Phantasy Star Online 2 International Release in Early 2013

Well the wait is over, Phantasy Star Online 2 is finally coming outside of Japan and onto our shores. According to the press release sent to PSO-World:

SAN FRANCISCO & LONDON – July 9th, 2012 – SEGA® of America, Inc. and SEGA® Europe Ltd today announced that free-to-play multiplayer action RPG Phantasy Star Online 2 will be coming to North America and Europe in 2013. For a first look at this new entry in the legendary Phantasy Star series, check out the official Phantasy Star Online 2 teaser site at www.pso2.com.

Phantasy Star Online 2’s features include:

  • Deep sci-fi fantasy universe filled with lush landscapes, extraordinary creatures, and epic adventures
  • Revolutionary real-time combat and third-person action with devastating combos and counters to master
  • Flexible, class-based leveling system that lets players define their own play-style with distinctive melee, ranged, and magic weapon types
  • Randomized dungeon maps and unexpected mid-quest encounters that ensure each quest is different for each player
  • Deep character creation system with a nearly limitless number of potential appearances
  • Three degrees of humanity to experience across three unique races: the versatile Humans, spiritually-powered Newmen, and artificial CAST

In the mean time you can follow them on twitter or like the facebook page.

Phantasy Star Online 2 Welcome Campaign

ラッピープラトゥ Rappy Plate

So you've heard the news about the overcrowding of Ships 1 through 5. To disperse the number of people that login to each ship, the team has decided to start a new campaign!

Campaign Period:

  • July 4th, 2012 through August 1st, 2012 @ 11:00 JST

Conditions:

  • Those who create a new character on Ship 6 through Ship 10  during the duration of the campaign period and reach to level 15 on any class will receive a Crappy Plate and 1000 FUN points ticket.

Item Distribution

  • The items will be distributed mid-August as an item code.

 There's also an English community on Ship 10 Block 20.

 

Sneak Peek at July ~ August Content

Yukata Costumes in July!

 

Fang Bantha enemy in August.

 

Summer Rappy in August.

[Thanks SilentPanda via anonymous of 2ch]

Official Release Status Report (7/6/2012)

Official Release Status Report

The Open Beta test finished July 3rd, and the official game launched July 4th. They decided to launch the Arks Cash purchasing site a day early to balance the load off of those servers. However, by July 4th, people were unable to purchase Arks Cash. After some tech support, the page should be relatively stable. However these measures have not been sufficient, and they will continue to examine further methods to reinforce the site.

Sakai had to perform some changes to help relieve the congestion for certain ships. Unfortunately he can't change the number of blocks available unless there's some form of maintenance inserted during your playing times.

Firstly, for ships 6 through 10, he will reduce the number of premium blocks by 8. For ships 1 through 5, he has added 4 normal and 4 premium blocks.

For now there will be a limit on how many characters can be made for each ship. Currently Ships 1 through 4 are at capacity and no new characters can be created. Ship 5 is now about 80~90% capacity. These restrictions will last about 1-2 weeks.  Please keep in mind, since this process is difficult for them to support now, you cannot move your character to another ship.

They are extremely sorry for the inconvenience and will continue to make your gameplay experience as comfortable as possible.

[via pso2players]

PSUBlog Status Report

I've made some adjustments to the blog so that there would be less Internal Server Errors appearing on the site. They still pop up anyway but at least the entire site won't be down at the same time. Because of this, I've been focusing more on keeping the blog up than writing articles hence the missing Tekker shop guide. I've continued to keep the Client Orders updated until someone makes a nice stable wiki. Telling me about the client order is nice and all but I need the actual screenshot in order to put them in. I think it's quite odd for this site to be ahead of the Japanese wikis in keeping an updated client order list. Great Job everyone! Also if you find any mistakes to the client orders please let me know.

I've added links to pictures of enemies and quests due to feedback, and I am in current need of shader-quality pictures of all the Tundra enemies to add to the Matter Board guide.

Since some of the maintenance reports occur during my sleep schedule (11pm – 5am Eastern), I am going to try deploying the maintenance blog writers first. Then when Edward decides on announcing an English version, the English bloggers should be up next, and finally the Japanese team.

If you'd like to contribute screenshots or client orders please email at [email protected].