Sword Art Online: Lost Song is a game for fans of the anime. It relies heavily on players recognizing the story twists and turns and grasping how the anime mechanics translate into gameplay.
Sword Art Online: Lost Song is an original game with an innovative 3D aerial combat system, excellent graphics and good solid storyline. While clearly intended for Sword Art Online fans, I would recommend to non-fans if only to experience the gameplay and breath-takingly liberating flight systems. There really aren't any similar games to this out there - the aerial combat is truly amazing and the real selling point of the game, despite the associated controls being quite difficult to get to grips with. The only downfall for me (putting it down from a 10 to a 9) was the lack of English voice acting in the game, meaning subtitles are expected to be read during combat, which is often just impossible. Given that the anime has an excellent cast of English-speaking actors, and that most other popular JRPG's use English voice actors, the decision to be Japanese-only feels like a way to save on development costs.
Definitely recommended for any PS4 owner or SAO fan - certainly a reason to buy a PS4 in the first place!
[Played for approx. 100 hours, platinum trophy achieved.]
Most fans of the series will get some enjoyment out of Lost Song. The core gameplay elements are solid, but the superficial story and monotonous questing prevent it from being fun throughout.
Sword Art Online: Lost Song is a game that delivers fan service to players, but fails at delivering graphics for PS4. Also it contains boring surroundings and lacks a decent story. If you buy it, go for the PS Vita version.
Sword Art Online: Lost Song is an interesting title, because its intuitive combat is an easy way for newcomers to experience the game. At the same time, it has a story and history that really is geared towards those who are already familiar with the series and the prior video game entry. Those two items are somewhat at odds with one another, but if you can get past that and the middling story, I found the actual characters and humour engaging.
Consistently, SAO:LS made us feel frustrated and a little ashamed with ourselves for actually sitting through it. Die-hard fans of the franchise may find something to enjoy thanks to the relentless fan-service but others would do better to go and actually play an MMORPG.
Not a perfect RPG, but is a perfect Fan Service with great moments and a lot of fun and interesting challenges. The chances for the next game to be perfect for fans is too high. "Lost Song" and "Hollow Fragment" are two great games, perfect or not, deserv our buy. Thanks to Sony, the Playstation family is a perfect plataform for the JRPGs and similars.
I love SAO, so perhaps I am a little biased, I know I´ve been forcing myself a little to like this game more, but if I am honest to myself, it feels as an incomplete game, at alfa or beta state at best, it re-uses a lot of enemies (the flying ones even have a generic hawk sound) and the textures and landscapes are generic and lack shading. Still I don´t know why I always end up returning to play it, the flying mechanic is cool, the combat though a little repetitive is fun, and the cutscenes and story are enjoyable but this game had a lot more potential and I cannot over see that. If you are not a fan of SAO stay away from this game, but if you are a hardcore fan you cannot miss it, but don´t pay it full price.
Let me preface this by saying that I am actually a fan of Sword Art Online. I'm a gamer at heart and the concept of SAO just appeals to me on a nerdy level.
Which is why I've created an account to write this review out of just straight up disappointment. I can only assume the people saying that "Even if you're not a fan of SAO you'll like this game!" are paid reviewers. It's the only explanation for this horribly clunky experience. Let's be honest you're buying this because its an SAO game.
For a game that's literally about one of the most popular games in its world, SAO:LS is just a horrible experience. Its hard to even know where to begin. If you played Hollow Fragment you know that Kirito - chick magnet extraordinaire goes on adventures with his friends and this game is clearly a sequel to that story as it doesn't follow the plot of the anime at all. That's actually a point in its favor. They've improved on the combat, another point in its favor and the world is simply bigger and less hampered by loading screens.
That's about where my praise stops. The combat is an irritating gripe I have. It's clunky and just feels terrible to use. Every attack has a wind-up animation that lasts FOREVER before you actually swing. This is made all the more infuriating by the existence of enemies that straight up move super fast and attack super fast, causing you to spend a long time fighting them just because they're so damn difficult to hit. I was willing to overlook this aspect of the game as the story seemed to promise something interesting at first.
But then I distinctly began to feel like the game itself didn't like me. Like I was being actively punished for liking the anime its based on. Combat while flying was cool at first and handled intuitively, even if slow as hell. But the combat just simply lacks depth. You can dodge and block and swing your weapon but its rather pointless to do any of that as you're constantly being mobbed by anywhere from 5-20 monsters. It's much simpler to spam your AoE attack until you're out of mana and what for it to recharge before going in. The targeting system is just a pain to use. You can lock on to targets but that hardly matters when your character will swing wildly at whatever is closest to you and not in the direction you're telling the character to go. Do you enjoy not seeing mobs come up behind you with no warning and smacking you in the face, knocking you down and preventing you from moving for a bit? I sure as hell don't but the devs think I do.
The tutorial didn't mention what half my UI was for and it wasn't until four hours into the game that I actually figured out why I had a mail icon on my loading screens. I had to look up a guide to figure out what the hell the "Union" bar does. The map is just straight up ineffective and for a game that's supposed to have flying, they limit how high you can go which doesn't cover the areas you want to go through on the map sometimes. Having your stamina bar deplete while flying is just stupid and prolongs the game unnecessarily. The dungeons are all very cookie-cutter and not memorable.
But I was willing to forgive all of it: Until I got to the bosses. The first few bosses were nothing special. Fight them, don't die, dodge attacks. I was used to it by that point. But then at one point you get assaulted by FOUR wyverns. These guys immediately knocked out the rest of my party and forced me to fight it alone. But even THAT wasn't enough. I had to trick the game into glitching it. You see a group of guys offer to help you by keeping two of the wyverns busy. But if you fly over to them they can aggro more than one letting you fight them one on one. You literally HAVE to do it this way otherwise you get two wyverns that fly into you one after another stunlocking you and killing your party. That fight took fifteen minutes.
"Whatever." I had told myself, headache forming. "It's still SAO and maybe I can just grit my teeth and bear through this absolutely abysmal combat." How wrong I was. You see after you fight the Wyverns you fight another boss after the next dungeon. This boss took me twenty minutes to beat down. That one wasn't so bad because it didn't have any weird stunlocking attacks but it was literally just a grind to bring the health bar down to zero. It was obviously done to prolong the game time.
But when I got to the next area was when I knew the game truly despised me. The next area begins with a simple exploration. During this exploration I came across a huge dragon and thought "Oh cool, world boss. Maybe this game is redeeming itself." I locked onto it and prepared for a fight.
It was level 600. I was level 150. It took me a moment to grasp how truly screwed I was as he decimated my party and then CHASED ME AROUND THE ENTIRE MAP ONLY STOPPING WHEN HE GLITCHED ON A ROCK.
This game is absolutely abysmal. You'll only play through it if you're an SAO fan and even then that's iffy.
I only got this game because it was significantly on sale, and whilst I'm not really a fan of SAO series, I was a fan of the .hack series, and this unfortunately isn't even half as good as the original PS2 .hack games and this is also quite possibly one of the most frustrating Jrpgs I've ever played, the control and camera features are dreadfully bad, if you could zoom the camera out so you could see more of whats happening in combat, that would be something but you can't even do that so most of the time your being hit by mobs who are off screen because the insane design decisions, this game is a VITA port and it clearly shows, the PS4 version doesn't really have anything extra to offer.
The targetting system is just as bad as the camera, you can lock onto targets but the camera constantly messes up, and if you try to move the camera so you can see whats going on, nope you can't do that because left/right cycle through targets so in the heat of battle, most of the time you can't clearly see whats going on. You only ever control Kirito, the AI controls your companions who occasionally suffer from poor AI scripting and will refuse to do simply things like heal themselves, or attack everything in sight or not buff your character. Equipping characters is a choir, you can only do that in taverns or Inn - and you can't quickly cycle through the characters, its all drawn out and pointless.
Aerial Battles are the worst, the design and implementation of this system just doesn't work, not only do you have to fight the control system...which is 90% of the time the sole reason you're getting hit, your also fighting the targetting system or the flight system itself....none of it works particularly well. Heck even regular battles can be just as bad, with some monsters being way to big that you can't see whats happening because of the poor camera controls. The monsters are recycled so heavily its not even funny.
Multiplayer is useless, the custom characters are not custom at all since there are literally the most minimal options available, 2 hair styles per race, 2 skin colors..yadda **** effort was put into the game at all.
The story **** what story? There isn't really any story just a whole bunch of cut scenes where the team experiences certain events like everyone trying on cat ears, or visiting an in-game festival. When the actual story and plot shows up, you quickly forget it about it because thats how thin the story is.
Its a real shame since this game could have been amazing if this game wasn't a port and actually designed for the PS4, the huge design flaws, limitations of the VITA are all painfully apparent, far too much recycled monsters/content. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone, even SAO fans since its just one giant mess.
SummarySword Art Online: Lost Song features all-new Aerial Battles and an array of customization features. With an original story based on the ALfheim Online realm, fans will be able to play as Kirito or other key characters from Sword Art Online including Leafa and Asuna to explore Svart ALfheim, a brand new area of ALfheim Online. Players wil...