How PSO2 Became POS

I have been waiting for the release of Phantasy Star Online 2 on the Personal Computer forever. It took Sega so long to bring this game to North America (almost a decade actually) and it was so painful when they only released it on the X-Box One last month. I was an avid fan of the original PSO on the Dreamcast and the original X-Box so I was very excited to download the game yesterday, hating myself a bit for not downloading it sooner.

Some phantasies are just mere fantasies.

As if the wait for the game's release all these years wasn't horrible enough, the game came with a launcher and of course it had to download a huge mega patch before I could even play the game. Once that was done, I couldn't start the game because it kept nagging me about changing a privacy setting on my X-Box Live profile, something that no other X-Box Live game had ever asked me to do. I didn't even change anything, I merely went to check on my profile when the game actually allowed me to pass through the main menu. All this time, the game was running in windowed mode, a small one that is on top of my 4K resolution desktop so I hurriedly make a new character to get to the actual game so that I could access the game's settings only to discovered that the fullscreen toggle was actually in the launcher. So, I quit the game and changed the setting in the launcher but then when I started the game, it wouldn't load. The launcher just disappeared and nothing was happening on screen and no activities were showing in the task manager window. I restarted the computer and clicked the game from the Windows tile and nothing would happen except for a white line that was seemingly stuck forever in the game's tile. One time, I just sat there waiting until the launcher suddenly showed and the same thing would happen, when I started the game from the launcher, the game wouldn't boot up. I had enough at that point and I deleted the game.

I went to check the reviews from other PC users and apparently, it's a common thing. The game just wouldn't work for a majority of people. I also noticed one disturbing trend - the game would leave a huge chunk of file behind after it is uninstalled and when I checked the installation folder, after going through hoops just to change user permission for it because Microsoft thought it was so very necessary, the game left me with a 130+ GB of hot dung. It seemed like every time I tried booting up the game, the client was redownloading the patch or something. It's obvious that Sega didn't do the proper test runs for this launch. I cleaned up the mess and vowed to never touch the game ever again. Well, at least not until it gets a proper release on Steam or the Epic Games Store.