This game is a disservice to the anime fandom. There are so many problems with this game. Do note that I have 100%'d the game, and even beaten it on Very Hard Death Mode. I am a content creator who Bandai Namco IGNORED IN EMAILS and thus I have no reason to give this a positive review as they did not gift me a copy of their game, I was forced to beg my audience to buy the game for me.
To start, the game is an absolute SLOG. It isn't so much a Dark Souls style game as it is a maze where you snake your way through winding paths trying to collect meaningless treasure. Out of the several hundred treasure chests on the map, only TWO of them in the whole game have blueprints (gear to craft) worth getting, and they're located both on the same mission towards the end of the game, as well as on easy pathways.
If you play 100% of the game, getting all the collectibles, every chest, watching every cutscene, maxing out your gear and stats, it's only about 60 hours of content, with 90% of that being navigating the mazes. If you were to beeline main story quest stuff and ignore most of the slop, you'd cut down the time significantly. If you skip every cutscene and know exactly where to go you could speed run the game in 3-4 hours or less.
Most of the content, weapon balancing, and combat is insignificant as if you don't play the "meta" of maximizing your damage, staggering enemies, and using the best gear then you're just padding game time, not having a fun or engaging experience.
The game isn't super loyal to the source material either. One of the biggest moments is the 1st floor boss raid, and they TOTALLY screwed up the way the room is supposed to look, and they force you behind a barrier where you can't even get close to the actual anime protagonists as they fight the Kobold Lord. It's super depressing and is a spit in the face of anime fans.
Speaking of story, you play as a mute no-dialogue no personality having side character that has no influence or meaning at all. The real main character is Iori, as even if you don't use that character in your party all their dialogue is through text messages, and at parts the game forces you to use that specific character over any other.
Also, when making your character, it's "body type A / B." Not male / female. This goes against the original source material. If you're playing it to enrich the experience of the anime or to get closer to the actual protagonists from the anime, you get shallow small-talk that you already know about. It builds or adds NOTHING to the characters or anime at all.
For an "MMORPG game world" where 8,000 players are on the 1st floor, there's ZERO other players in the open world areas. The towns are just soulless mannequin NPC's roaming around town doing nothing at all other than being background decoration. When you're out in the open world fighting mobs, other players are just, nonexistent? Ever play an MMORPG where the entire quest zones and game world are completely devoid of other players?
The game has a "monument of life" where you can search up the in-game names of characters, except if you search up names of characters that are in the death game, they don't exist, because the devs were too lazy to include every named character from the anime or movies into the game.
As far as the story goes, it introduces characters, that have zero impact or completely disappear entirely. If I had to guess, the story was probably AI prompted, and I can guarantee you some quest NPC dialogue was written (not voiced) by AI, as it has all the usual AI spelling and grammar. Speaking of subtitle grammar, there's many mistakes, major ones, likenotaddingspacebetweenwords type of stuff, or subtitles run off screen. It's hilariously bad. In the prologue, you're introduced to two PK characters, whom you never ever see until the post game credits. There's a "friend" of yours that you never, ever see, who dies off camera, and a friend character that just stops showing up in the story entirely, despite being there since the the start. No, they didn't die. They just, weren't used in any scenes and the game never questions or explains why. There's another ally whom you meet early on, who's kind of a big deal (Not Kirito), and he just randomly dead towards the end of the game, off camera, and without explanation. You also get a party member that tags along that you can never actually use as a partner towards the end, but is 100% programed in the games code to be playable, but I assume they'll just make you pay for DLC in a few months to have the privilege of having her abilities be manually casted. Isn't that fun? (No.)
The optional "super secret boss" that recommends you be level 200 to take on is insanely easy, and isn't even close to the top 10 hardest fights in the game. Almost all of the items "mods" don't do what they say and are absolutely undertuned for their rarities, making some early game items essentially super-weapons and end-game items completely worthless.
This game isn't worth $70. This game isn't worth $40. If it were priced at $20 I'd say give it a go, but this is nothing more than corporate greed trying to milk the fanbase. Avoid this game. Youtube the story or sail the high seas if you want to experience this one.
