PSO2 Anime coming to North America

[Serinah]

I don't know, I actually really like the story.

[KLMS1]

It's no classic, but as far as anime-ish space-opera lolplots go it's actually pretty decent. Surprisingly coherent too for the wonky premises.

[LonelyGaruga]

Yeah, PSO2's story is really not as bad as people say it is. I get the impression that most people just don't understand it.

[Zorafim]

I get the impression that most people just don't understand it.

That's a dangerous argument to use. It's an easy way to dismiss criticisms of a work without dealing with those criticisms.
"You don't like this movie? You just don't understand how genius it is."
Never mind the fact that person may have a completely valid criticism, which are not being addressed because they have been dismissed.

[LonelyGaruga]

There's huge parts of PSO2's story and background not translated or simply unavailable because it's covered by stuff like drama cds and material collections, so I'm not seeing where you got the idea that's the angle I was coming from.

[Zorafim]

Oh. You mean literally don't understand, because it's untranslated.
I got the psudo-art critic "your mind is not as good as mine" don't understand.

In that case... maybe? The blue tablet translations are always far behind the story missions, so there is a lot of stuff I was forced to skip over. And PSO was able to tell a captivating story using only this kind of story telling, so maybe I missed out on a lot of interesting backstory.
But I didn't get this impression. From the few tablets I was able to go back to and watch, I didn't get much development from them. It was sort of, filler level character development. Nice, but not substantial. So the meat of the story seems to take place in the story missions, which are... basic? Each one tells its own little story, but added together it didn't seem to amount to much.

What all happened in episode 1? Ignoring the side stories, it seemed like you reforged a staff, Guttenhart (is that his name?) was mean to you and then Zeno, your staff was stolen, and then... Menfillia? used the staff to unseal Dark Falz who possessed Guttenhart. You run away, and Falz goes One Winged.

It's not horrible compared to similar media, especially for how little time you're required to invest to see that much. But there's not much to it, either. The most interesting elements come from either PSO (which took it from PSIV), or common anime tropes.

[KLMS1]

Blue tablets are mostly background color and fluff, I thought everyone knew that already. I can only wonder if you actually paid any attention to the gold ones though?

[Zorafim]

I paid attention to all I could. Again, I was lucky if the story was translated. Though gold tablets at least had secondary priority, so most were translated by the time I reached them.

Gold ones seemed to be fluff attached to the story. Maybe you learn some information that unlocks another story route. Maybe you learn more of a current important character. Overall, I consider it part of the story mission, but far less important.

[KLMS1]

You may want to spend some time going through them in the Myroom event chronicle, just sayin'. Also if you've cleared the later episodes you ought to be aware Ep 1 largely lays the groundwork for the big developements down the road. (Also the Ep 1 matterboards are ass and it's no wonder the devs streamlined them a lot down the road.)
Hell.
You run into [Persona] almost at the beginning and s/he doesn't become seriously important until very late Ep 2 onwards. Ditto Matoi more or less.

[Zorafim]

Well I was planning to do some writing involving PSO2 sometime soon, which would require me to see all the story again to study the details so I could figure out what I want to do with it. ep3 seems to complete the story, while 4 seems to start a new one. So I figure waiting until 3 is translated will allow me to get the greatest understanding of the whole thing.
It's also a good excuse to finally see what all those blue tablets say. Each one by itself gave me almost nothing (I get it Marlu, you don't like hunters. Get over it. Tell me about your day or something.), but hopefully all of them combined will give more insight.

Though I'm adamant that the story so far as I have seen is fairly basic, the setting provides a great backdrop. What few stories the fan forums have going on are great proof of that. If nothing else, I'm hoping having more examples of those would help me out.