SWORD ART ONLINE Alicization Lycoris

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☑ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☑ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

This game is 20% gameplay and 80% story dialogue. If you're not into fiction and are expecting heavy RPG gameplay, this isn't the game for you. However, the story is good and the combat system is very satisfying

Disclaimer: Don't look at my playtime on Steam. I have played the game to completion for 48 hours on PS5.
There's a lot to cover, so I'll divide this review into two parts.
Part 1: Gameplay
It's very janky. You definitely need to be a fan of open world games with endless amounts of enemies and markers on the map to enjoy this. There are 4 regions to explore, all divided into smaller locations. It's quite flawed but still enjoyable, You'll be destroying thousands of enemies with 9 different types of weapons using quite an advanced combat system, but AFAIK it's been a bit streamlined when compared to previous entries. The variety is quite big, but you can have only 4 sword skills assigned to shortcuts for use in battle and when using 1 weapon a lot, it can become quite repetetive. As can the gameplay in general, because this game is very grindy. I've only played the main story and basically ignored all the side content and I still haven't gotten to level 50, and AFAIK the level cap is 199. That being said, the game also has DLCs (which I haven't played) and a lot of post-game content, so if you're a fan of this kind of stuff - there's plenty. Just be prepared for a lot of jank. Overall I'd say gameplay-wise it's a very enjoyable game, but it's definitely not some AAA quality and it's mainly directed at fans of the show who will pardon some repetition and jank
Part 2: Story
This is INSANELY frustrating, because I really liked Alicization. I have read the novels and watched the anime. And you know what? On the surface, this game's story is really dang good! We follow the story after the first part of Alicization in the show, where some things change during the final confrontation with the Administrator and now the heroes have to deal with a new danger. We get a new character, Medina, who is pretty well fleshed out and definitely has a lot of time to shine here. I understood her struggles and symphatized with her, the new antagonist is also pretty fun. Overall, I think the story of this game is a fun expansion to the Alicization arc in anime and a cool "what if" scenario that fleshes out the story and the world even more. During the particular chapters we even get some smaller arcs and villains in the regions and while they are hit-and-miss, they add a lot to the lore of the world of Underworld.
Okay, so now the bad. THIS IS SUCH A SLOG. The first chapter is a whole retelling of the anime. 24 episodes squeezed into ONE CHAPTER. OUT OF SIX. It's insane and it's executed so poorly that it completely discouraged me when I first picked up the game. The devs saw the backlash and included a "streamlined" mode, which lets you skip most of the content in this first chapter and only see the new stuff with Medina, but even then it takes more than 3 hours with barely any gameplay. The game fully starts at the beginning of chapter 2 when you get the open world and freedom what to really do, so it's baffling to me why you need to go through this boring recap, since even the first game in the series (Hollow Fragment/Infinity Moment) had the same premise, but simply started after the final fight, without the recap.
But anyway. The story is mostly really good from then on (only the third chapter has some long-ish moments) with only a few longer cutscenes that break the pacing. However, the final chapter is again, a slog. I've just endured 3 hours of cutscenes with the most boring, expositional dialogue ever, with maybe 20 minutes of gameplay overall. I still think the main story is fun, but the cutscenes could cut down on the fluff and repetitions in dialogue and it would be a much better experience in my opinion.
Bonus:
However, as you may know, SAO games were always very hard on the hm... "sexual" content. Alicization makes one, enormous improvement - this time, all the scenes with Kirito's "harem" are relegated to side quests, which give you exactly 0 EXP each so you are never forced to endure the cringe. I tried a few of them and they were very bad, so I didnt waste my time with them. The main story is fine without the side quests anyway and I don't think they would add anything substantial to my experience, so I just skipped them all.
Oh, and like the previous games in the series, there's a dating sim minigame, again. As Kirito canonically has a girrfliend I find this inclusion laughable and really inexcusable. It really doesn't add anything of value to the game, it just makes it less serious to anyone who is hesitant to try the games.
Overall, I reccomend this game, but only on a deep sale and only for fans of the universe. It's a deeply flawed experience, both gameplay- and storywise, but I still found it fun enough to keep going and finish the story. I will definitely try Last Recollection next.

I was super invested with the gameplay and story. It's mostly a visual novel with some combat mixed in but that is the best part! It's immersive and like an anime

Pretty fun game, daily tickets to roll for random cosmetics is cool. good "replay" of the Underworld Arc of SAO if you want to or you can choose to skip it and begin your own adventure. the combat system is very simple and easy to learn but still fun. there are some minor set backs that could be good if changed such as being able to mark quest locations on the map or have better guidance to those quest. my biggest down side to the game is honestly just the keyboard button default layout is hard to learn and maybe the fact that there are a million cut scenes(can be skipped) but other than that a simple fun RPG based on a great anime.

Would recommend buy on sale as i did.

well start with the cons
-buggy, the game crashed to desktop about 4 times while doing the storyline
-no player base, the barely anyone random will join your world and its based on two things
1. steam profile needs to public. 2. open steam settings and go to the download tab and change download region to "uk- london" the ai "players" only show up if people are playing in your region, the location i mentioned seems to have the most activity (3 "player wayfarers" in about 4 hours of gameplay)
-long conversations, if you have a small attention span move along because youll be eating a novel after about 10 mins of game play for the first 15 hours of the game but after that it gets alot better

pros
sao thats multiplayer, fun with friends
fun boss fights

I love this game so much but I want sword scabbard because when player do not using sword and player do not using sword this sword is gone, I don't like that I want this game has sword scabbard so much.