Reviews
Sword Art Online RE: Hollow Fragment was released at the beginning of August in the North America and European zones. The game is available for download via PSN on both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. And it’s incredible. I’ve really enjoyed the game so far, from single player to dabbling in multiplayer with other real players.
Rarely does a game pull me from my go-to game of Final Fantasy 14 and yet, this managed to – a feat that many games don’t have that title. But for all it’s wonderful aspects, there is one thing that I feel could be a real downfall and hurt the game – the glitches.
Games come with glitches, that is known. Many games get fully polished after patches rather than coming off the assembly line all good to go. This game needs patches to fix the things that really shouldn’t be happening. Random crashes that cause the game to close, defeating monsters in Hollow missions and the quest not completing properly, Hollow missions taking more than 30 seconds to start compared to some that take several seconds. Incredible lag in areas where there are plenty of NPCs to a bit of lag in a non-crowded area.
Two big multiplayer ones I’ve encountered are – being unable to teleport to the administration area despite everyone being ready to teleport. And even though we should be teleporting, it times out and we have to click the door again.
My favorite was being unable to join a room in multiplayer because it was full. So the game kicked me to the mode selection but it acted as though I was trying to enter a room that I wasn’t able to.
While I can understand glitches happening at times, and yes most of these glitches don’t happen all the time, some are happening every day. Lag, teleporting and missions not completing properly are the ones I’m encountering way too frequently. It’s quite frustrating, especially the mission one as sometimes it happens upon defeating a pretty difficult boss so you’re forced to exit and redo. Though that isn’t recommended as it’ll happen again.
Considering the game has been out long enough, these things shouldn’t be happening. I can sort of understand the multiplayer ones as going online with other players is new(as the old version, to play with others you needed ad-hoc). These could very well cause players to not play and that does not look good for the future of any other Sword Art Online games.
As I said, this game is really enjoyable, the only downside are those glitches. I want to see this game do well and, am hoping the developers can fix through patches. It’ll definitely help the game.
