Most of the time when a developer tries to convert an MMO-like game to a single-player experience, it comes with some kind of tradeoff. Usually it ends up being a bunch of fetch quests or just a boss rush simulator. This game is both. The world feels empty and the characters you meet will mostly ignore you. For being an MMO simulation, this world feels hollow.
It doesn't help that the combat is also not all that engaging. True to MMO fashion, it is all about using as many skills as you can and then watching the cooldowns. It is pretty neat that you get to use different kinds of weapons and each weapon type is useful against a different type of enemy. It does add a little strategy. It is a shame that 85% of the bosses you fight are weak to one type of weapon though.
The story in this game would have been game if the translation wasn't so terrible it is nearly broken. It is almost as if the whole script was just run through Google Translate and then pasted in. I've been told this was fixed in the PS4 version of this game but on the Vita, it is gibberish at best. This really does hurt another big feature of the game, which is the dating-sim aspects. It is hard to romance a girl when you don't have a clue what they are talking about.
All in all, this wasn't a terrible game. I made it through and I didn't absolutely hate it. If I can finish it and the 80+ hours contained within, it can't be that bad. It wasn't fun but if you like Sword Art Online, it is worth playing. It does introduce characters that aren't in the anime and they do carry those characters into future games. So it is almost required to play this before some of the other games.
