It's good... really good, in fact this my favourite PSO ever (including Universe and the Portable games), the UI is a little wonky and not entirely intuitive, but other than that everything about this game is amazing... well I have a few niggling problems but I'll get to them later.
D-D-Dash (cancel)
I think, the best place to start would probably be the combat. The difference in combat between this and the original game is like night and day, hell even between the more recent games its pretty amazing. Now admittedly I'm playing as a Force character (mage) so my experience in melee is limited, but even so it's enough to know just how different it all is. First of all you can jump, this means you can also do air combos to enemies in the air or even rain down magic/bullets upon them from some where safe. It also allows for more interesting level design. For ranged characters you can change the camera to a third person shooter style camera which works amazingly well if you want to hit an enemies weak spot without dealing with the finnicky auto target or lock on mechanics. For melee I've heard people refer to guard and just guard (guarding as soon as an enemy attacks to negate all damage) mechanics. You can also dash evade attacks granting invincibility frames, not only that but dashing midcombo cancels you out of the combo and into the dash. Combos are similar to the PSP games, you can still combo by pressing the button constantly like an idiot (or even holding it down) but you can also time it to do the nostalgic "shwoop" noise and hit for a bit more damage. Now compare this it PSO1 where you clomped next to an enemy, slowly hit on it, hoping you timed the combo just right so you aren't frozen awkwardly for a second, or hoping that the game will decide to autoblock for you... yea. Again, I'm a force, but I think I can tell what makes melee characters interesting is the make a combo feature, basically allowing you to put 3 different or the same special attacks into your special attack slot to make your own combo.
A matter of matter boards and quests
The structure of the game is rather similar to the portable games. Instead of being able to just waltz into an area, clear out a couple of maps and fight the boss, you have to select a quest. Most of these involve going through a couple of maps and fighting a set amount of enemies. There are also "free" missions, which are basically more traditional quests that involves clearing out a couple of maps and fighting the boss. And now areas are not entirely instanced, some quests have "multi-party" maps. What these are basically are larger areas where parties doing the same quest will converge. This is really awesome, one quest has you all working together to exterminate several bugs. But you all get EXP as long as you're near the enemy, and loot is player based so no one can kill or loot steal.
Of course, cutting through quests isn't the only way to get EXP and Meseta now. Around the lobby you'll see NPCs with
The matter board is basically where all the story missions are, this is a nice, it basically acts similar to the license board in FFXII. When you do a quest, all adjacent quests on the board will unlock unless there's another requirement for it. This is nice, part of me likes to see the board slowly fill out and gives me a big incentive to finish it, now I can't understand a word of the actual story, but I'm going to err on the side of videogames and assume it's probably not very good.
Butter Face
Graphically the game is, not great. I do appreciate that however as it means the game runs on my... less than amazing laptop. So while I cannot say how amazing it looks on full (it has terrible motion blur, that I can say) no amount of good graphics can hide the terribly ugly characters that populate the game. I mean the NPCs as well, not the player characters that even with the chance to make monstrosities look better than most NPCs in the game.
The music and sound is spot on however, nostalgic, PSO-ey, good. A nice mix of new and old.
Pantasy Star Online
I said it wasn't perfect so allow me to just mention my problems with it at the moment. 1) The structure means you spend a lot of time in the forest area. Like I said I've played for a few hours now (though some of that is dicking around in the lobby) and I still haven't seen the caves. Now this is super unfortunate for me because one of my biggest gripes with PSO1 is that after the forest the level design gets really bad and nothing more than square rooms connected by corridors, and I wanted to see if that was true here. 2) I don't like that you don't get the quest for your MAG until level 5, and the drops are not the easiest to find meaning you could be level 10 before you actually get it. Now I don't mind character slots being a cash shop thing, but only 1 is ridiculous especially since characters are bound to the ship you created them on.
Of course, this is the beta and those things may be fixed by the time the full version is out.
Basically I highly recommend playing this, just do it, the beta runs fine. There's no reason to be intimidated by the language barrier, there are plenty of guides and a translation patch in the works and after a while it all becomes second nature. Plus, the likelihood of a western release is grim considering SEGA's current state.
If you do decide to play then Ship 2, blocks 20-23 are where most english speakers hang. It's basically the foreign quarter.