I played the MMO for a bit when it first came out. I don't know what it's like these days, but it didn't leave a great impression. I understood virtually nothing about it, because it's entirely in Japanese, but from what I gathered, the story revolves around a Great White Dragon that has called all the Arisens to come and protect it from something. I don't fucking know.
Anyway, the gameplay was kind of shitty. For one, they split the ranger/strider into two different classes, so there was the "hunter" class that only had a fucking bow, and there was another class where you only had the dual blades, but I forget what they called it. Another thing, your character didn't level up; you would instead level classes. Say you pick knight and you level it up to the cap, but then you want to switch to mage or something. Well, you'd be back at level one, which means you have to go back to the region outside of the starting area and do the same fucking notice board quests over and over again to level up before you can move on to the region that you were playing before. Maybe that's not a big deal to the type of WOW autist who wants to spend the next three years on one game, and I understand that there should be some type of restriction for suddenly changing your class, but to me that's just too much. Maybe they could've let you retain your character level, but forced you to grind for Skill Points to unlock new moves like in the first game, instead of making you go back to level one and purchasing new moves from a shop once you meet their level requirement.
The large monsters like ogres and griffins have a "rage meter". That is to say, when you do a certain amount of damage to them, they will begin to enter "rage mode", during which time your normal attacks will do significantly less damage, and you'll have to work to attack certain weak spots on the body in order to get them back to normal, just so you can continue to do damage to the beast. This system by itself isn't so bad, but the problem lies in how frequently rage mode would initiate. Sometimes a single monster could enter rage mode four or five times in a single fight, and it just becomes a tedious slog to get them out of it again. Sure, you could partner with a priest character who could use magic to get them out of rage mode much faster, but if you're playing alone, or you can't understand Japanese and are therefore unable to find someone to play with, then you're fucked.
The pawn AI was utter shit, it feels as though they were added as an afterthought. Given my inexperience with the game, I admit I could be wrong, but from what I could tell, it seemed like pawns were unable to learn how to do better strategies like their counterparts in Dark Arisen. I guess they expected players to group up into teams and work together instead of having pawns.
Aside from this, though, the game ran pretty well, it looked good enough for a F2P MMO, and they added a couple of new mechanics that make the general experience better. For instance, players are now able to climb certain types of terrain, and I'm pretty sure that running outside of combat would not consume stamina, though I'm not sure about that.
Anyway, I don't know if the game has been improved since I played it, but I don't really care to find out. Give it a try if you really want to. You have to use a VPN to gain access to their servers, because the game won't connect if your IP address isn't Japanese.