Agreed with OP and I'll add in my beef with NGS
- putting harvesting/gathering (including world trials and randomites) forefront as part of the game loop. Never has a phantasy star game done this, as harvesting/gathering craft materials has been a secondary thing you do in the past to further aid your abilities and or gear(rings). Making this as a primary core part of game loop is not fun for many.
- removal of the mag raising and instead replaced it with a field buff mechanic. Mag raising has been a staple of the PSO series (which probably stems from Sonic Adventure chaos), and the removal of such mechanic leaves the player with even less to do in a game that is already barren of content.
- combat in favor of range/force spells safety. This is the consequence of making the combat in open world battle fields where you have much larger distance between you and the mob and as such gives you more allowance to put more risk into range/spell actions than you are if you were face to face against the mob. As such, close combat melee classes are punished as they have far more downtime when damaged (making close combat melee classes reliant on counter parry early on).
- BP gate for UQs along with level gate
- multiple region UQ fragmentation
- boost items continue to deplete once initiated even when not in use
- auto pickup spam of weapons/affix capsules/items caused a need for auto sell which is a premium benefit (or costly SG)
- one 3 day pass for the player shop access per mission pass is way too low in amount for f2p
- crossing a region boundary closes all menus you had up
- music playing in the field gets overridden by UQ or rappy music
- controls for mag music are not very accesible and requires too much menuing just to play a single track
- Gigas do not scale per region, instead all of them are beyond max level when a new update is dropped (killing u instantly while exploring if not cautious)
- addi is P2W
- Story is forgettable and has no inpact on player urgency or attachment
- Weather effect being random interrupts overall game loop (for that 1 blizzardia or gigas hunting)
- attack cap in regions makes attack progression not tangible
- seasonal events preys on players FOMO, making them grind to artificially generate play time for the game
- Revival scratches are full of rehashed based PSO2 spec'ed items, some of which cant even be used/sold in base PSO2 (I'm looking at you * Cyd Rygid)
- Alliance badge and Special scratch prize list hardly ever updates
- same-ish reused enemies/dolls type throughout each region
- Alliance task records scoreboard punishes small alliances
- title notifications are overly intrusive
- cannot finely control the amount of zoom in salon, only in steps
- trinitas had no matchmaking, which leaves it essentially a dead quest type