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.
Works perfectly right away on first launch, with only some forgiveable performance struggles holding it back a bit.
The default gamepad controls offer the option of either using the tilt of the thumbstick to aim, or moving a cursor with the thumbstick. I found that the first of these felt best between them, but ultimately chose to make a custom control scheme using the right trackpad as a mouse-region. Unfortunately the game automatically switches to gamepad input and ignores keyboard and mouse inputs if any gamepad inputs are detected, which necessitated recreating the gamepad control scheme as keyboard inputs in the Steam input settings. This has proven worth the trouble though, in my opinion cursor based aiming like this feels much more versatile the more chaotic levels.
When there's a lot of enemies onscreen, the game can struggle and drop to ~20 FPS (from its base 30).
Just to note in case one doesn't notice on the Steam page: Yes, this runs at a locked 30 FPS, and yes, you can feel it especially in some of the occasional platforming segments. However, once you get used to it, the game feels great on Deck and runs fine through Proton. It has a charm that is absolutely reminiscent of classics like Metal Slug.
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.
