I've played the first few quests. Is definitely local multiplayer only, doesn't seem to have download play, but you can streetpass or connect online to recruit AIs of real people as teammates for single player (along with a default teammate?).
The Free 2 Play part seems only halfway offensive so far, you have a real life timed "Vigour" meter that you spend to go on quests. You start with like 13 Vigour (which seems to level up), the beginning quests take around 5 Vigour. Recharges in 7 minutes by default, but if you spend "Gem Apples", you can permanently lower that recharge time. That timer also seems to recharge while you're in the fight, so it didn't really get in my way yet.
The Gem Apples are the micro-transaction part, you buy them in bundles from $0.80 to $20 (CAD at least), and they're used for all sorts of things, like reducing that Vigour requirement, getting weapons (this is mixed with other in-game resource gathering that you can also farm with amiibos), buying single use items, unlocking missions, etc. The game gives you a "harvest" of them every 12 hours at a tree, which apparently will grow to give you more apples at a time if you buy some microtransactions, but you also get apples from normal gameplay and doing "heroic mission" achievement like things.
I saw the prices for the apples when I first started up the game but now it's broken, so I can't check how reasonable the bundles seemed after looking more at what apples do.
So yeah, the F2P is kind of halfway. You can mitigate it by spending some money, and hopefully if you spend enough it might become irrelevant like Nintendo's other F2P efforts. I haven't progressed far in the game or anything though so Gem Apple requirements could easily go up for regular missions and requiring better gear and all that. The amount of variables on it isn't really my favourite type of F2P if it doesn't cap out your spending.
