Dualshockers posted an update on their website showing the new opening cinematic for Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode 4. The cinematic was taken from SEGA’s live niconico stream, and again features a setting on Earth, but this time we get to see the game’s heroes fight against a battleship that looks suspiciously like the Japanese battleship Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, which was sunk during WWII. In addition, fighter planes similar to the Japanese “Zero” (although carrying a different, fictional, roundel) appear in the battle.
So while the trailer avoids making a direct connection to the Japanese fleet and air force in WWII, the references are clear. The trailer is CGI for the most part, but there’s some brief gameplay footage near the end. We included the trailer below. It was recorded by Dualshocker’s Guiseppe from SEGA’s live stream.
In Episode 4’s planet Earth (that’s actually on a different dimension… where pso2 is a videogame…), the new enemy class is called Phantom, and they are supposed to be some kind of “human fear materialization”, the Tokyo stage has enemies that go from rats and bears to T-rex, passing through zombie-yakuza, tanks, or a Kaiju inspired in Mecha King Gidora (Train Gidora). So yeah, the Yamato is just another materialization of a weapon of war (kamikaze planes included) by whoever is behind those enemies. By observation the company responsible for PSO2 (videogame) in the anime seems to be the bad guy, some enemies materialize their logo in certain attacks.
Yeah, Episode 4 / anime plot and setting suck, specially compared to Episode 3 that ended so well, I’m of the opinion / hope that Episode 5 will reveal Ep4 was just a dream ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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