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Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis is one of the biggest disappointments of this year. It hurts because it was one of the games I was really looking forward to. Unfortunately, there are plenty of problems with it and I'm not alone with this. Lots of players have been complaining. The launch of the game was far from smooth. Just like when I participated in the closed beta test, the game lagged like crazy. It took a while for it to actually reach a much more playable to state but it was still far from ideal. The game wasn't running smoothly at all and the worst part is, players were suddenly required to get through the long intro of New Genesis before they can unlock a feature that shouldn't even be locked in the first place.
The thing about New Genesis is it was released as a part of the original Phantasy Star Online 2. The idea is that you'll be able to switch between the two games at any time you want. That sounds like a good idea on paper, but in execution it just makes me feel like New Genesis should have been its own separate game instead of being tied to the original Phantasy Star Online 2. I had spent so many hours in the original game so having to play the new game to unlock access to a game I had already played makes no sense to me. Worst of all, you have to do this with all of your characters. While there's some early missions can be skipped if you've already completed them with one character it doesn't make this any less annoying. Switching between the two games has been far from seamless. New Genesis works differently from the original game's mission based format by being an open world game. In an attempt to make things more convenient, there's only one loading screen and it is extremely long. Even the original PSO2 takes too much time to start up. I've been lucky that I've had a computer that can run it, but some players haven't had the same luck and are unable to play the game at all. When logging in, they just get an unbearable amount of lag. That's how it was for me on my laptop for a while until I got the idea to launch Razer Cortex. I normally don't find boosters like this helpful since they don't usually work for me, but it seems to have worked for PSO2. Thanks to that, I'm able to get into both the original game and NGS on my laptop pretty quickly. However, it's pretty dumb that I even have to launch another program just to get this one game to run better. They run near smoothly this way, though it should go without saying that the original game performs way better. NGS has a habit of freezing every now and then. Sometimes the game will continue, but other times it just gets stuck there and I have to exit the game, which can cause a great loss of progress on some story missions! Since PSO2 has become pretty much unplayable for a lot of players, the player count has dropped quite a bit since I started playing. Both games have missions that go much better with multiple players, although I'm more familiar with the original game. There were quests I played a lot that were made with multiplayer in mind. Whenever I got in the past, several players were there waiting to start a mission. We'd be at or close to the player limit for that mission before we began. Now when entering one of these quests, I often find nobody there waiting to participate and I don't have the patience to wait for anyone else to join so I just end up not doing those missions most of the time. It's not just players that have left the game, some features were taken away with the launch of New Genesis. While the updated graphics for New Genesis are nice and all, it doesn't really make up for anything. There were ways for players to get special items without paying real life money. Plenty of campaigns existed which would get the player in-game currency called Star Gems or SG and fortunately, players are still able to get the currency in the same way, but these days, you have to login into NGS, not the original game. We don't really get any of the good campaign items anymore. Whenever there's been anything, it's always been an apology item for some graphical glitch. Some days we'd get SG and on others, we'd get bonus keys which are used for bonus quests which are really good for grinding exp and leveling up. Bonus keys can also come from the daily recommended quests, but I haven't been seeing them much lately and when I do, it's never the good bonus keys. Back to SG, there used to be the Fresh Finds Shop, which would have several random items that changed daily and you could spend SG on them. It's gone now. PSO2 also had what they called Mission Pass. How this worked is the player would perform missions which could be anything like completing a quest on a certain level, go fishing, break a container of a certain color, or get your class to a certain level. After completing enough missions, you would unlock tiers and the more you unlocked, the more prizes you would get. After the launch of NGS, it's gone. Oddly, last I checked the mission for checking out Mission Pass is still in the game and my characters that have never done Mission Pass have no way to complete it. t's easy to feel like Sega's gotten greedy, since a lot of the cosmetic stuff that players used to be able to get for free by working for it is now locked behind a paywall. To be fair, a lot of stuff was locked behind a paywall already, but the thing is, there's so much less a player can get without playing. To make things worse, a lot of this stuff is locked behind a gacha system, so you're not guaranteed to get what you want. Thankfully, some of the gacha can be done with SG and there is one free pull daily. But that doesn't really change how lame all this is. The money crap is definitely annoying, but there's another reason that people are annoyed with what PSO2 has become. New Genesis is very lacking in content. The original PSO2 definitely lacked in content when it came out in Japan in 2012, but it's 2021 now so players would definitely expect more. With the original game from 2012 until this year, I assume content was released at a decent-ish rate and for players outside of Japan we were definitely spoiled as we got a lot of content at a pretty good rate. This is due to the fact that Phantasy Star Online 2 did not release outside of Japan until last year. Because of that, there was a ton of content that just had to be localized and then they could roll stuff out. In defense of New Genesis, it is new so we obviously won't receive stuff at the same rate as we did for the original PSO2. However, several players feel like the releases of new content are too far spread out. When New Genesis launched, several classes were unavailable. To be fair, it was like that in the original PSO2 for a while. However, considering the whole idea of switching between the two games, not having all of PSO2's classes available is kinda lame. It makes hard when sending an old character to PSO2, because then we need to decide what new class we're going to give them. It might have been better if all or at the very least most of the original game's classes were available in New Genesis from the start. If that was the case, we wouldn't be getting excited for classes that were already in PSO2 and perhaps NGS could have just gotten some new exclusive classes instead. To be honest, New Genesis players are dying for new content in general as they find they are running out of things to do. A lot of New Genesis players have finished the story quests and are left with just randomized tasks, some changing daily and others weekly. I've looked at those task lists and they have plenty of things for the players to do, but I can only imagine these tasks getting really repetitive. Not only that, but the amount makes players feel like the game isn't respecting their time at all. Speaking of not respecting time, there is a very annoying mechanic that was added to New Genesis: Battle Power or BP. As you do more stuff in game, like fight enemies earning exp, upgrade weapons, and complete tasks, your BP goes up. However, it moves up so slowly and it's even a requirement to get through the story. To be honest, it's just some extremely stupid and annoying way to pad out the game's length. Does Sega care that their fans aren't happy with the current state of the game. With things the way there, they're making it seem like they don't. There have been several complaints but Sega seems to be ignoring them, acting like everything is just fine with game they managed to screw up this summer. I really do hope things will change at some point, because myself and several other players aren't satisfied with New Genesis. Whenever I login, I find myself getting bored pretty quickly. New Genesis made leveling up tedious and not fun, so I have no motivation to do it. Whenever I do decided to boot up Phantasy Star Online 2, I usually just start up the original game, because too be honest with the way things are now, it's way more fun to play. I hope Sega won't ignore all the complaints and will actually do something to fix the issues we've been having. I'm sure I didn't cover everything since I mainly stuck to stuff I experienced myself and read from others. I'm not gonna try to get my hopes up, but Sega's going to have to make some big changes to the system and the game's performance if they want to get anywhere near the amount of players they used to have.
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After a good while of working on it, and a bit of a break in the middle, I have finally finished this visual novel. The goal was to make something sad like visual novels from Key/Visual Arts. They're known for stuff like Clannad, Little Busters, and Angel Beats. Winter Dream takes inspiration from more than one of their visual novels, some of which already listed. If you're a fan of their stuff, you might like this visual novel. I wish development could have gone a bit faster, but I had some stuff come up in my personal life and got distracted by RPGs. For a good while, a lot of my attention went to them since they take so long to complete.
Anyways, in this visual novel, you'll play as a boy named Caron Duff who moves in with his uncle Daniel during his winter vacation. He meets three interesting girls while he is there. First is Velda Penn who works for Daniel. She has a bad habit of speaking rudely to almost anyone. Next is Gwen Coy who is shy around new people and after getting to know her, Caron learns how playful she can be. Lastly, there's Rose Sherburn who cares more about others than herself. There are multiple endings you can get: good and bad. Each girl has both a romance ending and a friendship ending. Get at least one of those endings on each of their routes and you'll unlock a new route. When you complete that route, you'll unlock one more. Winter Dream is my attempt at a sad story, which I'll admit, I got a little bit choked up when writing one of the scenes. Hopefully I've succeeded in creating something that will make others feel the same way as they read Caron's story, from the happy times to the sad times. There isn't really much else to say but I hope you'll check it out and hopefully you'll like the story and characters. If you pay extra for it, you'll be able to get the original scripts and a manual. Check out the visual novel here. |
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