A fun experience is sure to be had but for how long and for how much?
You can invite NPCs to join your group and they will assist you by attacking enemies and casting healing spells and other things. Unfortunately, the AI is horrible in this game and they may only do about 30% of the work even if there are three of them! So, you'll find that they mostly walk or stand around and you have to do all the heavy lifting. It is so frustrating when they a party member heals everyone when everyone is at full life and neglect to heal when everyone is near death. Forgiving the NPC fragility, the single player campaign features poor voice acting and at times, no syncing. The mouths might not move, but they are speaking? This is obviously a Japanese game first but it doesn't help in the presentation department for story telling with it's familiar twists and turns that we could probably see a mile away.
The game plays well with an easy interface but PC users might not be too happy. Using the keyboard is very clunky and non-responsive at many times so if you get it for the PC, you may have to dish out an additional thirty dollars or whatever for a controller because without it, you'll be crying. It is obvious that the PC version is just a port of the console versions which is very disappointing.
You have special attacks and normal attacks. The special attacks use Photons and will slowly regenerate but this stops you from spamming these attacks. Some of them knock down opponents while others do a roll or a multi-hit maneuver that is fun to do and funner to see.
What you find that you will be doing, just like in PSO, is running around, killing enemies that are not too bright, to find a key, to open the door, to the next area, to repeat the process again. The game is an endless grindfest, which can be fun for a while but doesn't have a super long lasting appeal.
Multiplayer is the focus of the game and that is fine. Unfortunately, it costs money to pay for month. It costs about 9.99 USD per month for this game and they don't even give you a free month for you to see if you would like to pay at all! World of Warcraft gives you a free month. This doesn't unless you agree to pay for 6 months at first! At least in PSO, you could play offline with three other people. This doesn't have that capability and that is a major letdown if you wanted to play with a few friends instead of on the Internet.
Even though you can party with up to five other people, it doesn't get much better. The party options and the looting options are purely atrocious. You can not even share money that is picked up so melee fighters, who are close, can pick up everything especially rare items. What's even worse, is that fact that you have to hit an enemy before you get experience. If you're a healer, and neglect to hit one enemy, and then it dies, you get nothing even though you're helping your party!
The game looks okay but the graphics are obviously dated so do not expect to get blown out of the water when you look at the game. It's a more refined looking PSO but other than that, it seems to be a big letdown.
The sounds of the game are fine but the two footstep noises get irritating quickly. It would have been nice if they added more sounds to the weapons but there aren't that many to deal with. The music score is pretty good but nothing in the game screams out that it deserves much more than a fleeting ear.
Although the game is fun at first, it boils down to cost for a game such as this. Though there are thousands of players playing this game online, it is very difficult to justify considering all the other alternatives there are in this genre. This game has many endearing qualities but it doesn't stack up against the rest so unless you just can't get enough of a PSO updated, then I would pass on this one and wait until they make a game with post 2003 graphics unless you enjoy grinding enemies day in and day out for 9.99 a month.