Yes, in a surprising Tweet made yesterday, it turns out Sega’s highly anticipated Anime MMORPG Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis has a confirmed release date! Not only for its global Closed Beta test, but also for its official global launch!

According to the Tweet,

“We’re excited to confirm that PSO2 NEW GENESIS will be launching this June!~

This and so much more was confirmed as part of our ‘Prologue 3’ livestream early this morning~ Missed it? The stream is available to view now on our YouTube channel!”

It’s gone on to receive thousands of Likes and Retweets since, with players exclaiming their excitement that they’re finally going to have another new MMORPG to play. And not just any MMO: This is something players have been eagerly anticipating for the better half of a year by this point as PSO2: New Genesis is a drastic departure from the franchise, providing massively overhauled graphics, combat and providing larger zones for players to explore (comparatively to its traditional linear environments,) and allowing for significantly expanded party play, allowing for many additional players to occupy the same world even when not partied with the player.

Pre-registration for PSO2: New Genesis’ upcoming global Closed Beta runs from 04/21 10:00AM PDT until the end of the Closed Beta test. Yes, you can register at any point from now until the Beta tests’ conclusion. The Closed Beta test in question will begin on 05/14 at 6:00PM and last until 05/16 at 7:00PM PDT.

How do I apply?

Good question. According to the PSO2: NGS website:

The PSO2: NGS Closed Beta Test will be available to play after downloading the close beta test from the “Xbox Insider Hub” on Windows 10 or Xbox. You will receive a chance to participate in the closed beta when you become an Insider Program member.

Everyone is awaiting the upcoming Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis game, right? It looks like it could take PSO2 to an entirely new level – and I’m incredibly excited. Not only does the game look incredible, but they’ve taken what was already arguably an amazing combat system and enhanced it even further beyond.

So let me start this off by stating that they’re currently holding pre-registration for the Closed Beta of PSO2: New Genesis that will launch later this year (at a currently unconfirmed date,) for those of you that want to get into the game and test it out ahead of everyone else.

Now concerning the original incarnation of PSO2, currently the game is available on Xbox and PC. It launched onto Steam at the end of 2020, finally allowing the majority of PC players to access the title, as up until that point it was only available via the terrible Microsoft Store.

As of February 17th – just next week, the game will be launching onto the Epic Games Store as well, potentially increasing the total playerbase by another 3 or 4 people – which is huge (kidding.)

Additionally, there’ll be a brand new class for players to level: The Luster class, which utilizes gunblades – one of my favorite weapon types after seeing Squall use it way back in Final Fantasy VIII. If you’ve been holding off jumping into PSO2 for whatever reason, now’s the perfect time to make that investment!

I don’t care what you guys think about Sword Art Online.. I love that Anime. It has some of the best Waifu’s I’ve ever seen. And Asuna is the most bae Waifu of them all.

Now I know you guys have been eagerly anticipating a Sword Art MMO.. it’s probably the most requested MMO of all time, yet all we get are single-player or very limited multiplayer RPGs which while perfectly fine and plenty of fun in their own right, don’t provide us what we want out of them.
So, imagine my surprise when Sega announced they were holding a crossover between both Phantasy Star Online 2 and Sword Art Online. Yup, after almost a decade of being online, we’re finally getting one of the greatest crossovers in the history of the genre.
Although it is worth noting that unfortunately this doesn’t apply to the global incarnation of the game, but rather the Japanese version which is still pretty damn popular considering the release outside of Japan.

The Sword Art crossover event will take place in December 2020 and will add both Kirito and Asuna to the game along with weapon skins and various lobby actions.

In anticipation of the upcoming crossover event, a new brand new trailer was revealed.. which was honestly much more of a teaser than a trailer if you ask me. It didn’t really show anything other than key illustrations, which I guess stands to reason as we’re still a little ways off from having the event functional in-game.
I’m well aware that plenty of players play the global – the international version of the game but there are still plenty of English speaking players that never left the Japanese incarnation of PSO2 because of the sheer time invested into it.

We just got Episode 5 a few weeks ago so players are still playing through all of the content that Episode 5 brought with it, and Episode 6 is slated for release before the year ends – which isn’t very far off.
Then we’ll get to go into 2021 with the brand new PSO2: New Genesis MMO while waiting on Blue Protocol.

This is more than enough of a reason to come back to PSO2 if you’ve been absent for a while, and although this Sword Art collaboration with the Japanese version of the game is releasing exclusively for the Japanese version of the game, I’d like to note that it doesn’t mean we won’t get it as well somewhere down the line.
We’ve gotten various collabs already with more to come in the future. Granted there are plenty we haven’t gotten either – but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this goes.

Regardless, we’ll be jumping back into PSO2 when Episode 6 drops and streaming it over on Twitch if you guys wanna follow and join our.. guild? Alliance? Whatever it’s called in PSO2. We play on Ship 2!

I bet you’ve been playing PSO2 all this time without the knowledge that it had been censored in the official international release, right?
Episode 4 of the highly successful MMO launched last month on August 5th, 2020, bringing with it a brand new story with a brand new cast of characters including the flaming haired Hitsugi, a key character throughout the story going forward.
This is where I actually started playing the game years ago, back when Episode 4 was released in Japan. This is where, to me, the game really got exciting.
But at the same time, I noticed that the localized iteration of her introduction was significantly different to what I recall.

Before we go any further, though, I do want to note that there are spoilers ahead, so be careful if you care about the story at all!

So, in the original Japanese version, Hitsugi turns around to find a completely unclothed Al behind her.
I mean, yes, the English version was also missing the clock in the background, I honestly don’t know the reasoning behind the removal of that but it’s worth noting the English version of the game has Al completely dressed.
If I recall, and it’s been a little while since I played through Episode 4’s story, so I’m a little hazy on the details, but – and once again, spoiler alert, there was a battle, and Al ended up getting separated from Hitsugi within PSO2, and was transported with only his body to her bed side.
Clothing would not have been provided for him and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Hitsugi, in the Japanese version freaked out as she had a naked guy in her bed. This was an understandable reaction that had to be altered in the international release of the game with dialogue concerning his.. visible.. equipment and general state of being no longer being of concern, because, well. He was fully clothed.
Which changes the entire feel of the scene, and the purpose behind her surprise. Now I know translations are often altered to suit a Western audience all the time in English localized games, but this changes an integral part of the game – Al’s introduction and their meeting.

That wasn’t it, though. And credit to the Censored Gaming and Voices of PSO2 Youtube channels for finding this next scene, as I actually had no idea that it even existed, let alone was removed.
Over the course of Episode 4, there are several different cutscenes completely removed in their entirety from the game. These cutscenes are all concerning bathing with other characters, which is pretty commonplace in Japanese media. You find it all the time in JRPGs and Anime series, as I’m sure you’re well versed in.
What’s worth noting is that these scenes, while present in the Japanese version and removed within the English version, were completely translated and dubbed into English with the official voice actors.
Meaning they had at one point contemplated leaving them in-game, uncensored in all their glory, but later opted to remove them for.. whatever reason. And they’re not even bad.

The first scene involves a blindfolded Al, Hitsugi and Kohri. Al doesn’t know anything about male or female anatomy, as he’s what, minutes old? Days old?
But as one would expect.. various ecchi scenes ensue. I’ll provide links to each of these videos in the description below so you can watch them through entirely, but do be aware that the lip-syncing is atrocious for these scenes!

The second scene involves Phaleg, Och, Phul, Hitsugi and Kohri all in the bath together. This time things get quite heated, and all 5 girls end up talking about.. what most of you guys would expect: Boobs. Size. Shape. Everything. This is honestly a scene I know a lotta you guys are gonna wanna see.

The third scene involves Enga, Hagith, Aratron and Al. Yup, all 4 guys in the bath. This isn’t nearly as interesting to watch as the last 2, specifically the one with all the girls, but the guys are talking about… well, surprisingly, boobs.
Yup. All 3 of these bathing cutscenes have the same general focus: The first scene has Al touching the girls by accident, the second scene has all 5 girls discussing their bust, and the final scene has all the guys talking about the girls’ chests as well.

I got a chuckle out of them, but I understand they’re not going to be for everyone.

I never played through Episode 5 far enough to see the next censored scene, but from what I can tell, Hitsugi, as part of the story is depicted without clothes just as Al was. And while nothing can actually be seen, since it’s at an almost above-the-shoulder angle, they decided to alter the scene and have Hitsugi fully clothed for it.
While to my knowledge this doesn’t impact the scene like having Al appear de-clothed, and it isn’t like removing entire cutscenes like the bathing scenes earlier, it’s interesting seeing how many things they change concerning the internationally localized versions of the game.
When the MMO was released earlier this year, they had censored the ability to make loli characters by increasing the minimum height you could make your characters.
This incited quite a bit of outrage from the loli-loving community, but from what I’ve seen it wasn’t to a degree that warranted nearly as much hate as it did. A little upset or irritation? Sure.

But as far as I can tell, those are the 4 instances of censorship that have been made apparent since its release. They very well might censor other parts of Episode 5, or the upcoming Episode 6 releasing later this year in the 4th Quarter, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I guess I’ll keep you guys updated with more info going into the future, as I know there are still plenty of you playing PSO2 currently, and even more of you excited for New Genesis.

Phantasy Star Online 2 is launching on to Steam tomorrow. But that isn’t all. Not only is PSO2 launching on to Steam, but it’s launching globally in an additional 33 countries.

The countries that will now have access alongside North America are as follows:

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Great Britain, United States

Furthermore, with the global Steam launch, PSO2 will be moving into Episode 4, which is set 2 years after the events of Episode 3. Episode 4 increases the level cap to level 80, Photon Arts and Technique levels to 17, new skills will be available from levels 76-80, there will be a brand new PvP Arena added into the game called the BATTLE ARENA, for players to dominate one another and tesst their abilities, a brand new PSO2 Friends List as opposed to Xbox Live Friend List, additional character slots, new ARKS Missions, Universal Ship for Battle Arena and Challenge Quests, BONUS Quests for extra EXP, Meseta and materials, new Seasonal Events, New Alliance Quarters in Tokyo, the Battleship and Lunar Surface, characters from the Phantasy Star Online 2 Anime series will appear on the ship, and will be capable of joining your group to tackle content, there’ll be new Titles to earn, new enemy types to engage in combat, new quest types, entirely new areas to explore, the ability to preview purchased in the Fresh Finds Shop, you’ll have the ability to automatically send Material Items to the Storehouse, and the Season 6 Mission Pass.

Players will also gain the ability to craft. You can craft from your Personal Quarters or the Mini-Room, allowing players to craft a variety of different items and gear. Players will be able to explore Earth, which was honestly one of the more interesting areas to me. But most important of all is the new Story being added into the game. All of which, once again, will be available tomorrow, August 5th 2020. Now if only the Steam launch of the game goes better than the previous PC launch on to the Microsoft Store..

Yes, you guys read that title correctly. According to Steam, Phantasy Star Online 2 is launching on August 5th, 2020! That’s just next week!

Players have had a lot of issues with Phantasy Star Online 2 and the awful Microsoft Store experience over the several months the game has been available on PC, but we have been promised, repeatedly, that the game is going to be launching on to “additional platforms” some time “in the future.” While they never confirmed what platforms those were specifically, it turns out Steam, which is one of the platforms players were hoping for, is where we’re going to be receiving the game first.

According to Steam, Phantasy Star Online 2 already has its own Steam page set up, although the game isn’t available to download via the Steam client yet, again, with the game rolling out on August 5th.

The official PSO2 website also made a blog post making note of this including the rewards players will be able to earn for logging in and playing the game via Steam.

The Steam release will coincide with their Episode 4 update, which will bring a ton of new story content, and additionally players to the game now that it’s launching onto a platform players actually want to play the game on.

Earlier this week Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis was announced. This is an all-inclusive, easily-digestible list of everything we know about New Genesis currently.

So, Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis is going to be an entirely new title in the PSO2 series. Not an overhaul. Not an expansion. Not an update. An entirely new entry. New Genesis will take place one thousand years after the events of the original PSO2 game.
New Genesis is going to be completely open – having fields that are large, filled with content to explore, filled with enemies to combat. This is very different to what players have in PSO2, where the game is instanced, hub-based, and highly linear.
Players will be able to use the characters they created within PSO2 within New Genesis. PSO2 and New Genesis both will be coming to a global audience in the near future.
Currently, the game is available within North America and Japan, however at an undisclosed date it will be accessible globally.
Not only that, but once again the devs have reiterated that there will be additional platforms for PC players to play on coming in the near future. It’s still unconfirmed whether a Steam release is in the works but we can continue to hope.
Japan and North America should both be getting the update at roughly similar times, with New Genesis rolling out as the next large update after Episode 6 later this year. The update specifically will launch in 2021, celebrating Phantasy Star Online’s 20th anniversary.
New Genesis will feature an entirely new, upgraded graphical engine and game system, including higher fidelity character models allowing you to create absolutely stunning Anime characters.
Character creation and the avatar you create within PSO2 or New Genesis will be compatible cross-game.
Certain content, such as emotes will be shared between your character in both games. Character growth will not, meaning you’ll be required to level up separately in both games, including skills, Photon Arts and Techniques.
Currency will also not carry over as that would break the economy. AG and SG are shared between both games. Weapons, Units and Mags obtained within PSO2 will be usable in New Genesis, however, their functions, abilities and appearances will change.
PSO2’s graphical engine will be completely overhauled to match the engine that New Genesis will be running. And yes, for those of you wondering, PSO2 and PSO2 New Genesis will both be 100% completely free-to-play.
This update doesn’t mean PSO2 is going anywhere though. It will still be actively worked on, and allow for players to play and grow in both games, side by side, concurrently, traversing both universes with the very same character.
Finally, New Genesis is going to be available, at launch, on Windows 10 – for PC players, like the game has been for the last several months, and Xbox One. It is worth noting that they mention “if PSO2 is added to new platforms, we plan to make PSO2: New Genesis available on those platforms as well.”

And that’s it – that’s everything you need to know about the upcoming Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis.
Hopefully you’re excited for the game, I know all of us are.

We all enjoy Phantasy Star Online 2, right? Of course we do. But one thing I know a lot of people can agree on is the fact that the game, although it still holds up well graphically, looks pretty dated. Both the graphical style, and the UI.

Well, Sega and Microsoft aim to remedy that – sooner than you might think! Earlier today at the Xbox Games Showcase, Microsoft went ahead and debuted a brand new trailer for PSO2 titled “Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis.” No, that’s not the title of an expansion or a new DLC.
Or, perhaps I don’t think it is. See the official PSO2 Twitter went on to state “Today, during Microsoft’s #XboxGamesShowcase, we proudly announced a brand-new title in the #PSO2 series, PHANTASY STAR ONLINE 2 NEW GENESIS!” – if you didn’t catch that, they list it’s a “brand new title” in the PSO2 series.
However, the official PSO2 Youtube channel had this in their description: The latest entry in the PSO2 series, PSO2: NGS was announced at Microsoft’s Online Conference, the Xbox Games Showcase, on Thursday, July 23, 2020. Celebrating PSO’s 20th anniversary, PSO2: NGS is the latest entry in the series, updating PSO2’s game system and graphics engine. We’re planning to release this update on a global scale, including Japan and North America.” – “updating PSO2’s game system and graphics engine” and “we’re planning to release this update.”
Those are fairly contradicting statements to make, and as such the community is highly confused as to what it means for PSO2. Are we getting an update? Are we getting an entirely new game? Judging from what I saw in the trailer itself, I feel as though this is a complete overhaul to the original PSO2 title, and I’m definitely excited for it.

Now, when is the Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis release date? According to the trailer, the official Twitter, and Microsoft themselves, Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis will be launching in 2021. When specifically in 2021 is unknown, but that’s as good as a release date as we have right now.

I’ve made you guys wait long enough by this point to talk about our experience in Phantasy Star Online 2.
Regardless of whether or not you feel the same way, both Mrs Stix and I had an absolute blast playing PSO2 over the course of the first month of the PC launch.
During that time I made quite a few videos talking about how the game was going and how it was ultimately being handled, but now I want to talk about the game itself and why both Mrs Stix and I enjoyed it as much as we did, but at the same time, why we’re no longer playing it currently.

Alright, so I’ve always been a fan of PSO2. Seriously, I have videos done on the game dating all the way back to 2017 – yeah, 3 years ago. This was long before the game was ever announced to have an official Western release planned.
Yet even though I was a fan, having played other titles in the franchise, I never stuck with it.
This is partly due to me being busy with the channel, and partly because the game was more difficult than most, and with the fan-translations being all there was to go off of, I found myself confused at times, and with limited time to learn it.. I opted to just pass on the game all together.
Fast Forward to a couple months ago, PSO2 officially launched on PC, having rolled out onto Xbox’s earlier this year, of course, and I found myself being sucked back in. This time things made more sense – albeit not a whole lot more, as PSO2 is a very complex game to learn.

At its core, PSO2 is a hub-based action MMO. You can see tons of players on-screen while in the space-hub, and you can group up with and participate in missions, varying quite substantially in size.
Yes you did hear that correctly, there’s no open world to explore, and I know some people were disappointed to find that out after downloading and logging in for the first time.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to explore. There is a large variety of different, unique environments to play through each with their own aesthetic look and feel.

Thankfully, regardless of whether you’re a fan of hub-based instanced MMOs or not, one thing everyone can appreciate is a good combat system, and PSO2 does not disappoint.
You wouldn’t think this game was almost a decade old when playing it as mechanically, the game feels fantastic. Sure, graphically it definitely shows its age especially in the earlier zones, but as you continue to make progress and unlock additional zones that changes pretty rapidly.
Honestly I look forward to when Episode 5 launches as that’s roughly where I started and was my personal favorite point of the story.
The action combat system interestingly provides players the option to equip 3 different weapon types, and bind several skills to each weapon. This allows you to make use of various different roles that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
As an example, I had a katana and a bow equipped, meaning that while bosses or monsters were engaged in close-quarters combat or placing close-range AoEs on the ground around them, I could keep my distance and make use of my bow.
But otherwise I could be in close-range slashing with my katana. I bet you can understand how important this system is now, right?

Now as of July 2020, we’re currently playing through content in Episode 3. When I started, we were at the end of Episode 4 or the beginning of Episode 5, I can’t recall specifically.
I know that as we’re still quite a ways behind Japan in terms of content, we’re very limited in what we’re currently capable of doing. The PSO2 team are aware of this and actually made a blog post on their website a couple weeks ago addressing content concerns.
Episode 4 is going to be coming next month in August, Episode 5 will be coming the following month in September, and finally fully catching up with Japan with Episode 6 towards an undisclosed point at end of the year.
So you can bet while the content available to consume is definitely limited, we’re going to not only have plenty of new areas to explore, but a steady flow of new content to sift through and complete over the course of the year.

Mrs Stix and I got to play through quite a bit of the game, well, by quite a bit I mean we got to play through the entire thing up to level 50 something with all of you – with our community.
We ran so many different instances, we completed so many missions, we got to not only meet hundreds of you in-game, but we got to invite a ton of you to our uh.. our.. guild? I forget what the feature’s called in PSO2 but it’s essentially a guild.
We even had our own home where we’d group up, chat amongst ourselves, and drink adorable little drinks with those tiny umbrella things.
There were concerts that we went to, we played catch with a giant ball at one point in the shopping district.. honestly, the game was an absolute blast to play through.

But Mrs Stix and I both chose to initially install the game via the Microsoft Store initially, as the Tweaker didn’t offer a functional means to play at the time.
We played for 2 weeks straight until they rolled out their “maintenance fix” that was supposed to fix some of the issues players were having, and there were quite a lot of issues preventing players access, trust me.
And at that moment, Mrs Stix’s game got nuked. She couldn’t play it again. She tried for several days, she uninstalled everything, tried installing via the Tweaker, managed to get in-game for a couple days, and then it broke again.
This left us feeling frustrated, much like a large percentage of players and instead of trying to continue to fix it every time it broke, we decided it was a better choice to go ahead and delay playing.
It was announced after all that the game was coming to “additional platforms” on PC in the near future, so we had hope the game would launch on to Steam and allow us to bypass the terrible Microsoft Store experience, and hopefully the Tweaker as well.
Plus, we’d have access to Episode 4, 5 and perhaps even 6 by then so there’d be even more to do!

At the end of the day, Phantasy Star Online is a great looking game for its time that could have had a fantastic launch if it were handled correctly.
But it wasn’t, and instead, a lot of players ended up passing on it, inhibiting the growth and success that was possible.
Yet even so, there are quite a few players still actively playing, and there will be a large influx of new players once we have additional means with which to access it.