I volunteered myself to act as guinea pig to get it installed and running as soon as it dropped, 11pm Pacific time ... I think a week ago? -ish? I'll spare everyone a play-by-play of my experience but the TLDR is it was quite possibly the worst launch I have ever experienced. And I've been in the biz for (depressingly) more than thirty years at this point.

That said, once it is installed and working, and assuming you can tolerate the abysmal lobby lag (they claim to have a fix for that dropping this week), the game itself is hella fun. So far it's been very friendly to free players, and I don't seem to be locked out of anything except actually *selling* stuff in the in-game market, which is hardly a crippling constraint. Actual gameplay is lag-free and nice and snappy; if you've every played any variant of PSO before then you'll probably feel right at home.

Oh, and the in-game Miku and Luka concerts are *adorable*, though I advise shutting off player symbol popups lest you get spammed with lewds.

Everyone else in my gaming group was able to get it installed with no trouble, which seems to be the norm if you either already have an active XBox Live account *or* you have an active, signed-in Windows Store account. Neither of those were valid assumptions for me and so everything kind of fell over due to Sega doing shitty patchwork to get it into the Store and Microsoft having a shitty store to begin with.

If anyone hereabouts wants the ugly details I can share 'em.

--sofaspud
--i rolled a braver because the bow looked fun but holy crap the katana zip-slash is so frikkin fun the bow is collecting dust