Post by bramblett05 on Aug 18, 2015 15:29:43 GMT
Popular anime shows turned into games mostly are either decent or horrible never great and Sword Art Online falls into decent territory. It's about a online MMO called Sword Art Online and once you logged into the VR world, you can't log off. You are a character named Kirito who is one of the thousands of people who logged on and can't escape the world and are force to do quest and continue your journey through it all. If you played .Hack you will be familiar with most of the ways the game works and controls if not then read the instruction book first.
Hollow Fragment is based on the Japan's Infinite Memory game but with a new "expansion" called Hollow Fragment that adds a lot of items and a new party member. This is two games in one but they also go together but the more you play of them the more you realize one feels like it should have been worked on longer. This game has its fair share of issues to the point that sometimes deleting this game from my vita was looking better and better but hey I couldn't get a refund due to "all sales are final" bs so might as well stick out to the end of this train wreck. Don't get me wrong, the graphics are great and the cutscenes are fantastic and look just like the show but graphics can't save this.
I'll start with the camera, you can't adjust it during battle because it's tied to controls for your partner. If you get in a fight in a cave then pray you don't get into a corner because the old days of bad camera angles in the PS2 days creep faster with this than a guy wearing cameo standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. The next issue is translation, most are good but the speech part when chatting or setting up battle styles brings it down so low that the translation needs a translation. When chatting goes like this "hey..." "That battle...." "Rub my head" they could have at LEAST made sense of the chatting aspect since you can have relationships or as they really are called bitch fest where they just complain and wonder why haven't you spent time with them and keep in mind there's a lot of girls in this game and you can even have a relationship with your cousin or sister...yes you should be scared.
Last problem but huge is Hollows mission structure and mapping. They way you get missions from the story or analyzing aspect seems like this were little kids writing what to do. I have one that says something about magical fruit that doesn't make sense no matter how you put it together and it only goes down from there. At least the original story's mission structure was to the point and easy to know where to go. Which brings me to the mapping of HF. Good god who thought this map was a great idea? Order&Chaos is a real MMO and its mapping aspect runs circles around this mess. I'm glad there's teleporters because sometimes you can get lost on where to go. I do have one other problem which is tutorials. There's so many I'm surprised how to turn on the game wasn't included. Bad part is out of the 50 million tutorials, I feel some things were missing from it that should have been included.
Well that's enough bad, so the good? Well intro is great and starts like the show and battling CAN be fun unless the camera zooms in to close. There is a lot of skills to learn and weapons to master though good luck on finding the skill Just Attack because I haven't yet. There are some boss fights and they can take a good while to beat like 20 minutes because they have 3 bars. You will sometimes get an email from one of your friends that ask for help defeating enemies or to level up which is a nice way to make you feel like your in a mmo. Oh and why you do have a town, that's where most of the lag comes at though it really does simulate the MMO crowds that populate a town.
Final thoughts: the show does a great job at what it does but the game needs a push in some directions because it's lacking with certain aspects. The issues I brought about this game brings down the fun of an adventure not to mention missions in Hollow Fragment that are the bones of the game itself. If you crave .Hack then get a PS2 and get the games. If you can handle all the problems and want a big rpg maybe too big then get this game but don't say I didn't warn you.