When you boot Phantasy Star Online 2, you are greeted to a decently cool cutscene that briefly introduces you into the world, before putting you to character customization. Personality customization itself is heavy; you have control of every component of your characters appearance. If, like me, you tend to prefer to not mess with their look too much, there are plenty of presets to PSO2 Meseta select from, with considerable variety between them. You select a race of large Mecha, between four races; Newmans, Humans, Deumans, and the CASTs. Aesthetically, Phantasy Star Online 2 is unabashedly anime, so if you are not into that style you may not love the alternatives available, but it does not remove from the depth of choices here.
After building your character, you're thrown immediately into gameplay via a tutorial assignment, and these early few hours will be the stage where Phantasy Star Online 2 is likely to lose you if it's going to. The tutorial assignment is not especially interesting, and leads you through with some fairly clunky dialogue delivered by a few humorous NPCs; characters like Afin, who Phantasy Star Online 2 can not tell if he is Irish, English, or sometimes Australian; or Zeno, who is about as generic of a"veteran soldier" as they could have given you. The tutorial definitely gets you off to a rocky beginning.
And it doesn't help that the tutorial only introduces you into the many fundamental basics; how to take, use consumables, move and jump, things like this. Following the tutorial you're thrust into the primary hub area. Originally, this is really cool. Running round the ship, seeing all the Phantasy Star Online 2 players and NPCs drifting around doing their own thing. The sheer scale is impressive, but becomes daunting. Phantasy Star Online 2 does a poor job of explaining things beyond the basics that are fundamental.
There are a few tutorial popups and quests, but they are inclined to be extremely wordy, alternately either way too simple to describe things well or far too complicated to perform the same. Countless systems are concealed behind equally countless menus and sellers, none of which can be explained until you really use them, and even then, the explanations are often perplexing. Hours into cheap Phantasy Star Online 2 Meseta the experience, I was struggling to understand exactly what was occurring, how certain mechanics worked, or what exactly I needed to do. If PSO2 is going to lose you, then it will do so during those clunky hours.
