It….certainly doesn’t seem to be an expansion since it seems to be a slightly separate entity and your progress doesn’t really carry over from the original PSO2, but neither does it seem to be a completely new game because under the hood there’s still a lot of the original PSO2 in it even though you can say they’re just jammed into that new engine and you do can transfer over some items (mainly cosmetics) from the original PSO2.

So first of all, what is PSO2: New Genesis (from this moment on, let’s shorten that to New Genesis, PSO2:NGS, or just NGS), other than that it’s a Phantasy Star Online MMORPG? It’s pretty hard to describe. That said, in the past year, with the aid of Microsoft, PSO2 has gotten its global second wind and turns out that was just part of their plan to finally release……….Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis! And it’s available for both Japan and the global audience, too! Emphasis on “in Japan” because of its first attempt for a worldwide version failed spectacularly due to the mishandling of the game, with rampant pay-for-conveniences monetization method that plagued the game and pretty much every other free-to-play games at the time, something that isn’t present in the original Japanese version. The Phantasy Star series, with their online MMOs being the more recent iterations they have released, is another one of those successes the first Phantasy Star Online is still being played in private servers to this day, and Phantasy Star Online 2 became one of the two most successful MMOs in Japan, the other being Final Fantasy XIV.

Being probably best known for the Sonic franchise, it has ironically been failing to hit the mark in that regard, while oddly being successful in several other of its IPs and ventures, such as the Yakuza series and its acquisition of Atlus which by extension includes the Persona and Shin Megami Tensei series. It is one of the few very well known companies out there that is pumping out games here and there with varying degrees of success that just seems completely random.

Pso2 character creation slots