manjacksonpso2

[manjacksonpso2]

The PSO2 Casino: An Overview

Since there’s a bit of a brouhaha going on around the casino in GTA Online right now, I thought I’d go over another game that has a casino - PSO2 - and how exactly it works.

Welcome to the Casino Area! Jesus Christ, it’s gaudy.

The first thing you’re going to need is Casino Coins. Aside from playing the games, the only way to get Casino Coins is by getting a Casino Coin pass and taking it to one of these lovely fellows. Pull the lever, and a little orb will drop into the dish with your coins in it. Each coin pass will generally give you 100 coins, but sometimes you’ll get 300, and rarely you’ll get 500.

You get one coin pass per account per day, and there’s no other way to get them that I’m aware of, aside from the occasional login bonus or event. If you want to spend real money to get more coins, you can’t.

Jesus CHRIST that’s gaudy.

This is Rappy Slots.

It’s a slot machine, you’ve seen these. You can play with up to 5 coins at a time, and the payout rate is such that you’ll generally hover around the break-even point for a while, then hit the complicated high-payout mechanic and make some decent profit.

The big castle in the middle has loads of these around it. This is Mesetan Shooter. It costs 100 coins a go, and up to four people can play at once.

It’s a gallery shooter! You shoot these floating diamonds with weird little men inside, and they explode into coin balls, which roll down being shunted left and right by the pegs. There’s other stuff, but I’m not gonna get too hung up on this one game. Catch the coin balls in your catcher to get coins, catch bombs to lose coins. Payout rates are based on your skill and how many people you brought with you. You can make a small amount of profit solo.

This is Black Nyack.

It’s blackjack, but the dealer is an overconfident idiot who occasionally draws himself into a bust for absolutely no reason. It has one twist in the form of the SP cards - their value starts at 0, but every time someone gets one, it’s turned face-up if it was in their initial draw, then a random number from 0-3 is added to the value of all SP cards. There’s various special bonuses that sometimes come up, but generally speaking, you play blackjack, and if you beat the dealer, you get double your bet back.

This is a roulette wheel. I’m not going to insult you by explaining it.

Aaaaand THIS is Arkuma Slot, the only one of these dang games that’s really worth playing.

Which is why you can only play it 10 times a day, for 500 coins a time.

Each of the reels has four possible results - Arkuma (blue), Arkumami (pink), Arkuma AND Arkumami (yellow), or the devil’s fingers. If you roll three of a kind (and you almost always do), something happens. Three blue gets you 10 coins, three pink gets you 30 coins, three yellow gets you 50, and getting each of those lights up the corresponding icon on the bottom.

Lighting up all three icons gets you a completion bonus - 100 coins the first time, 300 coins the second time, and 500 coins each time thereafter.

But what if the devil fingers you? Well, this is the only time you have any actual risk in the whole thing! And even then, not much risk. I’ve got 740 coins here, and I could walk away right now with 240 coins profit. If you want to carry on playing, pick one of the four devil fingers to shoot at, and open fire!

One of these hands will always be 0% - getting that one ends your game instantly, and you walk away with nothing. The others multiply your coins by some amount. I chose poorly.

You probably noticed that stage track along the top of the screen. Every time you roll, the little ship moves along that track, which shows 5 stages at a time. The further along you go, the more likely you are to not get 3 of a kind, and when devil hands show up, there’s likely to be fewer of them - but the fewer arms there are, the higher the multipliers are on the ones that don’t end your game. The game can go to stage 30, where you fight the devil hisself and get a massive coin payout, but your odds of actually getting there are pretty unlikely. You can make a lot of coins off this one as long as you know when to cash out.

So, the important thing: What can you get with your coins?

Well, there’s cosmetics!

No thank you.

Ick.

Yeesh.

Alright, what about the stuff that actually affects gameplay? There’s a few of those, and they’re mostly limited in how many you can buy per week (look at the tiny number in the bottom left of the icon).

These are the weird semi-premium currency that you don’t buy with real money, but you can buy with the currency that you buy with real money. There’s also various drip-feed sources of them throughout the game, including, well, this. They have a number of uses, including utility stuff and gambling for cosmetics.

These raise your success rate in the old weapon upgrade system that people try to avoid using as much as possible. You can buy a better version of these with a resource that’s even easier to get.

These are Enemy Triggers. You can use them in free exploration quests to summon a rare version of a boss, then get a rare drop rate boost for the rest of the quest after you kill them. Nobody uses them any more, cause the bosses they apply to drop immensely outdated gear.

Extreme Passes let you play a fairly outdated kind of quest called an Extreme Quest.

You get these for free once a day whether you want them or not, and you won’t be playing XQs anywhere near that often.

And then there’s Lambda Grinders, which you need to upgrade the highest-end equipment. These are actually useful! For a while, the casino was one of the better sources of these things, though there are a few other ways to get them, some of which don’t have time limits.

They’ve added a few more sources of them now, too.

There’s a couple of other things, but they’re not worth mentioning, so I won’t.

In conclusion: The PSO2 casino, unlike casinos in certain other games, does not allow you to directly buy chips for real money, has relatively fair games of chance and skill that you can reasonably easily make a profit on, and only has a small number of useful things you can spend the profits on anyway. It’s also gaudy as all hell. This doesn’t paint a full picture of the game’s monetisation methods (it does have gambling for cosmetics with real money, for instance), but the casino isn’t that bad, considering it’s literally a casino.