As a free-to-play title, Phantasy Star Online 2 offers tons of story content, dungeons, and more along with fast-paced real-time action. New Genesis is a standalone experience (which still uses the same game application) and offers wide-open environments to explore and battle in. It also offers enhanced visuals for better lighting, particle effects and character models.

Combat-wise, players can use two types of weapons for extensive combos. Cross-platform play is already available for Xbox One and PC players but the PS4 version will also receive support at launch, as per a separate press release. Stay tuned for more details and updates in the coming months.

https://twitter.com/play_pso2/status/1542901999481544705

Also yes! PSO2 classic is coming as well!!~ ♡

— Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis – Global (@play_pso2) July 1, 2022

More details on Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, Sega’s massive follow-up to the popular MMO, are coming in a new broadcast. The pre-recorded broadcast will be available on December 19th at 3:30 AM PT/6: 30 AM ET via YouTube. It will essentially serve as a follow-up to the Tokyo Game Show 2020 Online program while offering new information.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis is essentially a brand new part of the game with a huge open world to explore. It features new systems, massively improved visuals with better character models and more character customization. This version will exist alongside the base game though certain progression elements like level, Class Skills and EXP won’t be shared.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis releases in 2021 for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC in North America. PS4, PC and cloud users can also access it next year but only in Japan. For more details on Phantasy Star Online 2, check out our review here.

For many years, Sega’s highly successful MMORPG Phantasy Star Online 2 remained contained within Japanese shores (outside occasional releases in other Asian regions). The game survived several console generations and many wondered if we’d ever get it in the west. In the end, we did when it was announced that the game would be coming to the Xbox One and PC in the United States and Europe. How successful has the experiment been? Overall, it seems it’s done well.

The game has now surpassed 1 million players with these western releases. It was announced via the game with a special event called “One Million ARKS Celebration.” For a limited time, EXP, Rare Drop, and Rare Enemy Spawn Rates will all be increased +100% and all players will have the opportunity to receive 2 million EXP with EXP tickets. It’s not too shabby of a start since it just started in April.

Phantasy Star Online 2 is now available on the Xbox One and PC. The celebration event will  last until August 26th. An overall of the game is set to come sometime in 2021 called Genesis, which you can read about through here.

If you’ve been willing to try Phantasy Star Online 2 but can’t get the Windows Store version to work, there’s good news. Sega has announced that the PC version will release on August 5th for Steam. Cross-play and cross-progression with other platforms will also be supported. More importantly, it also means that Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis will come to Steam as well, as per Sega.

Being on Steam means several Steam-exclusive benefits. For instance, logging in will net the Headcrab emote along with five uses of 50 percent more EXP, Rare Drop Rate, Meseta and Half Scape Doll. Complete any quest on Normal/Casual or higher and you’ll receive two Pyro’s Gas Mask and Alyx’s Hair which are hairstyles. But wait, there’s more.

Complete a quest on Hard/Hardcore difficulty or higher and you’ll receive Wheatley as an Evolution Device. Three weapon camos are also earned – the Team Fortress 2 minigun, Left 4 Dead Frying Pan and Crowbar. Finally, completing a quest three times on Very Hard difficulty or higher will net the HEV Suit (male). Complete any quest four times on Super Hard difficulty or higher and you get an Alyx Replica outfit for females.

Phantasy Star Online 2 is currently available for Xbox One and PC on the Windows Store in the West. As for New Genesis, it’s planned to exist side by side with the base game – learn more about how that works here.

Sega has finally dated the PC launch of Phantasy Star Online 2. The action MMO will be available on the Microsoft Store in North America on May 27th. The Xbox One version has been available since April 15th and supports cross-platform play with the PC version.

There’s no word on whether cross-save applies so you might want to wait before trying to carry over progress onto PC. At the very least, the game is free and comes with several years of content, all of it localized into English. You also don’t need Xbox Live Gold to play online which is another positive to playing on PC.

Those who login now will reap bonuses and Sega is promising “more surprises” for the coming months. For more information, check out our review for the Xbox One version here. Stay tuned for more details and updates in the meantime (including whether the game will ever come to Steam at some point or not).

The time to #JoinARKS is finally revealed. Phantasy Star Online 2, one of Japan's biggest online action RPGs, arrives on Windows 10 next week, on May 27th.

More information coming soon to our official website: https://t.co/yW0dhGjwnE pic.twitter.com/jHjt7XnixZ

— Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis – Global (@play_pso2) May 19, 2020

When you first boot up Phantasy Star Online 2, you’re greeted to a decently cool cutscene that briefly introduces you to the world, before placing you into character customization. Character customization itself is remarkably deep; you have control of pretty much every aspect of your characters appearance. If, like me, you tend to prefer not to mess with their appearance too much, there are plenty of presets to choose from, with ample variety between them. You choose between four races; Humans, Newmans, Deumans, and the CASTs, a race of large Mecha. Aesthetically, the game is unabashedly anime, so if you aren’t into that style you might not love the options available, but that doesn’t take away from the depth of options here.

"PSO does a pretty good job of making its case in the genre; provided you have the patience to listen to it."

After building your character, you’re thrown immediately into gameplay through a tutorial mission, and these early few hours are the point where the game is most likely to lose you if it is going to. The tutorial mission is not particularly interesting, and leads you through using some rather clunky dialog delivered by some hilarious NPCs; characters like Afin, who the game can’t tell if he’s Irish, English, or sometimes Australian; or Zeno, who is about as generic of a “veteran soldier” as they could’ve given you. The tutorial definitely gets you off to a rocky start.

And it doesn’t help that the tutorial only introduces you to the most fundamental basics; how to shoot, use consumables, move and jump, things like that. After the tutorial you are thrust into the main hub area. Initially, this is really really cool. Running around the ship, seeing all of the players and NPCs alike wandering around doing their own thing. The sheer scale is impressive, but quickly becomes daunting. The game does a pretty poor job of explaining things beyond the most fundamental basics.

There are some tutorial popups and quests, but they tend to be extremely wordy, alternately either far too simple to explain things well or far too complex to do the same. Countless systems are hidden behind equally countless menus and vendors, none of which are explained until you actually use them, and even then, the explanations are often confusing. Hours into the experience, I was still struggling to understand exactly what was happening, how certain mechanics worked, or what exactly I needed to be doing. If PSO2 is going to lose you, it will do so during these clunky early hours.

"Hours into the experience, I was still struggling to understand exactly what was happening, how certain mechanics worked, or what exactly I needed to be doing. If PSO2 is going to lose you, it will do so during these clunky early hours."

However, if you can manage to get past the admittedly high learning curve, things begin to open up immensely, and what you find is an engaging, likeable, and rewarding experience. It takes a while for things to come together, but once they do you’ll find a very fun experience on hand here. The game oozes personality; the character designs and animations are bright and colorful, the monster designs interesting and sometimes frightening. The mechanics begin to gel together, and you start to realize the systems hiding underneath, and how they all fit together.

When you first build your character, you choose your race, gender, and class. Your race and gender will determine specific stats, usually your offensive and defensive stats, with male characters usually being better at melee and female characters generally being better at ranged and magical attacks. After choosing that you choose your class, which have a lot of variety to them. I started with the Ranger, a long-range, relatively low damage support class. The members of my party played the Summoner, a class based around using different pets that you can switch in and out in combat, and Force, the game’s equivalent to a Wizard/caster class. All of the classes have a lot of variety in their loot, skills, and attacks, which helps make each one feel distinct, and makes class makeup for your party feel like they matter.

Beyond that, Phantasy Star Online 2 is a game that, at its core, is all about character progression. Everything you do in the game either earns you modifiers that improve your abilities or experience points, which are used to level up your character. There are a lot of options for character growth and improvement, and once again, it can certainly feel intimidating when starting out. But once again, patience reveals an interesting and complex system worth diving in to. There’s a lot of modification options available to you as you progress through the game; consumables that provide additional tactical options, nearly countless abilities that can be added to your weapons and classes, and multiple massive skill trees that can be levelled up over your character progression. You can even add subclasses to your character to further augment and enhance your character’s abilities.

"There are a lot of options for character growth and improvement, and once again, it can certainly feel intimidating when starting out. But once again, patience reveals an interesting and complex system worth diving in to."

The game also overflows with sheer charm and personality. The characters, while still unconvincing in believability, eventually become strangely likeable for that very same reason. The level designs are varied and interesting, and the main hub ship is full life and personality. Shops adorn nearly every open space on the hub ship, and there are some interesting sights to be seen. The market area has a balcony that overlooks a massive city sprawling below that makes up the rest of the level, a café area (where you can sell and utilize harvested materials) opens up into a sprawling zen garden, populated with cherry blossom trees. There’s even a massive, fully playable casino, with all the garish colors and over the top sounds that implies. And of course, every single one of these areas has a mechanical purpose to them, providing shops and quests to be picked up. For crying out loud, you can even watch a full concert in the market area, complete with effects around the stage.

Phantasy Star Online 2 can be clunky, ugly, and unwelcoming. It can also be fascinating, rewarding, and endearing. The opening hours of the game do little to make a good case, with poor tutorials and clunky menu interfaces obscuring most of the game’s features, making everything feel needlessly difficult. But for those who stick with it through this, Phantasy Star Online 2 eventually opens up into a large and rewarding experience, one with plenty of reward, personality, and enjoyment on offer. And on the Xbox One in particular, a platform with rather few options that truly scratch the MMO itch, Phantasy Star Online 2 ultimately makes a very strong case for itself indeed. If you have any interest in the game, or desire for a new experience in the genre, give this one a chance. It takes some investment, but ultimately provides an experience well worth the time.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox One.

Sega’s Phantasy Star Online 2 is finally available in the West – at least, for North America – Xbox One. You download and play the game for free today though there are bundles that can be purchased with different in-game items. Also, you’ll need Xbox Live Gold for playing on consoles. Oh and PC players will have to wait till late May and it’s seemingly exclusive to the Microsoft Store.

Cross-play is enabled though so it’s possible for console and PC players to play together (though cross-save is unconfirmed). Phantasy Star Online 2 comes to North American players with years worth of content and all text and voice work has been localized in English. Even more content is inbound in the coming weeks though, starting with login bonuses from April 15th 23rd.

There will also be two Urgent Quests – “The Cunning Black Winged Vanguard” and “The False Champion: Luther the Fallen” – out this week. Franca’s Cafe will also be getting a revamp in time for Cherry Blossom season and singer Quna will arrive on Saturday and Sunday for live concerts. Stay tuned for more details on Phantasy Star Online 2 in the coming weeks especially for the PC version’s release date.

We’re pretty spoiled nowadays when it comes to international releases. Most major games are localized fairly quickly now. It’s not like it once was when big titles took years to come westward, if ever. But there is one big exception that’s still out there, and that’s the legendary multiplayer-focused Phantasy Star Online 2. With the help of Microsoft though, the game will finally come to North America soon, after many years of being Japan-exclusive, and we’re one step closer to that release, as an open beta is about to start.

As announced via the official North American Twitter account for the title, the open beta test will finally open up next week, on March 17, in the US and Canada. You can check for more information at the website as listed below. The game already went through a closed beta, which was well-received, so now a wider audience can get in on the action.

Phantasy Star Online 2 is available and running on a variety of platforms in Japan, but will come to the west in Spring 2020 for Xbox One, where it will see graphical enhancements as well.

The time is finally here! The #PSO2NA Open Beta Test starts next week, March 17th! Play one of Japan's biggest online action RPGs, coming first on @Xbox One.

More information coming soon to our official website: https://t.co/pJIEmQkazM pic.twitter.com/vy6Az57bjB

— Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis – Global (@play_pso2) March 9, 2020

Sega’s Phantasy Star Online 2 will have its first closed beta from February 7th to 9th North America, marking the first time that the MMO can be experienced by Western audiences. Xbox One players will get the first shot but it seems that Xbox One X owners will benefit more. The game’s official Twitter has confirmed 4K support on the latter.

It also has an expanded display size for the UI, which means those with 4K screens won’t have to deal with smaller text. Other enhancements on the Xbox One X are unknown. We’re also yet to learn when PC players in the West can partake in the beta, especially since cross-play is supported with the Xbox One version.

Phantasy Star Online 2 released all the way back in 2012 for PC and eventually made its way to PlayStation Vita in 2013, PS4 in 2016 and Nintendo Switch in 2018. These releases were all in Japan however. The Western release has thus far been confirmed for Xbox One and PC with all content and updates included. It’s currently planned to launch in Spring 2020.

6. Explore the #PSO2 universe in higher resolution! Phantasy Star Online 2 will feature 4K support and an expanded UI display size on Xbox One X! pic.twitter.com/vXbo1GSAkp

— Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis – Global (@play_pso2) February 3, 2020

Phantasy Star Online 2 is one of those legendary titles that, for whatever reason, never made it past a certain region. The game has ran all these years in Japan and other small regions, mostly in unofficial and modded capacities with the latter. The MMORPG will finally come to North America soon though, and the first taste will be from a closed beta.

The game coming stateside was announced at last year’s E3. Microsoft used it as an example of many exciting and outside the box releases coming to their ecosystem. Now we finally have dates for a closed beta for the Xbox One release, which will run at the beginning of next month, as announced by Sega- more specifically, from February 7th to 9th.

Phantasy Star Online 2 will release at some time in 2020 for the Xbox One and PC. The game is also available in Japan on PlayStation 4, Switch, and Vita, but as of now there’s no confirmed release of any of those versions outside Japan.