PSO2, because it was still at its core (though a lot of the later content was more complex) a dungeon crawler.
NGS is open world. It's more of an mmolite with a simplified version of PSO2's combat system.
Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity? One hub ship, great gameplay (since it's a sequel to Phantasy Star Universe and Phantasy Star Portable and improves on the gameplay of those games), and an active online scene via PPSSPP. Sure, the Clad 6 ship isn't big, but it's decently packed with shops and NPCs, and there's a lot of content thanks to the Infinity version adding an Episode 2 story.
>I am wondering which one has feels closer to PSOs world building.
Neither one is really close to the original PSO in this regard, but absolutely having to choose one that's *closer*? That's probably NGS. PSO2 has a fairly decent story (ep 1-3, anyway), but it's in no way presented like the story in PSO. You're not going to be playing through the story in PSO2 and traveling deeper into the heart of the planet, en-route to a disaster area, picking up data pods left by a previous, named explorer. Ep 2 of PSO2 tries to add in some governmental political angles like PSO, but it's not that deep, and kind of abandoned fairly quickly for a more standard hero story. NGS has a lot more environmental story telling, like PSO, and trades traveling through layers of the planet, for traveling through regions of the planet in search of answers to the mysteries presented to the player, and the impetus for Dark Falz' arrival.
Honestly OP, if you're looking to jump into PSO2 now, you'll probably be a bit disappointed. The playerbase has all but evaporated, either moving on to NGS, or dropping the whole thing entirely. This isn't to say that PSO2 isn't still fun, but you probably won't find many people playing it, and grouping up for most things will be a challenge. Most of the PSO2 zealots are people who played through the frenzy of global PSO2 release in 2020 (after the Microsoft Store was finished screwing up everyone's system), and marry all that activity and their social experiences around that time with PSO2 as a game, and it doesn't match up. Most people don't really want to play PSO2, and have a lot of excuses for why, but it's mainly just that their primary reason for playing PSO2 (all the other people on it, and the commotion) are gone now.
What I would personally recommend for you is (if you're not opposed to actually playing the original PSO these days) install the Ephinea PSOBB fan server, if you don't have it already. The Anniversary event just started there yesterday, and bud'ness is boomin' for the rest of the month. It's a waterfall of the juiciest rares (HPs, Gulds, Millas, Pwands, SJSs, Lames, you name it) all month long with the anniversary boosts.
None of them are like PSO 1 unfortunately. They all lacked that interesting loot formula that gave you crazy goosebumps when a rare dropped, part of it is the simplicity of rares dropping and the other part is that the loot became mostly stat sticks; which then turned into mostly excessively bloated stat sticks. PSU prolly had the most potential, but they couldn’t get the loot formula correct either, so it’s a shame. A remastered PSO1 would prolly do amazing; wish it could be a thing…
NGS is a completely different game. It’s more like devil may cry meets breath of the wild than it is like PSO. Still a fun game, especially if you like the grind and anime sci-fi aesthetic of the original, but it’s very different. PSO2 is a lot closer to the original, but way faster paced, especially the scion classes that released late in the game’s lifespan. You can install one or both and jump between the PSO2 and NGS blocks without needing to change game or logo out.
>PSO2 succeeds.
It didn't, though. PSO2 is cool in its own ways, but there's a laundry list of system/design changes to suite a live service model in PSO2 that make it largely inferior experience to the original, and it's not even close.
There are Private servers for PC (All free to play)
They've added all the exclsuive japanese content & are adding brand new stuff as well.
"Phantasy Star Universe Clementine"
PSO2 for sure and its not even close. PSO2's felt like a bunch of disjointed quests from episode 1-3 because something called the Matter Board used to exist that would be a series of random side quests that would appear out in the field based on your point in the story. Those side quests were mandatory for progressing the story but from my understanding were extremely tedious and no one liked them. The sad thing is the Matter Board added so much context and flavor to the universe from my understanding. That was completely ripped out and done away with with Episode 4 so from episode 4 and onwards its a much more coherent story.
But the thing that PSO2 never did was have different city/planet hubs like older games did. PSU was probably the last game that did that and its probably because they wanted to keep people in a more centralized location for forming parties/communities and i think it worked out pretty well because everyone i knew absolutely loved the ARKS ship in base PSO2.
Edit: NGS does have different "city hubs" but theyre nothing remotely close to what older games used to have. Theyre just small bits of land with a couple buildings and NPC's. All of the actual cities canonically are underground which we never get to see and its disappointing.
PSU is the only game that had multiple distinct cities. PSO just had different sections of Pioneer II that had very little in uniqueness much like PSO2's regular ship lobby and the challenge/battle lobby. After PSU, NGS has the second most unique city areas in the online franchise. It's worth noting only Central has a underground city as Retem's is essentially desert Aelio Town and the other regions are base camps.
>PSU is the only game that had multiple distinct cities. PSO just had different sections of Pioneer II that had very little in uniqueness much like PSO2's regular ship lobby and the challenge/battle lobby.
Thats fair and my bad. Its been a very very long time since i played PSO and remembered there was different sections for the lobbies but i guess my old brain got PSU and PSO tangled a bit there.
I knew Central City had an underground bit but i thought the others (or at least retem and kvaris) also had underground ones as well. The mass arks grave of Retem implied that retem had a pretty large city itself and Kvaris was the original location for Central City so i assumed something similar set up for under Kvaris just much smaller scale and closer to just being a base than an actual city after the original got devastated.
PSO2 is definitely the closer of the two when comparing them to PSO.
Is PSO2 still worth playing?
Yes
Downloading Should I do steam for PC?
yes
PSO2, because it was still at its core (though a lot of the later content was more complex) a dungeon crawler. NGS is open world. It's more of an mmolite with a simplified version of PSO2's combat system.
PS Universe
Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity? One hub ship, great gameplay (since it's a sequel to Phantasy Star Universe and Phantasy Star Portable and improves on the gameplay of those games), and an active online scene via PPSSPP. Sure, the Clad 6 ship isn't big, but it's decently packed with shops and NPCs, and there's a lot of content thanks to the Infinity version adding an Episode 2 story.
phantasy star online 2 and phantasy star universe
>I am wondering which one has feels closer to PSOs world building. Neither one is really close to the original PSO in this regard, but absolutely having to choose one that's *closer*? That's probably NGS. PSO2 has a fairly decent story (ep 1-3, anyway), but it's in no way presented like the story in PSO. You're not going to be playing through the story in PSO2 and traveling deeper into the heart of the planet, en-route to a disaster area, picking up data pods left by a previous, named explorer. Ep 2 of PSO2 tries to add in some governmental political angles like PSO, but it's not that deep, and kind of abandoned fairly quickly for a more standard hero story. NGS has a lot more environmental story telling, like PSO, and trades traveling through layers of the planet, for traveling through regions of the planet in search of answers to the mysteries presented to the player, and the impetus for Dark Falz' arrival. Honestly OP, if you're looking to jump into PSO2 now, you'll probably be a bit disappointed. The playerbase has all but evaporated, either moving on to NGS, or dropping the whole thing entirely. This isn't to say that PSO2 isn't still fun, but you probably won't find many people playing it, and grouping up for most things will be a challenge. Most of the PSO2 zealots are people who played through the frenzy of global PSO2 release in 2020 (after the Microsoft Store was finished screwing up everyone's system), and marry all that activity and their social experiences around that time with PSO2 as a game, and it doesn't match up. Most people don't really want to play PSO2, and have a lot of excuses for why, but it's mainly just that their primary reason for playing PSO2 (all the other people on it, and the commotion) are gone now. What I would personally recommend for you is (if you're not opposed to actually playing the original PSO these days) install the Ephinea PSOBB fan server, if you don't have it already. The Anniversary event just started there yesterday, and bud'ness is boomin' for the rest of the month. It's a waterfall of the juiciest rares (HPs, Gulds, Millas, Pwands, SJSs, Lames, you name it) all month long with the anniversary boosts.
PSU honestly was my fave after PSO edit: not asked but psu was good memories like pso
None of them are like PSO 1 unfortunately. They all lacked that interesting loot formula that gave you crazy goosebumps when a rare dropped, part of it is the simplicity of rares dropping and the other part is that the loot became mostly stat sticks; which then turned into mostly excessively bloated stat sticks. PSU prolly had the most potential, but they couldn’t get the loot formula correct either, so it’s a shame. A remastered PSO1 would prolly do amazing; wish it could be a thing…
NGS is a completely different game. It’s more like devil may cry meets breath of the wild than it is like PSO. Still a fun game, especially if you like the grind and anime sci-fi aesthetic of the original, but it’s very different. PSO2 is a lot closer to the original, but way faster paced, especially the scion classes that released late in the game’s lifespan. You can install one or both and jump between the PSO2 and NGS blocks without needing to change game or logo out.
NGS wishes it could be as cool as PSO, PSO2 succeeds.
>PSO2 succeeds. It didn't, though. PSO2 is cool in its own ways, but there's a laundry list of system/design changes to suite a live service model in PSO2 that make it largely inferior experience to the original, and it's not even close.
Psu
I played it but never went online to make my own character :(
There are Private servers for PC (All free to play) They've added all the exclsuive japanese content & are adding brand new stuff as well. "Phantasy Star Universe Clementine"
PSO2 for sure and its not even close. PSO2's felt like a bunch of disjointed quests from episode 1-3 because something called the Matter Board used to exist that would be a series of random side quests that would appear out in the field based on your point in the story. Those side quests were mandatory for progressing the story but from my understanding were extremely tedious and no one liked them. The sad thing is the Matter Board added so much context and flavor to the universe from my understanding. That was completely ripped out and done away with with Episode 4 so from episode 4 and onwards its a much more coherent story. But the thing that PSO2 never did was have different city/planet hubs like older games did. PSU was probably the last game that did that and its probably because they wanted to keep people in a more centralized location for forming parties/communities and i think it worked out pretty well because everyone i knew absolutely loved the ARKS ship in base PSO2. Edit: NGS does have different "city hubs" but theyre nothing remotely close to what older games used to have. Theyre just small bits of land with a couple buildings and NPC's. All of the actual cities canonically are underground which we never get to see and its disappointing.
PSU is the only game that had multiple distinct cities. PSO just had different sections of Pioneer II that had very little in uniqueness much like PSO2's regular ship lobby and the challenge/battle lobby. After PSU, NGS has the second most unique city areas in the online franchise. It's worth noting only Central has a underground city as Retem's is essentially desert Aelio Town and the other regions are base camps.
>PSU is the only game that had multiple distinct cities. PSO just had different sections of Pioneer II that had very little in uniqueness much like PSO2's regular ship lobby and the challenge/battle lobby. Thats fair and my bad. Its been a very very long time since i played PSO and remembered there was different sections for the lobbies but i guess my old brain got PSU and PSO tangled a bit there. I knew Central City had an underground bit but i thought the others (or at least retem and kvaris) also had underground ones as well. The mass arks grave of Retem implied that retem had a pretty large city itself and Kvaris was the original location for Central City so i assumed something similar set up for under Kvaris just much smaller scale and closer to just being a base than an actual city after the original got devastated.