Been checking out info throughout the morning, over a myriad of sources, and so far I'm quite liking what I see.
The character customization is pretty insane, and I'm very happy they seem to be tending to important issues such as breast size and perkiness. We can't have a good character creator these days without such important matters!
Honestly though, there's a ton of options, including tattoos and scars and what else. The sliders are very in-depht and allow for you to make your character look as unique as I can imagine them, so in that regard it gets a huge thumbs up. It seems as if you can pick from three races and three classes, the classic Hunter, Ranger and Force classes making a return, as well as the Newman, Human and CASTs. The "news" for PSO players are what seem to be the FOcasts, a fusion of Forces and CASTs, which might be pretty entertaining. The female one in particular looks really cute, I'm tempted to have one myself, haha.
As for the gameplay, it seems like they're getting rid of the concept of "Character Level", and instead each character will have a "Class Level". Which means, I suppose, you'll be able to have a Force level 100, but then you might change to a Ranger on the same character and have it go back to level 1. It's nice because it allows you to fill three different roles on the same character, without having to occupy more slots with same races/different classes. There's also a "Multi Partying System", which there doesn't seem to be a lot of details about yet, but the gameplay bits showed up to 12 people on a single room. It'd be very neat if three parties got together in the same game but had different ways to reach a centered room, where their combined efforts would be necessary to beat the boss of a certain mission.
While we're at it, the monsters seem to be really well done. That Rock Bear has some grappling trick which seems to do a TON of damage, and adds a nice variety to the usually lacking AI in Phantasy Star games. PSO had the "attack everything, always aggro" variant, which I actually prefer to PSU's mostly "I'm gonna walk around doing nothing much" AI. Here it seems like each monster has its own quirks, so I guess it might actually be much, much superior to what we've seen from the series up til now.
All in all, I'm really hyped for the game. Alpha Beta seems to be scheduled for August, and from what I understood from the briefing they're going to hold a Closed Beta sometime after and also an Open Beta. I don't think they gave out dates for the betas though, so it could take a while yet. Biggest omission so far? No MAGs to be seen. It's not that I'm gonna boycott the game if they don't add them, but even without the stat boosts MAGs were just cute to have around, and a lot of old PSO players have cool memories of their small mechanic partners.