Despite Sega promising that Phantasy Star Online 2, their latest in the online spinoff sub-series within the Phantasy Star series, is still coming west – they’ve been doing some peculiar things to further discourage Western/English speaking fans’ hopes from rising anything higher than “moderately crushed.”

Now that Phantasy Star Online 2 has been available in Japan across multiple platforms for quite some time now, it would lead one to think that they would fulfill their promise and finally bring the game to Western fans right? Right?

Well, an official English version is now available via Playpark, the game’s publisher in southeast Asia, but they’ve unfortunately IP locked the game so that unless you live in south east Asia (or know how to disguise your IP), you won’t be able to play it. Their reasoning? Read it for yourself:

“IP block are implemented due to licensing agreement with the game developers”

So no Phantasy Star Online fan, you cannot create your own girl avatar and hop around an English based version of the game. They posted the official statement via their Facebook page, and while it’s definitely not something fans want to see, at least it sheds some more light on the absolutely strange situation over at Sega Japan.

It seems like they just don’t care for their Western fans who have been waiting nearly two years for the game, as it came out back in July of 2012. Why all this complacency for a game that is soon to be ported to mobile phones, and yet Western/English speaking fans have no way to officially play it?