YMMV / Phantasy Star Online 2es

• Alt Itis: Thanks to Phantasy Star Online 2 connectivity, es is one of the few mobile games where you can play multiple characters on the same account. Having multiple characters is extremely handy in this game, since each character has their own Drive gauge, allowing you to squeeze more playtime out of any one period of play. This also allows you to go Item Farming on multiple characters, then pool your rewards in PSO2es Storage.
• Breather Boss: Dragon Ex. In spite of it hitting brutally hard, most of its attacks have very obvious tells and are easy to sidestep. Get it down to low health, and it becomes even easier to deal with, since it then requires a ridiculously long windup time for half of its major attacks that make them super predictable.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The majority of players wield Twin Machineguns because they're the Game-Breaker weapons. Some wield other weapons with similarly-powerful Arts/Techs, but not as hilariously broken as Elder Rebellion.
  • Since the release of Facet Folia, the meta has shifted to "everyone wields Twin Daggers" due to Facet being even more broken than Elder Rebellion is. By extension, there's also "everyone wields Nesis Arion" because it's the best possible Twin Daggers you can have in es due to its cost reduction effect.
  • As of the release of 3rd Generation PAs, this effect has mostly evened out with a wider variety of top tier weapons. Gunslashes, Jet Boots, and Twin Daggers remain the most common weapons, but other contenders include Double Sabers, Assault Rifles, and Knuckles.
  • Assault Rifle, more specifically Parallel Slider Type-0, is the de facto weapon and PA for Extreme Survival. Having a high hit rate makes Life Drain very powerful, and not having to chase down enemies on foot makes mowing down enemies much more efficient. Parallel Slider also enables movement while attacking, making it possible to earn more points by gliding and shooting simultaneously.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • El Ahdas are among the most notorious enemies in the game. In endgame content, they have way too much health, unpredictable movement patterns, and enough damage to One-Hit Kill. Content like Nightmare Tower also ensures that you will fight multiple El Ahdas simultaneously, a staggeringly tall order when the nature of the camera makes it easy for them to gang up on you and hit you from your blind spots.
  • Everything in EX Quests. Not only are all enemies exponentially tankier, getting so much as blown on is anything between half your health in damage to a One-Hit Kill.
  • Most Kuronian mooks have a variety of hard-hitting attacks with wide coverage and lingering hitboxes. Unlike El Ahdas, they aren't super difficult to kill, but if you make a mistake they will eat your HP like a fat kid in a candy store.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Gene is possibly one of the most popular characters in the entire PSO2 sub-series. To wit, the ARKS Investigative Report 2017 stated that she was the third most popular Support Partner, right behind Afin and Matoi. This is especially notable because Gene's Partner Card is event-limited, so not everyone has it, unlike the other Partner Cards that made the Top 5.
  • Yamigarasu is a fairly popular Weaponoid, largely in part to her outfit. She was popular enough to beat out Bluesy Rhapsody in the Weaponoid Costume General Election and appear as an event NPC in the main game.
  • Bluesy Requiem, who is otherwise just another Weaponoid with an unremarkable effect, garnered quite a bit of attention on her reveal for her incredibly provocative design. She later went on to become a recurring character in the web manga spinoff "Weapono!", and even got her own Illustration Chip in Summer 2017, making her the only Weaponoid besides More to get another Chip.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The term "frame" originated as a Japanese nickname for the game's individual damage multiplier system, which was subsequently adopted by Western players.
  • "Beyblades" for Paji-Gowans, named after their spin move that has a good tendency to One-Hit Kill in endgame content.
  • "Baseball" for Solid Straight.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Out of all the Chips in the game, none are more extreme than the humble yet insanely powerful Solid Straight. What appears to be your average freebie 11★ Chip turns into a terrifying monster of a Chip when fully powered, starting from a mediocre 19 Cost 110%/120% U Frame to an almighty 13 Cost 210%/220% U Frame after Plugs 1 and 3 are maxed out. His low cost and exceedingly high multiplier make him one of the strongest slot fillers in the game with among the highest DPC ratios of any Chip, completely obsoleting nearly every other slot filler and 11★ in the game. He's one of the few Chips to have the honor of having a Fan Nickname: "baseball". Even after a substantial nerf, Solid Straight still has the best cost-to-damage ratio in the game and is still very commonly used in multi-element decks.
  • Meteor Fist, in a stark contrast to its Awesome, but Impractical PSO2 counterpart, is commonly considered the best PA in the game for Emergency Quests. It is the only ranged PA that Knuckles has, but the nature of the attack means that it almost always hits, and although it is a Randomized Damage Attack, rolling the big fist produces the hardest-hitting attack in the entire game, being capable of exceeding the 999,999,999 visual damage cap and vaporizing XH x10 bosses in a single blow. For even more ridiculous shenanigans, it's the only PA to also get a Lethal Joke Weapon variant in Meteor Gyu, which has identical functionality but comes at max Ability Level and weaponizes the titular character from the spinoff manga. Having both Meteor Fist and Meteor Gyu allows you to slot one of them in the Link Slot, giving you two Meteor Fists for the price of one!
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The mid-March 2017 story update accidentally gave Ragne Units a chance to drop with Gift Receptor during the Dark Agrani EQ. While this doesn't do anything on its own, the Units can be sent to Phantasy Star Online 2 and used in Affixing to transfer Lucky Rise I from the Units found in the Excube Shop to other Units. SEGA implemented a hotfix to eliminate the bugged Units.
  • The Weaponoid Nemesis Shoes was bugged on release to give the effect of her secondary bonus (add more A Frame bonus when you hit a Darker) repeatedly every time you connect with a PA hit on a Darker, causing her multiplier to inflate without limit. This turned her into an anti-Darker Game-Breaker, since you could easily start seeing 999999+ even with bad deck setups.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Tomoyo Kurosawa voices a super-adorable yet surprisingly strong female lead with mysterious superpowers and bunny ears. Fast forward to 2019, and this exact character description can be applied to a different mobile game character.
• Junk Rare:
  • Enemy Chips. While many are SR class, they're also ignored in all areas due to being vastly outclassed by the SSR Character and Weaponoid Chips. EQ Enemy Chips, on the other hand, aren't this due to being used toward the Exchange Shop, which has many valuable Units and Weapons that can only be traded for with EQ Enemy Chips. Players still don't use them, however.
  • Passive Chips are often more favorable than Active Chips, due to Actives being a drain on CP and require regular maintenance to sustain. This extends even to Character SSRs. You're more likely to find someone maining H44 Missouri T or Purple Heart over Luther or Gettemhart. This does not apply to Photon Arts/Technic Chips, since those are used for attacking.
  • Surprisingly, the 12★ Salus Punisher Chip. Salus Punisher is an Active Chip that periodically adds an additional attack that deals a high amount of damage when you strike an enemy. The problem being that Salus Punisher could deal roughly 100,000 damage against enemies on VH and SH. A well-equipped player can deal the same amount of damage in one Photon Art/Technic in a fraction of the time Salus takes to tick once. She was subsequently given a major buff months down the line to remove her from this category. Said buff roughly tripled her damage.
  • 12★ Aurora. Her chase buff is complete garbage, being outpaced by 10★s, and her secondary effect of adding extra damage is completely useless due to the damage addition being a flat number. She later received a Balance Buff to address this, which changed her secondary effect into giving the player a stacking ATK buff (up to a whopping 6000 ATK).
  • Most Character Chips fall into this category nowadays thanks to being power creeped by the Weaponoids. The only ones that aren't obsolete are 12★ Hitsugi and Kohri, which are slightly weaker variants of limited event Chips that can still reliably hold their own.
  • E-Frames are slowly falling into this, mostly because E is the most common damage type in the game, so practically everyone and their aunt has a solid E-Frame. It's even worse if you get a 12★ whose damage type is E, since they more or less obsolete 11★ E-Frames, making most conventional esScratches almost useless to play outside of the Seasonal 12★ and some Photon Arts and Techniques. However, by 2021 and 2022, the game shifted over to making W-Frames and Z-Frames the most common "generic" frames, making the older E-Frames more useful when they synergize well with W and Z.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The chirp of a Rappy that signifies that a Rappy has spawned in the current battle.
  • "Rappy Fever", which signifies that a King Rappy has appeared.
• Narm: This is the game that coined the plot point of "skin exposure = better Photon absorption". Many players have called the writers out on this as an exceedingly stupid Hand Wave that is used exactly once to explain Gene's costume change into Stripperific garb in Season 1.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: At least for the English-speaking community, largely due in part to the extremely small translation team that has yet to translate the plot due to putting more focus into the actual content first.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Bullet Bows, previously a bottom-tier weapon, received the 4th Gen PA Master Shot in mid-2020. Master Shot at first glance appears to be terrible, with a poor DPP rating due to its relatively high cost; however, its surprisingly fast execution gives it a very high DPS rating. When Challenge Mission rolled around after the launch of Master Shot, Bullet Bow dominated rankings charts universally due to both its extremely high DPS combined with strong decks designed to offset its high CP cost and keep damage flowing.
• That One Achievement: Getting the Queen Rappy Suit. It requires 100 Operation Stars to get, which can take a very long time to grind for if you don't perform well in the Ranking Events. Alternatively, you can get it by scoring within the top 10, which is an achievement in itself due to the absolutely gigantic amount of time and effort you need to put into it. It's also possible to get it if your exact ranking is 50th, 100th, 500th, 1000th, 5000th, or 10,000th. This is insanely difficult to achieve deliberately, even moreso than just getting to the top 10. If you manage this, you can bet your sweet potatoes that you got really, really damn lucky.
• That One Attack:
  • Wolgahda's palm strikes can stunlock you to death if you happen to be standing in the wrong spot.
  • Caterdra'an and Caterdra'ansa's body slam attack, mainly because it has a wonky hitbox that activates in places that it shouldn't.
  • Zeshrydha's tail swipe deals absurd damage per hit for two hits on high enough levels, and it's fast enough to stunlock you.
  • Org Blan's claw swipe. Absolutely no startup time and is an easy One-Hit Kill in most cases. Woe to you if he does the Ground Pound, because if he follows up with the swipe, it's a guaranteed kill due to the first attack preventing movement due to stagger.
  • Blu Ringahda has the charge attack, where it rushes at you. This makes it impossible to attack because it deals a lot of damage very quickly, forcing players to dodge, and if the A.I. Roulette is feeling particularly evil, it can spam the attack several times in a row. In Nove Ringdahrl Emergency Quests, this is a sure way to kill your DPS and stop one-passes cold.
  • Any variant of Leopard Vlozzo from Type C upwards has the ability to spawn orbs at your position that cast Razonde made of dark lightning. The attack is prefaced by a pounce with very quick execution and no forewarning, and the Razonde deals heavy damage for each second you stand under it, potentially shredding your HP in seconds if you don't retreat quickly.
• That One Boss:
  • Org Blan. Most of its attacks are That One Attack, with very little tell and extremely high damage that can One-Hit Kill on high enough difficulties or in EX Quests.
  • Blu Ringahda resists being afflicted with statuses. Since status damage from Yamigarasu and Saga is an extremely potent source of damage due to both of them possessing a very rare damage type, this makes it difficult to efficiently tackle. Also, it's a Damage-Sponge Boss and has annoying area-wide attacks.
  • Proto-Falz Lord. The arena means you can't see his attacks half the time.
  • Any EQ boss that can inflict Shock. Shock causes the player to stagger randomly when attacking, or suffer knockback if it procs while in the middle of a dodge action. Random staggers murder your DPS and can easily stop you from landing one-passes or just dealing enough damage, and knockback is even worse, since without a Partner Attack charged, you tend to stay down for roughly 8 seconds, which eats up a lot of precious time. Shock also lasts forever as a status effect, and can typically stay on you for between half the fight and the entire fight.
  • Haze Draal, which appears to be designed to be as anti-meta as possible. All of its attacks except its tail swipe have hitboxes with long duration and inflict knockback on hit, which make them difficult to i-frame through with Facet Folia. It also has a tendency to jump straight across the map and render whatever close-ranged PA you were using wasted due to not landing all the hits.
  • March 2019 Eternal Tower introduced possibly one of the toughest 100F rooms in the game. It is a Guar Zigmorde accompanied by two Itagi-Zakri, the first ever Final Boss battle in Tower to have mooks. Not only is Zigmorde abnormally tanky for a 100F boss, but the adds are required to clear the room, and all three enemies deal excessive amounts of damage, likely a One-Hit Kill if you don't have a damage reduction effect active.
• That One Level:
  • Eternal Tower 5 (April/May 2018) had Block 97F-99F, which is near-universally considered the worst Block in the entire Tower. The Block is largely proliferated with Sanctum Dragonkin, which include Sadinians and Dirandals, both of which are seen as Demonic Spiders due to their overinflated HP and tendency to kill you extremely fast if you make a mistake. The former are also very annoying to kill due to their shields blocking a majority of your hits, while the latter abuse a ram attack that gives them super armor and usually kills in one or two hits.
  • September 2018 Eternal Tower had 97F~99F, which is notorious for being a massive Beef Gate due to the return of Dirandals and Sol Dirandals, who are somehow tougher than bosses encountered earlier in the Tower and will obliterate you in seconds if you don't take the time to evade or keep them stunlocked.
  • February 2019 Eternal Tower had a very specific room in Floor 85 that consists of three El Ahda. El Ahda are notorious Demonic Spiders and three of them grouped together in the same room with massive HP pools and stats spells trouble for anyone who doesn't get out of the way or burst straight through them quickly enough.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: You'd be forgiven for believing that Noire Mirrors was a woman. However, he's voiced by Hikaru Midorikawa.