the very first moment. Where does anybody live? (In Minecraft, as it turns out, but I’ll get to that.)
Though its ending remains untold as of this writing, the player’s quest is rather dull throughout: meet new characters, fight a boss, be told you’re the greatest to ever do it, repeat. That cycle would be fine if any of the characters we met were compelling, but they’re all the most rote of types, and the cutscenes— “okay guys, we’re going to talk about attacking the dungeon now, the plan is to go into the dungeon and beat up the monsters”— drag. I can’t say how good or bad PSO2’s story was— I didn’t play enough of it, but what I did play was certainly wilder than this— but I can definitely say New Genesis is not a game to play for a compelling story.
An action game first and an RPG second
Anyway, in the course of your world tour you meet fellow ARKS defenders (though they sure seem like attackers to me) and beat up a whole hell of a lot of monsters together. If you only know PSO from the original games and weren’t around for PSO2, you might be surprised to hear that PSO2’s combat is seriously chaotic, as players battle ten or so monsters at once. Going solo is possible but not really advisable, as the game isn't designed for most player classes to be able to deal with hordes solo. The game even assigns solo players a team of rather capable CPU friends by default.
Breaking from PSO1/2’s action game “stage” structure, major dungeons in New Genesis are large free-form maps where you’ll run into groups of monsters every few steps and decide whether you want to fight them or not. Should you make short work of one gang, the game takes that as a sign to throw more at you. This ultimately scales up into an event called a PSE Burst, where monsters spawn nonstop at high speeds while you Whack-A-Mole them as fast as you can. You’ll probably fight a boss at the end, and all through the battle a mountain of cheap “rare” items will flood into your backpack from your defeated foes.
The original PSO2's PSE Burst convinced me that loot games are actually gambling games. The PSE Burst is a slot machine jackpot mechanic, and the dungeons are a big, wide-open casino. In the endgame I found myself “spinning” in one dungeon over and over again to get the only items that were worth anything.
The maps are huge on paper, but again the efficiency drive of the MMO takes over: you just walk into them and fight the first clump of monsters you see until whatever quest brought you to the dungeon is cleared. As annoying as some of the stages were in PSO2 when you flipped switches for the 200th time, I think I preferred the approach of procedurally generated themed stages with unique objectives versus wide-open 24-hour killing fields.
Though your big attacks feel omnipotent and you can certainly mow down hordes of enemies, players never get quite so powerful in New Genesis that the combat stops being about player skill. Just a few hits will kill a speedy attacker like my character, and there’s a lot of dodge rolling and parrying attacks just in time involved in defeating even weak bosses. When there are ten or twenty monsters on the screen, “just dodge/parry it” is a lot easier said than done.
This is an action game first and an RPG second, which is what I like about it. Even my “support” class, the Techter, is meant to apply a buff one time, heal if they absolutely have to, and otherwise spend the entire battle flying directly up to the boss’ face and slamming it with a hammer (Oh, I’m sorry, a “wand”; when armed with this weapon, the Techter is definitely a magical girl) over and over again, swatting aside the boss’ foolish attempts to retaliate with expertly timed Street Fighter 3 parries.
Even so, bosses take a lot of concentrated effort to take down, so you're on your toes the whole time. Battles with various forms of Dark Falz push the game's limits, and if you wander into a mysterious pyramid you'll find some real-deal challenges that will embarrass even maxed-out characters.
And then you take your loot and your XP and you make your guy stronger, right? Not in this game, actually.
The gear? Oh, we just give the gear out for free, here
This has a lot to do with the fact that I am playing this game in December 2024, years after the first players would have worked through it. I can only write about the experience I had in December 2024; it’s not the experience others had in other years.
And in December 2024, rather than forcing them to work with PSO2’s needlessly complex, money-grubbing, and frequently cruel equipment enhancement system, New Genesis simply hands players tricked-out gear suitable to their level at a few landmarks in the game. This gear is not the best possible gear for the player’s level, but it’s also better than anything the player would be able to get without weeks of pointless grinding. At level 65, an event awarded me a weapon that I found more than good enough for any boss all the way up to level 95.
When I finally crafted and tweaked a weapon of my own in the endgame, it was only slightly— and I mean maybe one percent— stronger than what I already had. As I write this, further gains seem to depend on running the same dungeon over and over again to get hundreds of rare drops. That is generally the point at which I begin to resent a game and stop playing it, so I don’t expect to get much further.
So gearing up isn’t really necessary in New Genesis. Endless item exchanges offer generations’ worth of weapons that were probably best-in-game at some point and completely inferior to what the game sent me for free. Through experience, you begin to learn that the dopamine-inducing “RARE DROP!” alert on the screen usually doesn't mean anything anymore.
Character customization is streamlined from PSO2 and much more flexible (you can re-spec whenever you want; PSO2 was cruel about this), but unfortunately this means there’s only really one build for any given class/weapon combination, which makes one wonder why there’s a skill tree at all. Perhaps, since the game has action combat, players wouldn’t know at all what abilities they had— like my weapon’s parry and counter— unless they checked them off on a tree and read their descriptions.
What’s this game really about?
If you ask me, PSO2: New Genesis is about three things: bopping monsters, dress-up and exploring. And yes, the dress-up part is more important than the exploring part.
With, eventually, no real reward for fighting monsters, you’ll want to explore the game world. Blatantly inspired by Zelda: Breath of the Wild (fair enough; who wasn’t), New Genesis offers a vast world for players to run, climb, fly and even snowboard through. (The Field Race, an optional Sonic-style time attack mission placed all over the game world, is inspired.) On paper, all these vast expanses exist for you to go foraging for materials in. But in practice, the materials go to little use; after thousands of rocks mined, did I ever actually use one?
Still, as I said before you’ll want to explore the game world because it’s worth exploring in and of itself. I was stunned by the sheer amount of detail and design work put into the biomes paired with how completely extraneous they are to the game. Halpha is a planet where a thousand years of nature has grown over and taken root among wreckage that PSO2 players will find weirdly familiar. There’s quiet world-building that indicates a lot of thought was given to these places beyond them being the typical PSO “forest,” “desert” and “ice” zones.
(Halpha doesn’t make a ton of sense when the big story reveal drops either, but I’ll leave that one for you to find out.)
One of my favorite spots is the mysteriously crescent-shaped mountain in Aelio, the first big “wow” spot of the game with a breathtaking view that begs players to take a massive leap and glide down to earth minutes and miles away. It turns out the reason for its odd shape was the failed test shot of a massive cannon. Another is a range of cliffs in the desert region of Retem, grown around the ruins of a massive anti-gravity device, leaving a sea of “floating platforms” for players to hop around and explore. Early in the game's hellish volcanic region Stia, just off the coast there's an inexplicable icy refuge in the back of a mountain, and it is delightful to discover it.
Every time I encountered a new region it seemed bland and generic, but I’d always be proven wrong the more I explored. I really recommend you look around Halpha for its own sake, because the people who built it really did something special, and not many people— even players of this game– will ever get to notice or appreciate it in its entirety.
And there’s dress-up!
From what I saw of this game on social media, I kind of already knew that the real game was dress-up. PSO2’s extremely in-depth character creator returns in New Genesis with sharper models and even better customization. It doesn’t limit you on any body feature you could imagine, so you’ll see a lot of uh, risque fantasy waifus running around the New Genesis world; it’s clearly meant for that.
(Normie gamer's game Street Fighter 6 is full of deformed Gumby dolls; cool eccentric PSO2 is populated entirely by players’ beloved original characters. Mine, too.)
Player fashion is probably the reason this game is still operating: this free-to-play (but really subscription-required) game has every variety of gacha, mostly for clothing items. Even I paid $40 on the gacha, as I happened to start playing this game during a tie-in with Melty Blood and couldn’t resist cosplaying my character as the Type-Moon heroines, or turning my floating Mag companion into Neco-Arc.
(It's actually not that random; Melty Blood's relationship with PSO goes all the way back to the very first game, for which Sega granted French Bread permission to keep a couple of animations in which Mecha-Hisui used PSO weapons.)
But that was just a step in: I found myself wanting to dress my character more appropriately to the sci-fi setting, and pretty soon I was mix-and-matching in the Salon with the huge wardrobe the game hands out for completing its battle pass. I imagine if you’re a long-time player, you’ve got looks for days.
Monetization? All of it
Speaking of battle passes and all that, you might be wondering what kind of monetization options New Genesis keeps the lights on with. The answer, innovatively, is “everything”. To keep it brief, you basically need two different subscriptions to function (the base one which affords you reasonable inventory space and the ability to buy/sell items with other players, and “materials storage” to hold a stash of upgrade materials which will otherwise crowd your inventory). There are regular gachas for cosmetic items on top of that, as well as a battle pass that’s mostly for cosmetics as well, along with other little up-sells too numerous to list and easy to ignore.
(The ability to buy and sell gacha items is I think the most fascinating feature of PSO2’s game economy: the assurance that even if you don’t like what you get in the gacha, you’ll still be able to sell it for millions of Meseta is effectively a loophole for the game to sell currency directly to players. Akiha Tohno’s hairdo alone made me 9 mil, more than I ever actually needed for anything I did in the game.)
The monetization is not as aggressive as the original PSO2, which could be actively off-putting with the amount of amenities it wanted players to pay for. But it’s still a lot: an in-game trading card game seems like a lot of fun, until you play your first human opponent (few and far between) and realize that to have any hope of winning, you need to pay up for better cards.
Speaking of monetization, did I mention there’s Minecraft in there? No, seriously, replacing the previous game’s real estate system is the “Creative Space”, a remote area apart from the rest of the game where players can build their own house or, hell, whatever they want. I didn’t spend a lot of time in here; the interface is as powerful and precise as it is confusing, and the controls are ornery to manage on a game pad. On the other hand, it is possible to place a giant hologram of Neco-Arc doing the dougie in the middle of an empty field, so it’s impossible to say whether Creative Space is good or not. (Going by Steam achievements, absolutely nobody uses it.)
In conclusion: Who’s on New Genesis?
So if New Genesis doesn't really work as a loot game, the way PSO2 did, who exactly is it for? Because the servers look pretty busy. People are actively playing it, and enjoying it. I had a pretty good time too!
There are a few types of people I saw online who I think this game is meant for: arcade sickos and Sega devotees like me, character creation and fashion maniacs taking elaborate selfies with the perfect fit.
And finally, the guys in the 24/7 dungeons with names like BloodySatoruX who have written anime stock dialogue like “So, you thought you could challenge my power?!” and “Hmph! More weak opponents? I’m getting bored!” to appear above their character as they fight the same boss monster over and over again. Really, if New Genesis is anyone’s game, it’s these guys’. They live in this world and I'm just a tourist.
New Genesis is not for players looking for a decent story (FFXIV) or a loot/gear grind (Path of Exile). As an evolutionary move forward for PSO, I think it's a misstep, one I suspect Sega is likely to walk back a bit in a few years when the next PSO comes along.
But in another world, I think Sega has every part of what could have been a killer stand-alone action RPG in here. It's just in an MMO. And for the cost of a single month's subscription, it's unique enough to make it worth a try.
