Phantasy Star Online 2 (Part Two)

Character Creation
I believe that one of the unique features of playing Japanese-made MMOs is the effort they've put into the details in making a character. The tons of options that a player has in customizing their in-game character is amazing and leaves us "spoilt" for choice literally. (Now if only The Secret World had this sort of intensive character creation ability and it would have been perfect.)

Human

Elf

Robot

Anyway, back to PSO2, the game allows us to choose between three types of races. I believe one of them looks human, the second race looks sort of like elves and finally the last race seems to be robots. And regardless of the race, options are made available for the player to choose either gender (which is fantastic in my opinion).

After choosing your character's race, the next option that comes along is to choose your job class. From the three options available in this stage, I can deduce that the sword-welding character (first option) should be the melee class, while the gun-welding character (second option) should be a ranged class. The last option shows a character holding what appears to be a staff, so I'm guessing this final class ought to be the mage or healer class.

The third stage of character creation shows you a variety of character "templates". During this stage, all you need to do is to select the "template" that best fits the ideal character you have in mind. And don't worry, for this isn't the finalized version of your character. You will be doing massive tweaks around in stage four.

Now this is the part where it gets slightly complicated. There is a massive number of options for you to click and each of those options lets you adjust a particular part of your character for example, facial features, hairstyle, hair colour, eye colour, height and build.

To illustrate how extensive it is, let us take for example the eyes.

The adjustments you can do for your character's eyes isn't only limited to a dozen or so "versions" to choose, but rather a wide range in the form of a "two dimensional slider grid". By moving the dot to various positions in the grid, you will see that your character's eyes will gradually change and adjust itself.

To further individualize our characters, we are even given the opportunity to adjust the proportions of the face and the relative locations of the eyes, nose, mouth and ears. And don't forget the usual hairstyle and clothing accessories that you can pick for your character too.

All in all, you ought to have more fun fiddling around with all these available adjustments instead of rushing through character creation. I'm pretty sure you will find the "ideal" avatar to represent yourself in the world of Phantasy Star Online 2 if you look hard enough. But just be sure not to press the reset option which is close to the bottom of the selection window or all your hard efforts might be in vain.

Previous: PSO 2 (Part One)

Next: PSO 2 (Part Three)

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