I played the game quite a bit yesterday evening, and it was an awesome experience !
I created my character, a tall, muscular amazon (some pics later). And then, I discovered the new game.
There was a story to begin the adventure, nothing amazing, but still nice to have. Then I was able to roam around the city and explore. The fact that it is now an open-world makes it really nice to travel. You have means to move around, like hovering. This is pretty fun.
What I want to point out are the adjustments they made. The experience was much more pleasant, and much less an inventory management nightmare. I played the entire evening without having to go to the storage even once ! What a great progress !
You can hold up to 100 items, instead of 50. And they drop a lot less. This makes up for a much better user experience really.
Visuals are nice on Series X, everything set to max, blur to off, fps to 60. There is still room for improvement, I noticed some ugly pixels in the distance at several occasions, but it felt pretty good overall.
Great improvement over the original PSO2 in terms of player fun. The game and its systems are much less in the way of the player.