PS4 Review Code Provided by Bandai Namco
While I am a huge fan of lore-heavy games and story-driven titles, there is always a wrong way to approach games. Unfortunately, it seems that Aquria took the wrong approach when making this Sword Art Online title. As a fan of both Lost Song and Hollow Realization, I was excited at a chance to play Alicization Lycoris after it was announced by Bandai Namco, but alas my experience was less than exciting… at least, for the first 12 or so hours.
Story
After awaking in a completely unknown virtual world, Kirito finds himself facing a mysterious situation yet something about this place feels familiar. Soon after he meets a boy named Eugeo and form a bonding connection with him. It doesn’t take long for their connection to fill their hearts with a lingering promise that is kept once they set out on an adventure together.
Ultimately, this story follows along with the anime expansion of the same name and is also set in Underworld.
Gameplay
You will be spending the first 12-17 hours of this game reading through dialogue, meeting characters, and have short missions or challenges to complete. Granted, you can fill some of these challenges with more gameplay by doing the side missions provided by statues in the open-world areas, but if you want to get to the multiplayer aspect of the game then you will need to push through the majority of it first.
When it comes to the dialogue moments, there will be some times to pick between two or more options on how to respond or question for details regarding what is currently taking place in the story. This is done to keep the player more interactive with the story than just reading it (since only subtitles are in English). Ultimately, these decisions have little-to-no effect on the way the story plays out nor on the relationships with those characters and only truly affect the moment itself.
I do like the gameplay itself though as the swordplay feels very fluid and there are a few different ways to go about it. Bigger combos mean more damage, plus you can build up your special meter by landing attacks and successfully blocking. This special meter is used to perform attacks known as “Sacred Arts” which can be customized from a full list of choices that you unlock from a skill tree. These arts can provide aspects from large attacks for fast damage, stat boost, defense increase, and many other aspects.
You will almost always have a party of three when you are out fighting in the field and these AI characters can be used by the player as well. While you can only switch to fully control Eugeo instead of Kirito, you can switch between all fighters and choose to use their Sacred Arts on your call. This helps when it comes time to take down bigger enemies together and when you need to switch the enemy’s attack focus on to a different player as you manage the party’s health bars.
Once you finally unlock multiplayer mode, you can end up using a customizable character instead of Kirito. Mainly customizable options can be purchased in the shops, just as you would do for weapons, armor, and supplies, but sometimes you can find gear as well. From here, you can team up with a couple of friends and head out to the fields to fight monsters together and complete more challenges from the statues. The game does let you take one AI character with you when you go out with your friends, which I imagine is so that if you only have one friend join you or the second friend leaves you will still have three fighters out there as the game has persistently maintained throughout the game, so use that as an opportunity to keep your relationship statuses up with characters you like.
Visuals
Cutscenes themselves look and feel like watching the anime, but any other time you are looking at a scene it will have the games graphics or an animated 2D image of the character for the dialogue. While there isn’t much of an issue with that, I felt like the switch between graphics made the game have an unnecessary amount of load screens as you progressed through the story making the long, pre-multiplayer gameplay experience even longer.
Sounds
From the music to the sound effects to the voice-over work, everything in this game seemed to have come straight from the anime itself. Simply put, however you feel about the sound work used in the anime is how you will feel about the sound work used in this game, so for me, it was very well done and enjoyable.
Replayability
Once you get this game to the point where it is just about completing missions and fighting the monsters out on the field, there is plenty of reason to keep coming back to the game. Especially the multiplayer mode itself is a lot of fun to play through as this is a great game to enjoy with a friend or two.
What Could Be Better
I can not stress enough how horrendous of an idea it was to lock multiplayer behind roughly 15 hours of gameplay. While I love story and lore, this game did not need to set itself up to be so story-heavy that it literally weighed its worth down. There was remotely no issues when it came to the gameplay itself, but sitting there through so much dialogue was tedious and obnoxious. Even when I tried to skip through the majority of the dialogue, it would take 10-20 minutes of smashing the X button over and over before it would reach a fight that takes 2 minutes to complete just to send me into another series of dialogue and story nonsense. The times I did sit there and read the dialogue, these skipping sessions turned into 30-45 minute story chunks before I got the 2 minutes of gameplay in. It is just such a poor set up that it ruins the game so drastically.
Conclusion
Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris is full of enjoyable gameplay that they, unfortunately, drowned in lore. Whether you wanted to enjoy a single-player or multiplayer experience from the game, you will find yourself going through so much dialogue that you can become annoyed more than entertained by it. Once you get past the tedious section though, the game becomes a fun landscape of gameplay and exploration, but getting there is just obnoxious.
