PSO2 died for this poor excuse to sell the same or worse costume gacha again. It's fucking funny how everything is worse, but they made a point in making the new costume releases more frequent than in PSO2 while also tampering with the trade and market ability of the playerbase.
The western playerbase is awful, a freakshow doing nothing than ERP and weird ass drama.
Granted, there isn't anything else to do but maybe SEGA would have gotten the message if these self-insert psychos would stop paypigging hundreds of dollars per month on this bad version of a dress up game.

Compared to the final version of PSO2 the combat is worse, classes are worse, mechanics are worse, costumes are worse, story is worse, characters are worse, interactivity is worse, events are worse, random SEGA jank charm is gone, experimental and random content is gone. Character creation is worse and the new graphics style makes everyone look ugly as shit, especially the faces. Some sliders are just garbage compared to before and some clothing interacts the wrong way making everyone look like they wear pregnancy clothing.

I remember the constant cope of "PSO2 also started this way", and here we are. 3 years later and it still the same nothing from launch.
Also I won't forget how the servers actually can't handle more than 10.000 players. They just waited until it dropped and claimed the servers were fixed.
And I won't forget them pushing new costumes and even certain support banners for gear affixing right before this game launched, claiming everything will carry over.
PSO2 costumes look better, but will clog your inventory space, which you have to spend money on to expand, and look lower poly/res. Although most of them still look better, they also disable NGS body models, which also look worse to be fair.
The gear that you could carry over and was very complicated and hard to obtain and affix in PSO2 was made obsolete within 1 hour of playing of NGS.
And they knew this game was coming way before this. In fact PSO2 was only brought global knowing they are releasing and announcing NGS about 1 year later. So they just milked the shit out of it.
PSO2 still exists within the game but it's obviously dead. They also "updated" the engine and it looks worse now.

The cherry on top was SEGA putting the guy who brought us the worst content in PSO2 in charge of NGS and in recent interviews made it pretty evident how little ambition and passion he has for this game.

Since the newest trailer for the 2nd game looked kind of neat from a directing and editing standpoint, I was curious to finally try this out.
This is exactly what I cannot stand about a lot modern video games. Just full on blast pretentious "we aren't like those other video games, we are... Hollywood. And video game systems are cringe".
The concept itself, great idea. Execution is insanely annoying and falls flat.
Combat is horrendously simple for a game that genuinely does not offer any other interactivity than its combat. It reminds me of licensed games that usually just slap the most straight forward combat system they can think of, while not engaging the player with anything else. Enemy variety essentially does not exist.
The whole game is just making you walk forward while being blasted with voices, the novelty of this wears off instantly. Then stopping you at obvious doors to spawn the same enemies over and over or gracing you with a "puzzle", which makes you look at surrounding garbage.
Literally just looking around with your camera, to form rune shapes by aligning objects like twigs or fences to match the shape superimposed on your screen. It will also tell you when you are near such matching objects through visual and audio cues, essentially removing even the tiniest bit of player agency in the only section of players interacting with the game.

Fuck "games" like this.

Content wise, the game is disappointing since the MMO should be a blueprint for what you can do with the game, just add a Tekken 3 force mode or whatever Granblue has.
There are also so many classes that should be there on top of them being just the base classes. There is no actual awakening system or skins for the characters.

Visuals and combat are great, the combo system easy and insanely fun with noob friendly input system which allow you to play with friends who usually don't play fighting games and have no interest in learning.

DLC character release is way too slow and we don't know if they even bother with a season 2 at this point since fighting game "fans" nowadays need weekly updates and only play games with high steam stats, because that really mattered for fighting games the past 30 years. Netcode is proper modern Arcsys quality. Crossplay would probably help with matchups but even then just consider it a discord fightan. And I doubt Nexon will support this any further since they just want to advertise their MMO cashcow.

Still one of my favorite fighting games in recent years just in terms of mindless fun, but I am a DFO MMO player so I have the fandom bias. The character tuning is close to kusoge status with many having half screen normals (think Yuzuriha from UNI). Although this really is just an anime fighter with no IAD. Everyone is busted. Strive babies get filtered.