Finished the story and all character sidequests (those with non-hidden trophies at least).
Took me about 51 hours and in the end I was level 54. By the way, that's way too high. Bosses were dying in a few OSS, without really being able to damage me.
There doesn't seem to be any post game exclusive content, I guess all that's left is grinding - weapon masteries, multiplayer and hunting HNMs for weapons etc. waiting for the new dungeon to be added on November 17th.
All in all, I enjoyed the game, but at some point I realized it's because it's mostly because I like soloing in MMOs. If you look at most elements of the game, they're mediocre. It's not a looker, the story is good only if you consider SAO story good. I don't and aside from the interesting premise, it failed to make me care about the characters or the world, which made the later part of the game fall flat narration wise. Character sidequests were pure fanservice, but I guess I shouldn't be complaining about it, since that's what "character games" are.
Gameplay was okay, although it felt a bit clunky. I hope some of the junk will be polished through continuous updates.
All this said, the game felt better than the sum of it parts and I'm glad I gave it a shot after being disappointed in Hollow Fragment and Lost Song. If you liked those, you'll probably be in love with HR, ha ha.
I haven't tried any multiplayer, since joining random people seems to be hard, because of the small number of players, but I'll probably check it out later, if only to get to level 70 faster than by defeating HNM adds and doing Episodes.
I also barely did anything to raise affection with NPCs, so I can't really say anything about that part.
My equipment when I finished the story:
Edit:
Tried the multiplayer mode, both with others and alone.
As someone mentioned earlier, the multiplayer part of the game is just running around maps with other players, defeating enemies and grabbing loot. Locations/warp points are the same as in single player, but I guess some NMs etc. are harder.
I think all or most rooms I saw had passwords, so I decided to make my own. 3 other players joined quite quickly, but in the end we weren't able to go on a quest, so 2 of them left and I started with 1 other person. The other player was quite laggy, especially while running, but since I was the host (or at least I think that is the reason), monsters behaved normally. Or maybe monster attacks are all done client side? Who knows.
Anyway, it's nothing to write home about, a lv 120 HNM bested us, but the whole experience wasn't that much better than playing alone. I guess with a group of friends and voice chat it might be fun, but to be honest I'm already kind of tired of all those maps, so running through them again doesn't sound that appealing.
After the above, I tried some multiplayer alone, first on the HARD (recommended for players around lv 50) and then on the DEATH GAME difficulty (~70 lv). I have to say, that being able to do this any time makes getting to the maximum character level extremely easy. Level 70 monsters can be defeated with 0 problem even around level 30-40 if you have decent equipment and since they give a few hundred xp per kill, if I'm ever bored I guess I'll spend an hour or two and jump to lv 70.
I honestly don't recommend it if you haven't finished the story yet, since going through areas while one-two hit killing everything is very boring, especially given the size of the locations and the amount of backtracking.
