A fractured, yet healing full dive experience
Earlier this year, a new Sword Art Online game was announced and it featured a multiplayer mode, raiding bosses and dungeons with 20 players. As it was announced, of course I got excited and looked forward to playing it. I knew there were a lot of Sword Art Online games but this is my first and probably my entry to the series.
This is JJ-kun bringing you my review of Sword Art Online Fractured Daydream.
Sword Art Online Fractured Daydream, developed by Dimps and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, is a multiplayer hack-and-slash, action RPG, made for modern consoles and PC. Its main selling point? The multiplayer aspect of it. Seeing trailers and footage of the game, it seemed to be a great experience of what the world of Sword Art Online really feels like. Unfortunately for me, I forgot to register for the Closed Beta Test so I had to wait for the Open Beta Test to finally start, and that just made me even more excited for the full game.
Little did I know, all Sword Art Online video game titles are connected and are dubbed Gameverse as it follows its own canon and Fractured Daydream is the latest installment, serving as the 10th anniversary celebratory game of this franchise.
Although, if you’re like me who wants to enter the Sword Art Online Gameverse’s story and lore through Fractured Daydream, it’s to my regret to inform that this game is a standalone game and while it has references with the previous games and the light novel, it is mainly following the Anime-timeline.
The game starts with Quinella (Administrator) joining your party in Alfheim Online (ALO), even joining Kirito in the real world—only to be attacked by Quinella—who then magically summons his Dark Repulser and Elucidator which made him realize the events currently happening were not possible to happen in the real world and is only possible in a digital world—a VR full-dive world. Both being confused about what was happening, the two decided to make a truce to figure out what was happening.
Later on, they met two individuals, Fuuka and Neige, who were also the ones who introduced where they are and explained what was happening. Galaxia, the setting of the game, had an error leading to different worlds getting merged. Soonthereafter, the party was attacked by Leafa, seemingly under a spell, only to be broken by Kirito. From there, they decided to figure out what was happening to Galaxia and hope to solve and bring everything back to the way it was.
The game starts very slowly as it tries to spoon feed you every information you need to know to understand the game’s story. In addition to this, the characters in the game were all sent to different locations in the game’s setting so it took a while for all the characters to eventually meet up. If I were to compare it to a different game, I’d say it’s quite similar to how Square Enix handled Kingdom Hearts III’s story. The earlier parts up to the middle part of the game feels like a filler only for the heavier fluff to be dropped down on you by the latter half. Although, just like Persona 3, that’s when the story actually becomes good.
Initially, the plot seems to be very basic and very easy to follow, so I became more focused on S-ranking every mission on Normal Difficulty for achievement purposes since I thought the story needed no brain to understand. The latter part of the story, however, is when you’d need to actually stay tuned with the story with how they handled, delivered, and executed it. The game kept everything hidden until it a plot point is necessary and made sure that you will not be spoiled, nor be given any hints as to what will happen throughout—or I guess, it would be more appropriate to say “misguided”.
My problem with the story is how short it was. If I were rushing the story, I can probably finish it in about 4-5 hours. There isn’t really a lot of chunk in the story and the only thing making the story progression long are the gameplay sequences that aren’t really enjoyable to play as a single player since you can’t recruit online players when doing the story though you are accompanied by CPUs—more on this later. The developers mentioned that the game’s story will take 20 hours to finish and I’d say it’s about right… if you’re S-ranking it in normal difficulty, that is. It took me about 35 hours to finally finish the story since I had to repeat some of the missions as I fell short with the score required to S-rank a mission—which requires 50,000—that, or I get disconnected.
It was also quite interesting to see the interaction of different characters with each other, especially those that were the antagonists of different arcs. Some were goofy, some were edgy, and some were definitely just cringey, it actually made me feel second-hand embarrassment (cough cough Oberon cough cough).
If this were any other game, I’d say that the graphical art style of this game feels like a PlayStation 3 game. However, I understand why they went for this style, especially that the different titles of the Sword Art Online video game franchise have had different graphical art style given that the mood, setting of the game, and different developers of each game vastly differ from each other leading to having different directions. All that said, I’d like to point out that this is art style worked in the favor of Fractured Daydream since no one in the game felt out of place and it seemed like everyone was meant to be in this world. It’s vibrant, colorful, and just pops life in it. It’s also even more justifiable once you have seen the in-engine cutscenes where the art style really shines through. That alone can make for a 3D Sword Art Online animation project…not that I wish there’ll be. I think that’ll be cursed.
Unfortunately for the 2 new original characters of the franchise, Fuuka and Neige actually feel a little bit out of place, especially when they have very modernized stylistic choices towards their characters. It feels as though they were from a different game like…Oh, I don’t know, Fire Emblem Engage maybe? Luckily, there is actually a canonical explanation for this, just not explicitly stated.
The UI definitely reminds me of Fatal Bullet—and to no surprise since it’s by the same developers. They’ve also had some updates towards the design of the UI which now looks cleaner.
As for the enemy design, I like how there’s a variety of enemies in the game. However, as much as there was variety, the subclasses of these enemies were mostly just resized and recolored versions of the original, much like how beat-’em-up arcades did back in the day. Same enemy, but the recolored versions are bulkier, stronger versions. The ones with the biggest changes towards the original design were the World Bosses, or mid-bosses in the case of this game. It was quite nice to finally take on Sword Art Online bosses though. I get that the game needs a variety of enemy types, but this is quite a lazy way to do it. If this were an arcade game, I would probably understand it.
Finally, I’d like to point out the environment. 1 word, amazing. The lighting, the environment, the debris, nothing feels out of place. If there’s any complaint I have with the environment, it’s that some stages were definitely a reskin of earlier stages. However, in contrast to my comments with the enemy design, at the very least, these reskins of some parts of some stages have had new mechanics and gimmicks in it, like breakable walls. These are those that you wouldn’t notice much if you are heavily focused on playing the game however, so it’s not a deal breaker, especially when you have different objectives for different maps.
There’s a bunch in Fractured Daydream in terms of the original soundtrack. Unfortunately, you won’t notice 60% of it since by the time you are playing the game, whether in Story Mode or Online Mode, you will be listening to the same music over and over which will make the BGM quite annoying to listen to. I know it made me annoyed. However, on certain cutscenes, that’s when you will notice they’re using a different music which leaves for a feeling of freshness, allowing you to appreciate the original soundtrack. Speaking of the original soundtrack, the game has a bop of a TV-size cut opening theme named Our Song—sung by ReoNa—which is quite fitting for the anniversary celebration of the Sword Art Online Game Project which brings everyone in, and for the plot of the game.
The SFX of the game is something to take notice of as well as it really makes the game alive. You can feel the heaviness of each attack that you deal with the enemies, including buffs and charges. Unfortunately though, given that you never play alone and will always play with 19 other players (or CPUs), most of the time these SFX will overlap each other. You will most likely appreciate the SFX on story mode or on the first segment of each map where you are alone with your party before meeting up with other parties.
There is this one SFX in the game that haunts me because of a different game though. When you attack those Healing Pebbles or Block Pebbles, it has the same sound effect as Nine-Tail Naruto’s attacks in Naruto Shippuden: Clash of Ninja Revolution 3 and Deidara haunts me. It was not a fun experience at all. Mind you I was probably 10 at the time.
The game is heavily reliant on its online functionality, that even the simplest features are internet connection-bound. This is one of the biggest flaws of the game for me. The only feature it has that you can play offline is the Story Mode. Everything else is locked behind online connection, which leads me to fear that there’s definitely going to be a day when people won’t be able to have the full Fractured Daydream experience. Furthermore, it also doesn’t help that the game is in constant communication with the servers even when you’re playing Story Mode so the slightest flick in your connection would disconnect you from the game servers, requiring you to do the entire mission from the top. Along with shorting the final score, this is one of the issues I’ve experienced as to why it took me almost 35 hours to finish the story.
That said, I’d like to talk about the controls of the game. It’s actually quite intuitive, easy to control and grasp. If you played other action RPG or action adventure games, picking up Fractured Daydream will be a piece of cake! Even during the Closed Beta Test, it was easy to utilize the Advanced Skills, the Ultimate, and chaining them all together as well! Unfortunately, there are definitely times that pressing buttons don’t do anything. 1/10 times, it won’t respond to your input at all which leads to dropping your combo. It’s bad because: (1) it’s generally bad to experience this in a game, and (2) sometimes, an objective in Boss Raids is to get the highest combo count for additional EXP by the end of the mission.
One thing that I found in a bit of a gray-area—one that I can’t say is bad or good—is locking characters behind the story mode. You need to play at least 60% of the story in order to unlock all 21 characters to use them in multiplayer modes. I say I can’t say it’s bad since I grew up in the era of video games without DLC and you just have to unlock characters through a specific method—or doing arcade mode multiple times, like in TEKKEN—nor can say it’s good since the game was primarily marketed as a multiplayer game. I was even expecting to log in on the game and wreak havoc online, only to find out there’s only 4 characters in the game and everyone else is locked. Fortunately, you can choose to skip everything in the story on story sequences and do the bare minimum performance in story missions in order to rush through just to unlock everything…or better yet, it would be nice if there was a way to unlock characters while playing through multiplayer sessions.
Speaking of unlocking things, most of the costumes that you may use for different characters are also locked within World Bosses in Story Missions so if you’d like to be stylish, there’s only 2 ways of doing it: (1) defeat World Bosses in Story Missions or (2) get lucky drops in multiplayer modes.
Costumes aren’t the only thing you need luck with to get, all equipment/weapons and accessories are also obtained in-game via luck. It’s like gacha, but without the things that make a gacha game, a gacha, like energies and premium currencies. You can run through Co-Op, Boss Raids, or Free Roam mode to gather random equipment drops and its substats/equipment skills— similar to HoYoverse titles—are also randomized. Fortunately, there’s the Special Effect and Dismantling features which allows you to move substats/equipment skills to another equipment. This is reminiscent of my days playing Ragnarok Online when I used to grind a lot, switch cards, and leaves quite a satisfying feeling when you have finally got your build ready for action.
Moving those aside, it’s a game I thoroughly enjoy especially when playing online, whether with random people or with friends. There’s only a few multiplayer games that I can play without getting competitively stressed out and this is one of those. It’s a very casual experience where everyone is completing the same goal. That’s the game loop. As mentioned earlier, you’d feel freshness in every stage as each has different objectives, enemies, and bosses. Furthermore, you can play as different characters from the franchise as well! Definitely giving out highlights to the characters we have met in the franchise instead of just Kirito.
One of the biggest questions that lies for this game is that, while it’s an amazing Sword Art Online game, is it really worth its price? ₱2,399.00 for the base game is no joke and it only goes higher with Deluxe Edition and Premium Edition at ₱3,399.00 and ₱3,999.99 respectively.
For me, as much as I really recommend this game for all Sword Art Online fans, that price tag is a little bit too steep for what it is offering. As mentioned earlier, there’s only the Story Mode (and an unlockable mode) for the Offline Mode and for everything else you would need an active, steady, online connection, which also means that the online service for the game will eventually shut down—and if you’re playing on consoles, you still have to subscribe to your respective online subscription to play this. I am not going to recommend anyone to get this game at this price tag. If you want to get this game, just wait for a sale. Besides, it’s Bandai Namco. Like Capcom, they’re almost always on sale… just maybe not on the next sale since the game just released.
Furthermore, I know a lot of people are forced to choose one—between this and Dragonball Sparking Zero—and a huge factor is the number of players playing the game. If I were to choose one, I’d just get Sparking Zero first…but if you can get both, why not?
Sword Art Online Fractured Daydream is not a perfect game, and it’s definitely not a game for everyone but at the very least I can say that it is a fantastic Sword Art Online experience. Sure, it has some flaws, but those do not stop me from enjoying playing a game from a franchise I love. My only wish for this game is for its online service and server to have a very long lifespan so that more Sword Art Online fans would be able to experience playing the game.
As I am writing this, maybe it’s actually canonical that the game is (mostly) online-only since Full Dive VR titles in the Sword Art Online lore are online-only, haha!
This review was written before the release of “Otherworldly Visitors DLC #1”.
REVIEWED ON PC
