After putting over 19 1/2 hours into it so far, I think Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris is probably the weirdest RPG I've played in the last 5 years in how it just tries to cram Every RPG System Ever into it.

It's not great, but not completely awful either surprisingly.

It has Dragon's Dogma Pawns. It has FFXII Gambits. Its skill tree kinda resembles a weird intersection between Path of Exile and a Destiny map. There's fully integrated multiplayer, but it unlocks after putting 10-15 hours into it like Dragon's Crown & DQB2.

It's wild.

There's plans to include 16-man raid dungeons down the line. It's a stupidly dense game filled with bugs & optimization issues on PC (I heard console performance struggles a lot too & generally buggy across the board).

If they iron out all its technical issues, it might be good?

Also want to mention that everything surrounding the new original character for the game sucks. SAO has a long, tired trend of how it establishes its villains at the cost of misconduct on its female characters and it's no different here. It's terrible, once again, in that regard.

Battles in SAO:AL are engaging too. They have a Xenoblade-esque flow to them where you put foes in a Break state to launch them & attack them mid-air to push them back to the ground in a Down state. Lots of flexibility in how you want to play with lots of different weapon types.

Once again, this game doesn't really open up till you finish the 10-15 hour long "tutorial" that covers the entire first season of Alicization up until the Administrator fight. Things branch off immediately from the source material right at the end of the fight with her.