Trivia / Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis

• Ascended Fanon: In the Fan Translation for PSO2, Urgent Quests are referred to as "Emergency Quests", an alternative translation that has mostly stuck throughout the game's history among English-speaking fans. Although New Genesis's version of Urgent Quests are still referred to as such in pre-release footage based on the Global version of the game, the closed beta test for the Japanese version of the game does in fact use the term "Emergency Quest". However, in the final release the term was changed to "Urgent Quest" to be consistent with Global's terminology.
• Christmas Rushed: Miscellaneous sources claim that the game still had months of dev time to go prior to the announcement of its June 2021 release date and that higher-ups pushed for the accelerated deadline in order to avoid a time gap that would cause their playerbase (and potential cash flow) to drop off. This resulted in the game launching as an Obvious Beta and being fairly incomplete in terms of content, and despite the game's short-term success a fair number of players weren't very happy with the way SEGA handled its release. Japanese fans in particular bemoaned SEGA once again falling victim to its Executive Meddling habits and forcing New Genesis out the door when it clearly wasn't ready.
• Demand Overload:
  • The Japanese closed beta had to go on emergency maintenance numerous times to deal with the huge player population, even though they had culled the numbers themselves via lottery. The English beta had similar problems, but not nearly so bad since much of it was resolved by the second Japanese closed beta.
  • The moment the game launched, Global servers hit max capacity near-instantly. Many players wound up being forced to wait their turn as the servers literally could not hold any more players. This wound up affecting the game's launch way more than it should have, as the unexpectedly large player population produced ridiculous amounts of persistent lag due to server stress.
  • The Japanese servers were likewise hit with a huge surge of players, especially during prime hours. While not at full capacity like the Global servers, the game suffered similar amounts of lag when more players were on, making the game difficult to play.
• Development Gag: The Slayer class shares its name with the internal dev name for Luster from the original PSO2.
• Dummied Out: There is unused data for Silver and Gold Primm variants of all weapons in the game, not just Swords. The models for the unused weapons are used as part of an obtainable Weapon Camo that can be equipped to all weapons except Harmonizers and Gunblades.
• Fan Translation: Depsite the existence of Global's official English translation, ARKS Layer has stated that they will continue working on its own translation of the Japanese version of PSO2 through the release of NGS independent of the Global version.
• Milestone Celebration: New Genesis commemorates the 20th anniversary of the original Phantasy Star Online.
• No Dub for You: The Global version finally got the missing Voice Tickets from PSO2 in a January 2021 revival scratch, with the caveat that, unlike the tickets for the Story NPCs, the AC Voice Tickets don't have English counterpart voices and only come in Japanese.
• No Export for You:
  • Like the regular PSO2, the only version that will be available worldwide is the PC version. Japan gets the PS4 and Switch version (albeit cloud service only for the latter), while the West gets it exclusively on Xbox consoles and PC; when Japan doesn't get the former.
  • Weirdly, the Japanese version of the game, which was region-free prior to New Genesis, is now IP blocked to non-Japanese players for all versions, including the Cloud version. It has since been presumed by players that this is an effort by Executive Meddling to funnel the playerbase into playing the "correct" version of the game for their region (as evidenced by the Global version being IP blocked to Japanese players), but this is easily circumvented by the use of a proxy or similar measure, and administrative behavior on either side has shown minimal to no interest in banning foreign players.
• Release Date Change: The Waker class (originally referred to by the name of its PSO2 counterpart, Summoner) was originally pitched for a Spring 2022 release, but it was pushed back to August 2022 due to high player demand for more content, decreasing the priority of releasing new classes. This also pushed back the unnamed Gunblade class by extension, since it was slated for after Summoner's release.
• What Could Have Been:
  • New Genesis was originally going to be a completely separate game from Phantasy Star Online 2. However, once the developers realized that their players would lose access to their current progression and cosmetics, they reconsidered and retooled the game to use the original Phantasy Star Online 2 as a base, enabling the Old Save Bonus functionality.
  • In early previews and in the beta, there were originally six Class Trainers, one for each starting class. In the final game there are only three Class Trainers, with the Fighter, Gunner and Techter Trainers being removed and their functions rolled into the Hunter, Ranger, and Force Trainers.
  • In the beta, one of the enemies you could encounter in Central Aelio was a Gigantix Waulon. In the final release, all overworld Gigantix are exclusively DOLLS. An option for the Geometric Labyrinth causes random enemies to become Gigantix equivalents, however.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • The ability to send Symbol Art to nearby players in the area was unceremoniously removed shortly after the release of NGS and only got reinstated after a patch turned the display of nearby Symbol Arts off by default. The official announcement specified "inappropriate Symbol Arts", with players assuming the updates were to combat the outright pornographic ones (especially on any server block numbered 34 or 69) and/or meseta-selling bots using Symbol Arts to circumvent URL censorship.
  • The Global version suffers from a far more exploitative market compared to the Japanese version due in part to the aforementioned RMT bots and many players abusing alt accounts to funnel Meseta gained from Red Containers into other accounts, causing pretty much everything to cost several times more than they would in the Japanese version and utterly screwing non-paying players out of participating in market. The latter issue resulted in Personal Shop access being gated behind main story progression for both Japan and Global, but this only serves to make Red Container exploit slightly more annoying than before, and between SEGA's internal confusion on alt account rules and the fact that Red Container exploit pumps their bottom line due to changes to Personal Shop accessibility, it doesn't seem like they're super interested in taking any serious measures to crack down on it anytime soon.
• Word of God: SEGA states that its own playerbase is the cause for Game-Favored Gender; specifically, Type 1 outfits and CAST parts are considered low priority compared to Type 2 outfits because a majority of players play Type 2 characters, which is basically a Brutal Honesty way of saying that they prioritize outfits that can earn them more money from a larger number of players.