Play time is incorrect. Play time at time of writing is ~80 hours.
I played this game back in 2005 / 6 as a teenager. Eventually I was ostracized by my community in this game for buying gil, so I put it down for a long while. I returned to this game after seeing the trailer for Aion 2 and wanting a nostalgia hit (Aion classic was not enjoyable). This did not deliver that nostalgia hit. Those are my biases.
This game has an awful onboarding system. Playonline is junk, the websites are dated and oftentimes incorrect, and SquareEnix seems unwilling to adjust this account creation hurdle (to be fair, FF14 has similar issues here. This may just be an "it's difficult to be a japanese company and host a live service" thing). I spent several hours creating an account, downloading incorrect files, purchasing incorrect subscriptions, pressing incorrect buttons, before I was ever able to just log in and make a character.
The largest servers are closed to new character creation. Some research has led me to believe that this is not all bad. Some reports have shown that the largest servers have a botting problem, and overpopulation can lead to issues getting things done as these servers are not sharded, and mob spawns are limited. However, the server I chose felt utterly abandoned, at least for the leveling process. Players I found would choose to walk away from me 100% of the time in the wild. I never had to compete for monster spawns, but I also never met a single soul in-game. Players that did communicate in-game were doing so in Japanese. I never saw a single line of english text, nor met a single other human playing this game. For eighty hours.
The game has been adjusted since the 2009 false shutdown to accommodate solo play, or at the very least solo leveling. This is appreciated, as I don't think any player would ever reliably hit max level otherwise, however this method has lead to an unfortunate gaming experience. The world feels quite lonely, built for hundreds of players to a zone, yet it's only just you. Walking across a field. For hours. Sometimes looking for specific enemies, sometimes just hitting things because there's nothing else to do right now. It also leads to a very strange difficulty curve. Early levels are a breeze until a certain roadblock, which may completely halt progress. For instance, I spent 5 hours in Davoi trying to tackle a specific quest, and then spent all of 30 minutes completing that quest's counterpart in another zone, Oztroja. The zones aren't appreciably different, maybe I just got unlucky in Davoi. But if I had had a community of friends with me, I don't believe that would have been nearly as frustrating as it ended up being.
Players online will suggest that the game gets fun after hitting max level. After researching all I would have to do to begin having fun, my understanding is this: There are several activities to do after *reaching itemlevel cap, which must be performed solo as no one else needs activities below itemlevel cap. Therefore, new players must sink around **200 hours** before they will even be allowed into a pick-up group. Once there, you will be on the gear treadmill, competing with other players for drops when they have thousands of hours of head start against you. Fun. Oh, and if you want to enjoy a class your way, forget it. The entire community are all meta slaves, and they have found this one-handed sword that destroys all the other weapons in statistics, so you can't play any other weapon if you want to find groups either. Fun, fun.
The game supports modding now, and I would argue the mods are an essential element to making this game palatable. I modded the draw distance, for instance, which made navigation much easier. There are several cosmetic mods, and a few inventory management ones.
The story in this game is an absolute farce. Scenes are cut short often (by this I mean that characters are not allowed to continue a cutscene inside the cutscene, instead the scene is cut short and story elements are told to you through a static NPC), even when there isn't any voice acting. The story is full of cliches, has almost zero character building. Characters are introduced as dark and brooding, and remain dark and brooding throughout the arc. The players' character is laughably lost in this world. Frequently, a cutscene will begin with the player character being treated like the NPC knows who they are. We have no idea who the NPC is, and the player character's face reflects that. Instead of setting up the world, and introducing characters, the NPC's will **remark how strange it is that you don't remember them // Comment on how your face looks since you are clearly so lost** and simply continue with the plot. It is **utterly** ridiculous.
Guides exist to help new players. Don't even bother with them. As I was approaching max level, the guide I was following said "be sure to equip X,Y,Z because these pieces of gear are a free leg up and will save you tons and tons of time!!" as a major step. Can't find X,Y,Z, so I google a bit. Turns out those pieces of gear were removed from the game **in 2013.** That is how outdated the paratext for this game is.
I could go on, but this is enough for a steam review. Stay away from this game in 2026. EVE Online has a very similar gameplay loop, play that instead.
