So I finished Story Quest 1-3 on my first character of the account and when I went to my second character on the account it didn't have any available. So my question is, is the story quest shared between all your characters on the account? Like can you resume story quest where you left off on any of the characters of the account. I even checked on my second low level character and it can invite everyone from the story even though it hasn't done anything. So a clarification on this would be appreciated and thanks.

The story quest completion is shared between all characters on the account. This is mainly because certain story quests give SG, which is one of the semi-premium currencies.

This also means all characters get partner cards that are awarded from the story too.

Ok thanks, makes sense

You can also re-play story quests by clicking the orange dropdown at the top of the list and choosing the "All" option.

Could someone help me out and list the number of main story quests per episode? I'm up to quest 114 in Episode 1 and I see no end in sight. T.T I've looked in a lot of places, but I can't find any mention of this.

You cannot replay "story quests", you can replay the cutscenes. Unless you happen to remember which random ARKS or sub or exploration that cut scenes was associated with you will have no idea what 'mission' you were supposed to play. This I personally think is really bad as you can never take another completely different character through the same experience of uncovering the story as your first.

Or worse, if you play the game with friends as I did and just do a ton of content together NONE of the cut scenes play so before you know it you have passed huge chunks of the story and are left just watching chopped up cut scenes later. "Oh I guess I talked to this person at some point... and had a moment with this person I have no idea why..."

All the developer's brilliance and they couldn't just make it so repeats of the same story quest don't award SG? Pretty much every other MMO developer had this one figured out.

@Shadex uhhh, what? The only content outside of the story quests itself that gates story progression is Explorations and you basically just do those in the order they're presented to you and that's it for unlocking story. There weren't ANY cutscenes that would've played if you were without friends or not, it's just not a thing that happens outside of the lobby, and running into cutscenes in the lobby is not the main method you're even meant to access them.

You can replay every single story cutscene and mission via the Story Quest menu, and in fact replaying the latter to get S ranks if you didn't the first time is a good source of SG. There's not much "uncovering" of story for a new player in PSO2 Global, and hasn't been on JP since Ep5 reworked the whole story progression.

@konana uhhhh, yes. Few of us started playing last week. After finishing the prologue and dumping into the Gate area there isn't a lot of direction. So after about two days of just grabbing suggested ARK missions we all started asking, wasn't there some big story to this game? So we go into the Story section and start clicking on the missions only to find they are not missions, they are cut scenes we never got when we were actually doing the missions they were associated with. So you are left completely disconnected from the story. It is no longer a story 'you' the character are a part of, it is a story you are watching after the fact happen. We all sat there for almost 2 hours watching cut scene after cut scene trying to piece together where all this stuff had happened, past tense, to us all.

Researching I discover that yes, they used to play for you out in the field as you were doing the missions so that you had some sense of context of what was going on. You were there, in the moment, when something happened and a cut scene occurs. Seems they have since removed that for whatever reason so that players are just expected I guess to go watch the anime to figure why they are even here.

It could very well be simply a difference in game design philosophies and so be it. That makes it no less jarring to some and in no way invalidates their opinions on the matter. FF14 also has the ability to watch the scenes later but does not remove them from the quests.

@Shadex The Matterboard (the way the story originally played out) was not friendly to those who played in multiplayer groups because so much of the context-based story in Episodes 1-3 involved finding the right areas, fighting the right enemies, getting certain enemies to spawn, getting certain drops to occur, and finding relevant areas around the lobby to trigger the scenes. All of these pulled you out of your party and griefed other players you were with because you would be dead weight in the parties (or would be outright removed) and forced to start over to find the next part. When it came to the bigger fights like the Emergency Quest-related fights your story progress hinged entirely on following the Emergency Quest schedule and having players to help you because you otherwise would have to solo those fights (which were very hard at the time).

In Episode 2 the player is introduced to the Matterboard which allows players to complete a checklist of scenes in order to move on in the "larger" story and introduces dead ends to the story that requires players revisiting parts of the story to retcon paths to find their way forward in the story. On paper this sounds like something every other game would have done for story progression but its implementation in Phantasy Star Online 2 was tedious, lackluster, and heavily convoluted to the point where Episode 4 and 5 replaced the Matterboard with the "Omnibus" instead. Later on in Episode 5 this was completely scrapped out so you purely get the story and then relevant (and curated) versions of the boss fights without having to grind and hope for the chances you get the correct circumstances.

Episode 1 is a very big baggage of "here is a world where everyone talks about the past but won't tell you about why it matters" shotgunned to the wall over and over again with so much filler until the very end when something "had" to happen to end the episode. Episode 2 starts to get more clear with its path (because it retcons Episode 1 via time travel magic) and Episode 3 starts to solidify what Episode 2 was about. When you play through Episode 5 (which is a semi-reboot of what established Episode 1) you will have a much clearer idea of what Sega decided to settle on for the Episodes 1-3 story in the long run. The anime series does not completely tie in nicely to the actual game due to it omitting several Episode 3 aspects of the story (which then make it so Episode: Oracle cannot have the events of Episode 6 playing out due to those story elements being omitted).

The story really could have been handled more nicely and smoothly, I would agree. But unfortunately for Phantasy Star Online 2 you are better off taking the story not so seriously until you get towards Episodes 2-3 or Episodes 5-6 (or Episode 4 if you really wanted to detach yourself from the Episode 1-3 story).