![]() You still have the option of fighting monsters with a party of teammates, but you get to move a little more freely around wide-open spaces, attacking whatever enemies get in your way in real-time combat. The combat is relatively simple and straightforward where most JRPGs stick to the tried-and-true formula of team- and turn-based combat on an isometric grid, Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment takes a hackier and slashier approach. Yet, despite all my problems with the game, I still really liked it. Needless to say, it’s difficult to fully appreciate a game when you can’t see yourself, or your enemies, or pretty much anything of use to you as a player. Or, worse, I’d find that the camera had suddenly gotten stuck in a fixed position which gave me no context as to where my character was. Throughout my time in Sword Art Online, I would regularly find my onscreen character stuck on the other side of a charging enemy. While it’s easy enough to correct a weird perspective when you’re running across a field, it’s pretty much impossible to do that in the middle of a battle. For that matter, even the non-cutscenes look pretty great - as you’re exploring the world of Sword Art Online, you’re regularly shown a place that’s much more richly fleshed out than most other Vita games of this ilk.Īnd on the topic of exploration, there’s another major flaw: the camera controls in this game are occasionally horrendous. ![]() I get that animating a whole game’s worth of cutscenes would call for a budget that’s probably unrealistic for a Vita game, but at the same time, those teases of what could’ve been are so tantalizing. It’s a lot easier to get drawn in when you’re watching actions unfold, rather than when you’re constantly being told to press a button to advance to the next line. When the action switches over to straight-up animation, it feels like you’re watching a TV show (or, presumably, the cartoon series on which the show is based). Rather, what makes those static dialogues hard to take is that the animated cutscenes look so fantastic. That, by itself, isn’t the worst thing it makes SAO seem like (insert name of every other recent Vita JRPG here). That’s not to say they look bad indeed, SAO:HF’s dialogue scenes look like virtually every other JRPG’s dialogue - which is to say, you get people sliding on and off the screen as they say their lines, and you trigger each new line by pressing X (or, in this case, O, since the Japanese controls were kept intact). No, what makes them even harder to take is that they don’t look so great. It’s a lot harder to sit through those interminable dialogue sequences though - and not just because they’re regularly provided with little indication of who the other people are and why you’re talking to them for so long. I, personally, wouldn’t make that argument, but at least I sort of understand where it’s all coming from. Similarly, there’s a whole lot going on here, so there’s certainly an argument to be made that it’s better to know too much about a game’s mechanics than too little. If, like me, you’re going into Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment without any prior knowledge of the series, there’s definitely value in getting an overview of the basic storyline. In fairness, of course, the infodumps aren’t wholly useless. Throughout Sword Art Online, the developers regularly commit the sin of telling rather than showing, and unless you’re already deeply invested in the game’s characters and their relationships because of prexisting anime fandom, it’s hard to keep it all straight. Walk into a new area, and you trigger an endless cutscene. Talk to a random character, and you’re liable to trigger ten minutes of unskippable dialogue. ![]() ![]() Head into a battle, and you have to click through pages and pages of explanation on what each piece of on-screen information means. Or, to put it more bluntly: this game features lots and lots of massive infodumps. Take, for example, the whole way SAO:HF presents information to you, the player. I’m saying this up front because, for a game that I liked, I’m having a really easy time thinking of all the things I didn’t like about it, and a much harder time saying what, exactly, I liked so much. It’s a fun, deep game, and I enjoyed my time with it. I like Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment. ![]()
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