Developer: Bandai Namco Entertainment, Aquria
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tested on: PC
Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris – Review
Following the release of the third season of Sword Art Online, Alicization, Bandai Namco Entertainment and Aquria teamed up to create a game that follows the story of this new season. Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris lets you explore the virtual world of ‘Underworld’, which feels much more alive than any other virtual world would. This game will let you meet all of your favorite characters from the anime series. Sadly, the PC version struggles with a lot of performance issues and feels like a poorly executed port from a console version.
Story
This game follows the story of the third season of Sword Art Online called Alicization. The main character, Kirito wakes up in a strange unknown land that feels like a virtual world, but he isn’t able to open up his menus or log out, as he could in other virtual worlds. He then meets Eugeo, a woodcutter in Rulid Village. His task is to fell the Gigas Cedar, a huge demon tree. With Kirito’s help, they manage to take it down and fulfill Eugeo’s calling. Kirito and Eugeo then travel to North Centoria’s Imperial Sword Mastery Academy to become Integrity Knights to save Alice, Eugeo’s childhood friend that was taken by an Integrity Knight after a small violation of the Taboo Index, the rules in the world of ‘Underworld’.
The game is heavily focused on conversations and not so much on battles. With all the loading screens between conversations that can take longer than you’d want to, you get the feeling that you’re seeing the loading screens more than you actually play the game. After more than ten hours of gameplay, you’re still stuck in the academy, going from conversations to loading screens, with an incidental small mission to defeat one or two opponents in the wild.
Graphics
The game can look quite nice, if you have the equipment to run the game smoothly on high settings. Due to the game’s poor optimization for PC, setting the game on average settings could cause the game to crash or lag a lot. This isn’t even due to having a bad set up as many people are having problems with their high-end systems. In the beginning, you’ll see some cinematics that look beautiful, but most of the time, you’re just looking at photos of the characters with subtitles and no real interaction at all. This also includes a lot of events like fights and other important events that can be seen in the anime, which makes the whole experience a lot duller than it would be in the anime.
When you do have the chance to walk around in the world of Underworld, it looks very good, depending on your settings, but it doesn’t really stand out to previous games in this genre. The effects in combat look amazing with some special moves having special animations that are quite nice to see.
Sound
The background music in this game fits the game and its genre perfectly with its soothing nature. The background music perfectly changes to the situation, for example when entering combat, the music becomes more exciting. The voice acting in this game sounds pretty good, and has original Japanse voicing. Furthermore, in many conversations, the sentences you see in the subtitles are shortened in the voice acting with single words, which happens in many anime-inspired games made by Bandai Namco.
Gameplay
Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris is a JRPG inspired by the anime series Sword Art Online. It tells part of the story of the third season, Alicization. The game offers a good combat system while also relying on a whole lot of dialogue.
In this game, you’ll fight against wild monsters and NPCs with a group of characters that you encounter along the way. The basic combat is fairly simple with basic attacks, sword skills, magic skills called Sacred Arts and a timing-based dodge/guard system. By mastering the timing of dodging and defending, you’ll be impervious for most incoming damage, although this takes some time and skill to really master. Switching from attacking to dodging won’t be as fast as in other games, so timing your attacks and defensive movements are important.
This game features an expansive skill tree that can grant you passive skills, combat skills, sword skills, and EX skills. When you unlock a type of skill, it will be available for each character in your team and can change in name, depending on the type of their battle style, but the attacks stay quite alike. You can earn experience when fighting enemies, completing quests, and completing requests from relics you find scattered throughout the map. These relics will also grant you a skill point aside from the experience earned to expand your skill tree even more.
While the combat is pretty good in the game, the first ten to fifteen hours of gameplay won’t involve a lot of fighting as you will constantly move from conversation to conversation, split up by annoying loading screens that take up too much time. All these conversations do contribute to following the story of the anime series, but the way this is implemented in the game is rather dull.
The game also struggles with some issues on the PC version of the game. The game is badly optimized, as playing it on even low resolutions and low settings will make the game crash often. In a weird way, the game lets your GPU run at 100% even in the loading screens, resulting in crashes. At the beginning of the game with the enormous amount of dialogue and no opportunity to save your game, it can crash, resulting in needing to go through all those conversations again and again. In our case, we had a crash at a point within dialogues where it would crash at the same point five times and we needed to go through all conversations multiple times until the game finally managed to get past that point.
Conclusion
Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris is a JRPG that follows the story of the third season of the anime series. The game has a big amount of dialogue that is separated in a lot of short conversations divided by annoying loading screens. At the start of the game, you need to spend a lot of time getting through all this dialogue before you can really begin playing the game at your own pace. The game has quite a good combat system that can be really fun after playing a while. The PC version does have many issues with performance that need some workarounds from your end to play it in a good fashion. For fans of the series, we’d definitely recommend it, but for those who are just looking for a new game to play, we’d definitely recommend considering the slow progression of the game because of the many conversations and loading screens before buying this game.
Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris - Review,
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