You can date other characters, even those with the same gender, which is a surprisingly progressive feature. Expect to be bombarded by friend requests as you help others out. Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization is set up just like a real-life MMO. This may be due to the number of NPCs roaming around the area, and the number of interactions you might have with them. Oddly, any time you’re in the game’s main town hub, the frame rate dips considerably. Since textures and environments are lower in texture, the game does at least run at a consistently high frame rate through most battles. Monsters litter each area, and combat takes place in real-time. The environments are so incredibly generic, it would be hard to tell this game apart from many other RPGs. One of the weakest portions of Hollow Realization‘s presentation is the graphics. Even side quests include cutscenes that can span 10-15 minutes, but they are impressively fully voiced, which makes a big difference given the static nature of the cutscenes. This does allow each character to become fully-realized, and before long you feel like you know some of the behaviors and nuances between them. Hollow Realization takes what feels like forever to go anywhere with the story. Many JRPGs have slow stories, taking upwards of 20 or more hours to really get to the meat of the issues at hand, and even core mechanics of the game. Still, the level of animation on offer here is a bit disappointing.Īn issue that may divide some of you is the game’s pacing. It feels like lazy story telling, but on the other hand if you have a halfway decent imagination then it’ll almost feel like you’re reading/listening to a manga. This is key, because the cutscenes themselves are typically of the more static variety - you see a couple of avatars of whichever characters are interacting, and most action takes place off-screen, leaving you with sound effects and occasionally a screen color flash to indicate when something is going down. Cutscenes are fully voiced, which can help to sell immersion. There’s so much story content here, it’s probably enough to fill up a manga volume. It’s an interesting concept, and most of the game’s characters will likely grow on you in the long run.įans of Sword Art Online will find a lot to enjoy in Hollow Realization. Even after a couple dozen hours with this character, I couldn’t find myself caring all that much about a simulated being, but perhaps I just lack that kind of empathy. Hollow Realization attempts to get you to care about AI-controlled game characters, almost in an Ex Machina kind of way. Without giving anything major away, an early goal in the game is to determine why you’ve come across a seemingly bugged-out NPC, and why the new game has a few weird, darker rules when it comes to NPCs themselves. A good chunk of the beginning of the game is spent with many characters examining what is new, and what is carried over from their harrowing time spent trapped in the original game. A lot of the assets have been reused from the original SAO game, which could certainly be taken as a critique of the video game industry. New, supposedly non-lethal VR headsets have been produced, and a new game called Sword Art Online: Origins has opened up for a public beta. In Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, it has been some time since that world was saved by protagonist Kirito. The first virtual reality massively multiplayer online game (VRMMO) in this world was called Sword Art Online, and the day it first opened to the first 10,000 pre-orderers, it was hijacked and players were held hostage in the game, with the penalty for dying in the game or attempting to remove the headset before all floors of a giant tower were cleared resulted in that player’s real-life death. In short, think The Matrix and you’ve got the concept. The gist of the story is that it is the near-future, and virtual reality has progressed to the point where you slip on a VR headset, and are completely immersed in a virtual world, experiencing all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures that the world has to offer. For those who are not familiar, Sword Art Online is a popular Japanese franchise, which started as a light novel and now encompasses manga, anime, video games, and soon even a movie.
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