Why is it wierd?
Because it's old now, and stuff doesn't make sense to people who weren't there at that time of technology so here comes an explanation page.

1. Dial Up Dreamcast Days
YES these were the days of only dial-up telephone modems. The Dreamcast console had one built right in. This means that someone could "disconnect you" if they picked up the (non-dedicated) phone line, or, sometimes calls would just drop & you'd get booted off. Lag was much more common too.

2. Client-side-saving
Yeah...dial up didn't allow for server-side saving, your guy was on your memory card. This (of course) enabled all the hax.

3. HAX!
PSO was LITERALLY the first ORPG to EVER exist for consoles. Contemplate that for a minute, it's very interesting & implies a lot. SonicTeam had absolutely no idea the type of attack the game would be under within a matter of months. There wasn't a whole lot they could do about it, either. The longer the comic goes, the more outlandish powers random people will get. (Jet & co never hack anything though...I didn't have a Game Genie & I didn't care) This usually gets explained in After/WORDS but, it's worth noting here that the place couldn't possibly be 'hack free' due to its construction. Don't think ill of the game as it is (now more than ever) clearly a product of its time.

4. The Times They Are A Changin'
Well, technology it is a changin....It has become super easy to notice all the wierd old outdated 'junk' in the comic, like Jet having all these CRT (thick, square, heavy) monitors and screens, plus consoles with wired controllers! Wow! They can build sentient androids but not get the wire off their silly games! Preposterous!
Yes it is. But, in the time the comic was drawn, no one had yet invented the flat screen (do you believe it??) and all consoles had wires only. Isn't it a funny notion years later? I've no idea what to do with this...do you go back and change the old art so it doesn't look bizzarre? There are people alive now reading this who never saw a CRT in action in their own home.

5. Ahead of its time
If you look at the translated phrase builder in-game, the world-unifying gameplay aspect, the graphics used, the amount of quests they added FOR FREE, how much you could just...talk to people, and really all the content that was in there holy cow not even much today can get close. Why doesn't anybody try? PSO was composed of probably 80% ambition. All the talk above makes it look like a fossil, but really, what else lives up to it, even in 2018? (No really...I'd like to hear about such a game...)

6. No Competition
Remember how it was the first ORPG, basically if you weren't on a PC and you wanted RPG PSO was your jam. It was hella populated. But, even if people 'didnt like it', they also wouldn't usually leave. This created an odd dynamic...there wasn't a million other worlds to go to, a billion distractions in the cellphone, no Facebook no other games to just hop to. This is another thought-provoker especially once it gets into the era where "Certain people's only fun in pso is to ruin the fun of others inside of pso" and the "pso destroying hobbiests" who's hobby was to try and demolish the game so no one could play it.

7. Jet is pretty wierd looking
Yes he is! He doesn't, and is not supposed to have human proportions. The customizer was slider based for 'height / width'. You could generate interesting androids with non-human proportions. (This kind of hasn't been achieved since, PSU certainly flopped at it.....)
His arms are too long, and his hands are larger than they ought to be. (This combination lets him reach across his own chest as a human would be able to, without clipping through himself, something PSO2 fails at)
Also, his arms are only connected at the top part of the shoulder, he has absolutely no "Armpit area" whatsoever. His face is the "Kireek face" that you would recognize (for most of the comic) but the facial features ALSO widen along with the body so he has a very different facial look than Kireek did. It helped make him unique back in the day. (There was no color slider)