I would honestly rather watch Fantastic Four than play this game again.
[dropcap size=small]W[/dropcap]hen it comes reviewing video games, I generally try to play through the entire game before writing a review on it. That way even if the game is rough in the beginning there is still some sort of chance for it to redeem itself at some point later on. Unfortunately for Sword Art Online: Lost Song that wasn’t the case, I didn’t even play the game for longer than four hours before I ejected the disc from my PS4 and threw it away.
Sword Art Online: Lost Song follows closely in the footsteps of the anime that it is based on, Sword Art Online. You play as the main character Kirito in a fictional MMO world called Alfheim Online and the original characters from the anime like Yui and Asuna make an appearance. You get the option to have these characters, in addition to several more, be a part of your three-man party as you take the fight to different kinds of monsters and non-playable characters.
When it comes to battling the different groups of monsters and NPCs in Sword Art Online: Lost Song the controls are relatively straight forward and easy to use. To sum it up simply, you just hack and slash your way through different groups of monsters either on the ground or in the sky. If you press the triangle button Kirito will do a strong attack and if you press the square button he will do quick attack. You can combine these moves with the R1 button to do a special move that deals out a greater amount of damage but takes a certain amount of time to recharge.
The biggest flaw in the combat system is that there is no indicator that a monster or NPC is approaching you from behind, giving you no time to dodge or block the attack and before you know it an eight foot tall demon dog has slammed his hammer into the back of your skull sending you flying several feet. In order to counter act this, I had to spin the camera around to keep an eye on my back but in doing so I could no longer see if the enemy in front of me had died or flown away. Not only that but when it comes to combat in the air, monsters will change their altitude randomly throughout the battle and I found myself constantly trying to change my altitude to match that of the monsters while I was attacked. Eventually the hacking and slashing, dodging and blocking became old and I quickly realized that the majority of the monsters have the same fighting patterns. The worst part was that nearly every boss battle was the same, which means it wasn’t necessarily a boss fight anymore but just another monster.
Sword Art Online: Lost Song doesn’t have a large landscape to travel across and discover like Skyrim or Fallout 4 and eventually even the beautiful skyline lost its effect on me. The dungeons that you enter and the quest that take you to different points in Alfheim Online don’t do the anime justice. Not only that but Kirito and Asuna’s child/AI Program Yui is a Japanese anime version of Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, except she is ten times more annoying and instead of Navi’s high-pitched voice shouting, “HEY! LISTEN!” randomly throughout the game Yui actually stops the game and your thrust into a screen like the one above where your party members talk about minor details pertaining to the quest you’re on or how much of a badass Kirito is. These cut scenes are disruptive to the flow of the game and after a while it becomes increasingly frustrating where I was skipping the dialogue all together just so I didn’t have to hear Yui or Asuna talk.
The worst feature of Sword Art Online: Lost Song is that the game doesn’t do the anime’s story justice. There is a mystery revolving around the character Seven and the group known as Shamrock, but the reason for Kirito and his gang of friends to get involved in uncovering what Seven is up to doesn’t make any sense, nor does the group present a life or death scenario to Kirito’s group of friends . It is abundantly clear that Sword Art Online: Lost Song is directed at fans of the anime but the downside to this is that if you have never watched the anime before you would have a no clue what was going on. Hopefully if another Sword Art Online game is created in the future it will be played with the Nerve Gear itself and not on a console like the Playstation 4 or the PS Vita.
