Came here to see what the "best SAO" game described on online posts.

It has some surprisingly good elements, the nomer of armor transmog and weapon designs is very very high. The skill system is pretty simple and flexible. Combats slightly deeper than a mousou game but about as easy.

I've been looking for an offline action game to gear NPC followers in and have ai companions and this game has it. A really rare system that I'm always on the lookout for and why I bought the game.

The story of the game is pretty dire, as someone who tolerated the anime 10 years ago I can't handle that kind of storytelling these days. Luckily for me you can set up an enter spam macro and just ff through all non 3d cutscenes. The few lines that I did read and plot points I didn't skip were complete slop.

What I really came here looking for was the systems and they're pretty good. The levelling and gearing is smooth right up until the second DLC called "abyss of the shrine maiden. Before then you can fight 99% of monsters and get 99% of chests which is dope and getting a nice drop on gear felt nice. It all falls apart at dlc 2 though as levelling normally killing everything and gearing decently left me at lvl 70-77 where the mobs are either 76 to 120+. I can reasonably kill things up to 100 but anything more is a real slog and grinding mobs 30+ levels above me has suddenly gone from 10-14 mobs per level to MMO levels of like 50+.

There's a memory leak issue where the frames will start tanking after 4 hours and will tank in general as it loads in npcs or a lot of them in certain areas (I'm on a 4070 super+ 12700f, 32gb ram) regardless of hardware.

There's better games to play these days especially if you have no time. Wouldn't recommend.

Also the game went on sale for 85% off a week after I bought it ffs.

GG