I don't. "Progressing" through the story through matter board item pickups between yellow nodes (which could mean serious amounts of time between major plot points) made the story delivery feel so damn disjointed, many conversations can be percieved as having 0 relevance outside of themselves after 30min-1hour or more time from the last one you saw.
Even simple things like Sara telling the player to wait a safe distance away because of someone causing destruction was hard to figure out. I just assumed it was Maria. It wasn't until they streamlined the story events like 2 years ago I realized she was following around Claris Claes.
Matter board made EP1 make even less sense, and most encounters with characters to me became "why should I care about anything you're saying?" or "why am I doing this?" or "why am I here?". Why else would they make the individual matter boards in EP2-3 smaller than EP1 on average? They knew it was horrible.
Matter board was so bad, it turned me off of the story, and I only did it because it was something to do, and there was free stuff. I passively understood what was going on, but the leadups to every event through EP1 was vague at best.
Anyway, point is, matter board was a shit vehicle for story delivery, a huge waste of time, tedious, and good riddance. Fuck matter board.
Jesus I almost forgot I had such a hatred for that crap because its something I did my best not to think about for so long.
I guess that is one of my worst moments in PSO2; EP1 matter board: A long tedious slog of me doing random shit, having random conversations, and then suddenly dark falz elder. Why the lilipans? Why the artifacts? Why do I care about putting them together? Why is Xion giving me cryptic metaphors like Vulcan Raven from MGS? Why am I getting attacked by purple sword easy man? Why did council of 6 members give a damn about who the hell the player was before elder broke loose?
Last edited by Maninbluejumpsuit; Oct 14, 2019 at 07:57 PM.
I am on the other side of the fence... I considered Matterboard to be a better and more involving way to tell the story. It required us to go in the "world" and kill stuff or explore areas to progress, whereas the current mode is just... click and collect your reward. Not to mention that the branching story paths (or alternate timelines?) were one of the major reasons that I got hooked to PSO2. I also enjoyed "meeting" with other important NPCs on the fields and have them say their part whether it was Katori's advertising of Bouncer and her getting dragged by Saga, or Patty trying to lay useless information and Tea losing a bit more of what hope she had left for her, etc. Nowadays the Substory system has replaced these cutscenes, but significantly reduced to a static background with characters watching to the player.
The Matterboard system actually made sense. I don't care much for the new streamlined versions.
The worst moments I lived in the game were all related to affixing. Grinding was also a chore but I distinctly remember the let-down when a particuliarly important affix just failed and several months of hunting just vanished into nothingness.
While I liked meeting the npcs on the field, don't even try to pretend the matterboard wasn't mostly busy work to pad out the story. The fact that the story is just a bunch of cutscenes without it says a lot about the game's poor story pacing and lack of engaging story gameplay than anything about the matterboards being good. Most of the things people seem to be saying they "like" about the matter board aren't even things that require the matter board. You can have a game story that involves going out and doing stuff more, and more in-depth cutscenes, without making the majority of the stuff you do "kill x mob for a useless drop". The matter board was a slog and I would actually rather have nothing in this case.
Matterboards were such a chore that I couldn't blame anyone for not wanting to deal with the Story content of PSO2.
A better system in their place was long overdue by the time Story Board became a thing.
Setting an alarm at 3am to do a GGG trigger MPA and get no Saiki unit >:(
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