I should have listened to the reviews and done more research, but I got tempted by a low price, news of a "solo mode", and the general gameplay looking like a discount version of GBFR, don't make the same mistake I did.

It starts innocently enough with the tutorial and the first story mission, right away you're gonna notice the same usual trappings of other BAMCO developed SAO games : Relentless bombardment of tutorial windows explaining one system after another before you have a chance to assimilate anything, and looooots of dialog (which thankfully you can skip), but ok, once you actually get to play, you realize it's a fairly simple dungeon crawler with decent enough combat, but then you reach the "lobby" and you see a familiar layout with multiple tabs and no less than FIVE currency types displayed at the top right, and then it hits you : This is a live service game! Complete with battle pass, seasons and all that jazz. Look, it is what it is, but personally I think that should stay on the f2p territory, when you put it in a game that you already paid full price for and lock content behind it, it's just disgusting, on top of also having a load of DLC and in-game currency that you can pay real money for so you can skip the grind.

Now I could excuse this if the game was fun regardless, but it isn't, at least as a single player experience. The main problem is that once you venture outside story missions you find out it doesn't play like your regular RPG, it's more like a moba. Non-story maps are BIG, you roam around seeking quest markers that you must complete to finish the map, there's many other random monster spread around the map that you can ignore and run past if you so desire except you probably don't want to do that because characters actually begin every map at lvl1, weak and with 0 unlocked skills, you must kill monsters to lvl up, unlock your full skill set and generally get strong enough to tackle the quest and final boss of the map.

This system sucks all the potential fun out of the game for me. Yes, there's still permanent progression in the form of equipment and "character rank", which unlike the in-game lvl is permanent but all it does is give you some meager stat boosts and a passive skill when you hit 30 (which will take a while), the 4 skills your character starts with stay the same all the way, there's no skill trees or any form of character building outside of equipment and those passives. Feels like this was done to facilitate multiplayer since it more of less puts all players in equal ground regardless of play time, but the lack of significant tangible progress is just lame.

Oh, and the solo mode? Yeah, you can do the online content by yourself with 3 other bots and you can even switch which character you control at any point, but there's a few catches :

-AI is very dumb, you're gonna be doing most of the work yourself
-Since the maps are designed for 5 parties max (total 20 players) to roam around and compete against each other for score, you're gonna find a lot of down time as you travel long distances between quest markers
-The stuff you do solo doesn't count at all for any of the events or battle pass missions, so you don't even get any of the cool rewards for your trouble.

So yeah, it sucks as a single player experience, as far as action RPGs go the previously mentioned GBFR does a much better work at that. Maybe the multiplayer is a better experience, specially if you're REALLY invested in the franchise and can gather friends to play with, but given the basic systems in place, I highly doubt it.

Its pure trash. Bandai Namco trash, the cant make good games.
Started the game, played the tutorial, went to the "boss" got disconnected and needed to start the game from the start again, uninstalled instantly.
Too bad i got it from a third party page otherwise i would have refunded it

How unstable is their damn network and why do i get disconnected when i play with NPCs?
Who the ♥♥♥♥ thought this was a good idea?