Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment review for PS Vita

Platform: PS Vita
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Developer: Bandai Namco
Medium: Digital
Players: 1-4
Online: No
ESRB: T

I like Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment. I really do. Itโ€™s a fun, deep game, and I enjoyed my time with it.

Iโ€™m saying this up front because, for a game that I liked, Iโ€™m having a really easy time thinking of all the things I didnโ€™t like about it, and a much harder time saying what, exactly, I liked so much.

Take, for example, the whole way SAO:HF presents information to you, the player. Or, to put it more bluntly: this game features lots and lots of massive infodumps. Head into a battle, and you have to click through pages and pages of explanation on what each piece of on-screen information means. Talk to a random character, and youโ€™re liable to trigger ten minutes of unskippable dialogue. Walk into a new area, and you trigger an endless cutscene. Throughout Sword Art Online, the developers regularly commit the sin of telling rather than showing, and unless youโ€™re already deeply invested in the gameโ€™s characters and their relationships because of prexisting anime fandom, itโ€™s hard to keep it all straight.

sword art online 4

In fairness, of course, the infodumps arenโ€™t wholly useless. If, like me, youโ€™re going into Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment without any prior knowledge of the series, thereโ€™s definitely value in getting an overview of the basic storyline. Similarly, thereโ€™s a whole lot going on here, so thereโ€™s certainly an argument to be made that itโ€™s better to know too much about a gameโ€™s mechanics than too little. I, personally, wouldnโ€™t make that argument, but at least I sort of understand where itโ€™s all coming from.

Itโ€™s a lot harder to sit through those interminable dialogue sequences though โ€” and not just because theyโ€™re regularly provided with little indication of who the other people are and why youโ€™re talking to them for so long. No, what makes them even harder to take is that they donโ€™t look so great. Thatโ€™s not to say they look bad; indeed, SAO:HFโ€™s dialogue scenes look like virtually every other JRPGโ€™s dialogue โ€” 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). That, by itself, isnโ€™t the worst thing; it makes SAO seem like (insert name of every other recent Vita JRPG here).

sword art online 3

Rather, what makes those static dialogues hard to take is that the animated cutscenes look so fantastic. When the action switches over to straight-up animation, it feels like youโ€™re watching a TV show (or, presumably, the cartoon series on which the show is based). Itโ€™s a lot easier to get drawn in when youโ€™re watching actions unfold, rather than when youโ€™re constantly being told to press a button to advance to the next line. I get that animating a whole gameโ€™s worth of cutscenes would call for a budget thatโ€™s probably unrealistic for a Vita game, but at the same time, those teases of what couldโ€™ve been are so tantalizing. For that matter, even the non-cutscenes look pretty great โ€” as youโ€™re exploring the world of Sword Art Online, youโ€™re regularly shown a place thatโ€™s much more richly fleshed out than most other Vita games of this ilk.

And on the topic of exploration, thereโ€™s another major flaw: the camera controls in this game are occasionally horrendous. While itโ€™s easy enough to correct a weird perspective when youโ€™re running across a field, itโ€™s pretty much impossible to do that in the middle of a battle. Throughout my time in Sword Art Online, I would regularly find my onscreen character stuck on the other side of a charging enemy. Or, worse, Iโ€™d find that the camera had suddenly gotten stuck in a fixed position which gave me no context as to where my character was. Needless to say, itโ€™s difficult to fully appreciate a game when you canโ€™t see yourself, or your enemies, or pretty much anything of use to you as a player.

sword art online

Yet, despite all my problems with the game, I still really liked it. 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. 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.

Speaking of moving around wide-open spaces, thatโ€™s another good thing about Sword Art Online: this is a big, expansive game, both in terms of its physical space (itโ€™s designed to be a faux-MMO, and it feels like that) and in terms of the story. Presumably because the game is based on a property with its own, fully-developed mythology, this game has a lot going on. Thereโ€™s literally a universe to explore, and even if the exposition may occasionally go a little overboard, itโ€™s still great (if a little daunting) to have so much to do.

sword art online 2

And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment so compelling. It may have more than its fair share of flaws, but a lot of thatโ€™s because it tries to do so much. This is a big, ambitious game, and like any big, ambitious game, thereโ€™s some stuff that goes wrong, but a lot more that goes right. And with all that right stuffโ€ฆwell, thatโ€™s what makes the game so worth playing.

Grade: B
Want to know more about our review scoring criteria? Read our Review Guidelines!