Good hopes, mediocre results.
When an MMORPG genre comes out from somewhat a successful developer these days, it is always interesting to see if new things are being added. With Moonlight Sculptor it is not the case.
I will try my best to distant from possible bias due to first days of servers being under pressure, resulting in connection issues and iOS stuck problem, and I will not be focusing too much on amount of money you can spend to buy literally everything.
1. Character progression.
As I haven't progressed way too far into the game being only lvl 90-ish and 50-ish with my characters, it clearly lacks any diversities in the skilling tree compared to other titles. You are dead locked into same spells/skills on same classes and have no general priority in them. You can upgrade their damage with spell books, but that's about it.
Powering equipment via enchants has an insane gap of usefulness, when enchants are very scarce to get and by paying money you can transfer them between items. Stats come from sculptures, but their bonuses very heavily depend on how much you've paid or autogrinded.
2. Quest line and running quests in general.
As you can do absolutely anything from interacting with items to actual constant "kill X" quests on autoplay, it becomes very boring. Even without touch input quest dialogues skip forward on their own. I did like couple of hidden side quests, they have fun stories and use characters outside the world in an interesting way, but some of the quests seem to be bugged/wrongly described/translated to English.
3. The autoplay.
Ah, the devil himself. I won't be explaining too much, but it is very much based on your ingame time per day. You need a lot of resources for progression, you need drops for daily quests and etc. Being active, actually playing the game, doesn't provide many bonuses towards that. You better just installing emulator and afk grinding 24h every day with zero inputs. It is that bad. I am fine with emulators, not all want to play from phones, but when throttling your device for full days straight or just using pc to afk grind without any scripts, since game offers it itself, becomes the only option to progress, it is unsettling to say the least.
4. Life skills.
You can collect resources(also droppable by mobs) and fish, but it isn't in any way a progress-able skill. Lame non-interactive activity. Cooking seems to be alright kinda, but you will just do same dishes again and again, since while they have visual variety, it is basically same buff on different stuff.
Auction house aka exchange has the dumbest trading system I've seen in games on its own besides daily limits. Everybody bids the same price and in 2 hours someone random gets the item. What?
5. Graphics, models, player crowds.
While I do like the art style myself, I can't stress enough to explain how strange it is to not have an option to turn off others' models in cities and raid bosses. Imagine having 40 players at same spot and all of them have a summoned creature, a pet and a companion on your screen. Why? Your player also collides with other players, so, as a melee champion you literally get stuck under bosses.
6. What money gets you.
Of course, any projects require some MTX to sustain the costs associated with keeping the game going. You can give players bonus dungeon entrances, cosmetics, but what about bonus xp? Okay, well, 10pc seems alright, maybe, 20. But here with money you can get 100% bonus xp from every source and a little bit on top. So you literally progress twice as faster than other players in a game where you can open pvp against any levels. You can buy bonus drop chance, bonus stats and even ingame gold that leads to a chance of buying any sold items. So, what's the fun part of the game then if only limit is a wallet.
7. Community, guilds, content for friends.
Some zones hint that there could be an open guild pvp to contest a region for, perhaps, bonus rewards, but so far there is nothing to do with your friends. Chat is clunky, has no time stamps, friend list lacks any usability. Guild shared quests are interesting enough as a system, that's about it.
8. The world.
Looking diverse enough world with variety of habitats and bustling cities where npc could hold a hidden quest waiting just for you, the adventurer. A pleasant musical track, but enemy attacks seems to be the same lame sound. Maps also have pretty much not very hidden small nods with lore or rewards for Christmas(!) event in May... But all the little hidden stuff is pretty useless and limited daily, so, doesn't force player to explore anything.
Shortly: underdelivered fun-deprived fully pve auto grind orientated wanna be MMORPG with too impactful microtransactions, lack of character diversity and server delays.
I am giving it 3 stars for what it can/could be considering possible upcoming updates, but for where it is now it is 2/5
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