I’ve never played a game where I had to use valuable skill points to make the game run better. Skills that increase your attack speed, recovery speed, and many many more.
The combat is so slow at times that the game actually has passive skills you can unlock to make it faster. If I didn’t use these special attacks it would probably take me over 50 normal strikes to defeat an enemy, begging the question: ‘What is the point of having a regular combo attack? To put it into perspective I can defeat foes in about one or two special attacks. For an action-RPG, Alicization Lycoris is not only slow it’s also boring and repetitive. I would have loved to avoid using some of these attacks but your regular attacks do virtually no damage. Characters just linger there in an action pose after every special attack. Here I sometimes have to wait longer to recover from an attack than it takes to perform said attack. For an action-RPG, combat should be fast and fun. What makes combat so disappointing is how slow it is. After spending a serious amount of time with the title, I can say that it’s easily one of the worst and cumbersome combat systems to date. As an action-RPG, it looked like the perfect fit for the franchise. Alicization Lycoris looked to resolve those issues.
The franchise has gone through various battle systems and all of them have had serious issues. Sword Art Online has always had a problem establishing what kind of game it wants to be. Sadly only the most hardcore and faithful fans will stick around long enough to actually enjoy the story as the game is actually quite long and can last you up to 70 hours to finish. Although the Alicization story arc is actually pretty good you won’t spend to much time experiencing it as the game jumps six months into the story’s future.