Level One (Hundred) - Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment

Format - PS Vita
Current Level: 117
Floor Reached: 79

So, for those of you that don't know (and trust me on this, it's probably a good idea that you do know) Sword Art Online is a popular anime series about a Virtual Reality MMORPG, it's your standard fantasy game set in a world called Aincrad with a huge 100 floor dungeon and a raidboss on each floor, everyone who got a copy was super excited but shortly after starting the game they realised the logout button was gone and nobody could get in or out. An entity calling himself Akihiko Kaiyaba reveals himself as the creator of the game and claims that should you die in the game, the Virtual Reality headset you are using will fry your brain and kill you in the real world. The only way for everyone to escape is for someone to defeat the boss on the 100th floor. That's about all the basic knowledge you need. when I first played this game I had no experience with sword Art Online whatsoever bar a strong desire to get into it that was never fulfilled because of the well-known rule 'Games > Not Games'; but because of this inexperience I had litterally no idea  what a lot of the opening cutscene was.

Take for example the first character you meet, a game original character called Philia, the first thing pointed out to you is that she is a 'Yellow Player,' this means she has committed crimes against another player in the SAO universe, but Hollow Fragment doesn't seem to make any effort to explain that at any point. In fact, the game isn't very beginner friendly at all, the tutorials are sufficient enough for you to understand the game's mechanics, sure, but this is a game you will get NO enjoyment out of without any background knowledge, because believe me, disregarding what the game offers to SAO fans, it's actually pretty terrible.

In fact even though I am a huge SAO fan I hate how flawed this game is, but let me start with the obvious one. Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment COMPLETELY screws up the SAO timeline we know from the anime with an excuse that I can only describe as 'ripping a hole in the Aether makes everything explainable.' This flowchart might offer more insight.

As you can probably tell, two characters that should most definitely not be Aincrad in Hollow Fragment are present, and while I do really like both characters, their presence is just another factor that makes me feel like I'm playing a disappointing Chinese bootleg of a spectacular anime.

Regardless, maybe it's time to talk about the actual game now, but believe me it doesn't get better from here.

After starting up the game you get a little character creation which is great, you can change Kirito's eye colour, hair colour, name and stuff and create a truly unique character, but despite offering this it feels like the game really doesn't want you to. Let's be honest here the colours change fine but the name, oh the name! It basically doesn't matter what you call the character, the game developers clearly weren't smart enough to program changeable text fields into their dialogues so even if your Kirito is called Droopyballsac or god knows what, the characters will ALWAYS call him Kirito. In fact the only thing that changes if you change the name that what you entered appears above the health bar in the bottom corner, but honestly what's even the point of naming him if everyone's just going to shout "Ah! It Kirito!" anyway?

If you expect to dive into a typical JRPG and grind a few levels, at least Hollow Fragment might surprise you. With the game being set vaguely sort of after the events of the first half of the SAO anime Kirito starts off at level 100 and at least the game is true to the JRPG style, if you want to get to level 101 anytime soon, you're going to be grinding monsters forever because everyone knows lategame levelups take an eternity to happen. Don't forget you'll want to level up all the characters you like too so they can help you in the raids, which is fine if you take just one partner with you but just bear in mind that leveling them all takes an millenia as well, if you don't want to be stuck on the most painful grind ever, pick your favorite character and don't ever change, trust me.

Believe it or not this is actually the first battle, but seriously I can't deny the battles against bosses like this guy are pretty damn epic.

Surely a game based on an anime with such epic fight scenes has some brilliant combat to make up for it though? Right? RIGHT!?
... Wrong...
Combat is flat and boring to be honest, Kirito has one basic combo, press O four times and then do a sword skill to finish the combo. Though there are a variety of skills to use the only thing that really seems to make a difference is whther they do AoE damage or single target. The biggest problem with this though is that those four basic attacks of yours will do only the tiniest sliver of damage to the enemy, then suddenly it'll lose half it's health from one sword skill. In fact, saying that combat is really quite stupid: Skills cost 100-150SP to use, which would be fine, but you start with 300SP and that figure doesn't increase. The SP Recharge rate is really slow so you'll often find yourself slowly chipping away at the enemy's health as if you were trying to cut down a tree with the slightly more solid end of a feather.
Don't get me wrong though it doesn't mean every fight is a grind, there are ways to restore your SP, and I'm not talking about potions. The designers had a pretty good idea with one of their mechanics, to keep the feel more like an MMO you can praise your partner when they do in combat, and as a nice touch if you praise a particular thing a lot that partner will use it more often since they know you like it. That's great and all but the real beauty of this mechanic is that i's about the only thing that makes combat manageable: Every time you praise your partner, you regain 50SP. It basically means you can spam that praise button and regain enough mana to kill everything by the turn of the decade. Probably not that feature's intended use, but gosh is it important.

Multiplayer looks like it could be a lot of fun, but since it's ad-hoc only you're probably not trying that out unless you have a good group of SAO friends.

Hollow fragment is another game that becomes pretty laughable and loses a lot of its seriousness by falling foul of it's terrible Japanese translation, because if there's something everyone knows about the cute red-haired girl in the corner it's that "his swords skills are is very impressive". Even the dialogue that is grammatically correct is horrible though, every single sentence is so basic the game may as well have been translated by a 10 year old and a lot of the game feels wooden because of it, and don't even get me started on the stupid chatting system.
It's nice that you can talk to the characters and build relationships with them, sure, but unfortunately all that consists of is choosing whether to say 'Right.' to a badly translated fragment of a sentence, or whether to say '...' instead, and if you do it outside of events the effect is nigh on negligible anyway. No need to delve any deeper on that.

I'm sorry what? Are you talking about conquering Aincrad or does Lisbeth also have a bondage dungeon where you all like to hang out

Overall I really hate that this game has so many flaws in it, the world of SAO in the anime is a spectacle of a place that I would personally love to journey in (minus the whole die in real life thing, I wouldn't last too long with that), but this game just takes everything away from that and turns the epic adventure of survival into a slow and painful climb to the top of a mountain... while you're the size of an ant.

And that's only half the game, there's also a large free roam area with lots of quests and stuff similar to Final Fantasty XIV's Guildleves, but despite having access to these from the start most of them are near impossible for you to do then and you may as well just tackle Aincrad, I think this area has a story to it as well, but I can't for the life of me find it.

TL;DR: It's nowhere near as good as it could have been, badly translated and combat is dull and grindy. Only manageable if you're an existing SAO fan and barely playable even then. (But this is me we're talking about I still like it. Deal with it.