Shampooh
Published
Current verdict based on the demo is a firm "don't bother". The game is seriously CPU bottlenecked on the deck and lacks offline.
FSR seems to completely disable rendering, resulting in a black screen
15-20 FPS average at completely minimum settings
Offline play is unsupported. Disconnecting forces back to menus, and nothing can be done, not even opening the options menu, without an internet connection.
Shader precompilation took about 30 minutes. If you're really going to give this a shot, grab a snack.
I'd recommend a 30 FPS cap in NGS for playing on battery; while it can reach 60, you'd only have about 2 hours tops of playtime.
NGS is functionally unplayable without Proton-GE, which resolves a filesystem issue that causes constant freezes when moving on the map. This can also apparently be resolved by installing the game to a drive formatted to be case insensitive. Further reading here, though note that the GameGuard issues mentioned throughout the first few years of the comments have long since been resolved.
"PSO2 Classic" is comparatively playable without it, though loadtimes will still be significantly slowed to a crawl and you may even timeout from the game servers during loading.
Having a lot of characters onscreen, ie in cities or major raids, will give some microstutter as assets for their characters load in. Don't expect them to load quickly.
All hurdles aside, the game runs flawlessly and works as expected once you've got Proton-GE sorting things out: NGS can achieve a mostly stable 60 FPS with some graphical compromises and FSR if you don't mind giving up the battery life. "Mostly stable", don't expect that to be smooth in the most cluttered city areas.
Classic can easily hold 60 FPS without too much power draw and can even be bumped up to 90 FPS on the OLED display if you're feeling fancy.
Maximum settings can't quite maintain 60 FPS, and there doesn't seem to be an advanced graphics menu; the "mid" preset seems more stable. There does not appear to be any way to increase the in-game framerate limit despite the main menu being uncapped.
