I’m not that big into the whole Sword Art Online world, in fact I can’t even say I have ever saw, read, or played anything from the series until around 6 months ago but the series slowly started to make its way into my life. Everyone here should know by now that I love games, and I am always looking for new games, especially ones that are on sale. Ever since the start of 2019, every time I looked for a new game to buy, one game that I always saw was Lost Song. I saw it every week on sale for the Vita and was tempted to check it out but didn’t know anything about the series and I was able to control myself for a while.

But from January until July I saw the game so many times that my curiosity got the better of me and I ended up watching the entire first season in 3 days and became a big fan, to the point where I knew I wanted to get one of the games. The one that jumped out the most at me was this one, Hollow Realization. The PS4 version was on sale at Amazon for $20 but I really wanted the Switch version but that was a whole $50 so again, I controlled myself. Then one day the Nintendo eshop was selling the digital version with all DLC for $20 and I scooped it up without thinking.

When I picked it up, I knew that it had a lot of bad reviews, but at the same time, my understanding was that those negative points were made towards people who weren’t already fans of the series, those who wouldn’t really care for the content. I was pretty invested at that point so I didn’t really care at all. The moment I downloaded it, I tested it out for a few minutes with the character customization and the tutorial and I instantly knew that I was going to put 100 hours into this game with ease. Then, after playing for around 30 or so hours during just the first week, I realized that I had so much to say about it.

GRAPHICS: 10/10

One of my favorite aspects of this game is the graphics. From a visual standpoint, the game is simply beautiful for a number of reasons. The world just has so much detail and is super vibrant, even the backgrounds look like they could be works of art. One of the first things I did when I was first exploring the Town of Beginnings was look outside of the town, at the world beyond, and it was full of color.

Then, when I went into the first wild area, I really liked how much detail there was. Other than the generic ground, you could see blades of grass and flowers, each tree looked different than the others, and the designs of all the creatures really worked.

The lighting and shadows are also magnificent, quite possibly one of the best that I’ve seen in a video game, especially on the Switch. The clouds above you slowly move across the sky and they cast very detailed dark shadows all across the ground that move in sync. Trees cast accurate shadows and you can even see rays of light when looking in the right direction.

ANIMATION: 10/10

The best part of the games visuals is the animation, whether it’s that of the cut scenes, character movements, or other minor details, they are as perfect as they can get. First off, the game has actual cut scenes that look like they are right out of the anime. Right when the game first starts off there’s a cut scene that’s very detailed and immersive that introduces you to the world and the characters. It’s full of detail, it’s smooth, and feels less like a video game cut scene and more like watching the events actually unfold. The cut scenes are even fully voiced like the rest of the game which makes it even more immersive.

Beyond the cut scenes, my next most favorite part of the animation is in-game movement. Most of the time when you’re playing an RPG or an MMO, in-game movement is very limited. Sure your character will usually have free movement, but everything else will have a very strict movement pattern or will stand still. In many of the games I have played, creatures and NPC’s will just pace back and forth or stand still. In many of those games, companions or party members have very strict following patterns or don’t even appear in the overworld with you, just in battles, dungeons, and towns.

This game is very different and characters seem to be more like actual people. In the wild areas, party members follow in different patterns and paces, and in battles they mostly do their own thing. You can even leave a battle, travel a few meters and they’ll keep battling for a little while.

In towns, the NPC’s actually look like they’re real people. Even the ones that are standing still are in groups and look like they’re talking and having a good time. Ones that are moving aren’t just going from point A to point B, but are covering great distances as well.

Character movement is further highlighted by other parties in the wild areas, and this was a pleasant surprise for me when first playing. I was 20 minutes into the first quest doing a brief tutorial when off in the distance I noticed a party of actual NPC’s doing the same quest. There were NPC’s that had nothing to do with my party covering most of the wild area, battling creatures, and interacting with one another, and it was all so fluent. Before I knew it, I was battling a boss creature along with 11 NPC’s and not only was there no lag or combat issues, but it looked great as well.

I was even grateful for the little movements that made the game more realistic. This included the moving clouds, wind blowing trees and grass, gestures, and the ability to play in first person in some areas.

Voice Acting: 9/10

The voice acting in this game is very strong for a number of reasons. First of all, it's fully voiced. There are roughly two dozen fully voiced characters and a ton of one or two line dialogue between others. I remember being a kid having a game with full voices was super rare. It's way more common now so the fact that it's fully voiced doesn't really add much to the game, however the sheer amount of dialogue does.

This isn't one of those games where there's a couple cut scenes and some text to read. It's a full visual novel, sometimes you'll feel like you're reading an entire book because of all the dialogue between characters. Yes, all of those lines are fully voiced. Plus there's tons of screaming on the battlefield.

One other aspect of the games voice acting is that many of the characters are actually voiced by the same actors who voice the characters in the Japanese version of the anime. This isn't all that common in games that are based on other media. All the characters might actually be voiced by the same anime actors, but I didn't do enough research to confirm that.

The only downsides that I see are: A. I don't understand anything they're saying. Cause it's in Japanese. It would have been really cool if the English cast also recorded lines like World of Final Fantasy did. B. I heard that much of the translation is missing, more so than other games.

Music: 7/10

The music was good but it was not what I was expecting and hoping for, so in the end I was a bit disappointed. I just didn't really hear any songs that were memorable or enjoyable when compared to the larger SAO universe. If this was an original game and the anime didn't exist, I would have said that the music was great. But I went into this game with a history of SAO and I liked the music in the anime.

In fact one of the battle themes is probably one of my favorite anime songs in general. I didn't hear the same songs in the game and many of them didn't give off the same level of energy that the soundtrack from the anime gave. On their own, the songs are good but in my case I had a bias towards the OG SAO songs and was expecting something that was better than good.

With that being said, some of the songs do fit the mood and tempo well. Some are calm and relaxing and some attempt to catch up with the action. I do enjoy the music that plays in the Town of Beginnings though.

Story: 4/10

There is virtually (get it?) no story in this game. Here’s the problem, Sword Art Online had an amazing story. Being all hyped for a video game and then being trapped in said video game with life or death consequences is a great story and definitely had me hooked right from the start. But at it’s foundation, Hollow Realization really took away any part of the original story that made it compelling and dangerous. Nobody is trapped in the game, nobody is trying to actually kill you. You’re literally playing a game where you play as someone else who is playing as someone else in another game.

It’s like the foundation of Inception where you’re just in a dream. It even kind of feels like watching a Let’s Play where you don’t get the full personal reward of playing the game yourself, here you’re not rewarded because there was nothing to begin with. There’s no risk, the only real threats don’t actually exist, when all the characters aren’t in the SAO world, they’re going about their normal lives. Not that we got that out of the way, let’s discuss a little bit of what the story does entail.

The story follows an AI/NPC that is introduced at the very beginning of the game and much of the game follows you trying to find out more about her and what she really is while also trying to defend NPC’s from a harmful group of players. That’s really all there is to it when it comes to the main storyline, which is why I’m a bit hesitant to say that I like it. That story itself isn’t exactly well thought out or filled with content.

However, beyond that main storyline, there are a ton of quests for you to take on that will help keep the game flowing.
The only other criticism that I had of the story is that it followed a different continuity from the anime, one that was set up from the previous three games in the series. In the game series, it splits right at the end of the SAO ending of season 1 and then spreads out into it’s own story. So if you saw the anime but haven’t played any of the previous games, much of the background and other info might be a bit confusing, especially when it comes to how certain people met or certain events.

One thing that I really liked about the story was that there were times when you had the option of going forward with the game or hearing more background. For instance, near the start of the game you end up talking about the game Alfheim Online. You are given a choice to either go on with the game or view a cut scene with some dialogue that explains what happened in Alfheim. I like this feature because it basically works as a skip function while also offering a bigger view into the story, background, and depth of their world.

Quests: 8/10

Hollow Realization is in no short supply when it comes to quests, there are a ton of them. There are boring ones and simple ones that have no major rewards and all sort of fun ones that take you to insane landscapes and offer great rewards. Many of the quests are very simple and most of them can be covered by “kill a certain number of this creature” or “collect a certain number of that item”. Others are more intricate like when facing boss level creatures or ones that progress the main storyline.

There are numerous ways to get a quest. In addition to finding them on a quest board or when looking at the map, NPC’s who have you added as a friend will sometimes randomly bring a quest to your attention. Personally my favorite part of quests isn’t how easy some of them can be or the reward that you get from them, it’s that you can keep doing the same quests over and over again. That’s very helpful because it separates this game from others when it comes to grinding.

One of the very first quests you get when starting up the game is to kill five boars. It’s an easy quest and once you travel to the exact area where they are, it should take less than a minute to kill them all. For completing that quest, you are given some EXP and an item you’re free to leave the area and start the same quest over again right away. You can do it as many times as you want and you’ll keep getting EXP and items each time, though the amount received would be a bit smaller for repeats.

Quests that are given to you by other players are also repeatable, but those will take a while to become available again and are usually gathering quests. For instance, there are 3 gathering quests that require you to find items in the first wild area (I think it was 5 of each item.) It’s easy to find those items, you can get them all in 1 run and when you bring them back to the Town of Beginnings, you’re given 800 col (money) for each quest.

I really liked grinding in the wild areas so instead of 5, I ended up coming back with 20 to 30 of each item and had plenty left over after completing the quest. Around 2 hours later those same 3 quests appeared on the quest board again, but I didn’t have to go and get all the items again since I still had so much left over. I just accepted the m and they were instantly completed and rewarded. This was an easy way to get lots of col fairly quickly, especially considering that if you were to sell the items to a vendor, you would actually get less col.

How is this different from other games? Well most games that offer an extensive quest system are one and done. Once you finish a quest, you aren’t allowed to do it over, or you can but without another reward. This also gives you extra motivation to grind. Take Pokemon as an example. You want your Pokemon to level up so you’re in the grassy areas grinding and battling as many Pokemon as you can. All you’re doing is getting EXP for each Pokemon that you defeat.

It’s different here because the grind is compounded. Yeah it’s the same as Pokemon in the sense that you grind by defeating creatures and you get EXP for every one that you defeat. But all you have to do is keep taking the same quests over and over. You’re defeating the creatures and getting EXP and items from them but at the same time you’re getting the bonus EXP and items from the quest. Quests are an extra motivation to grind because grinding becomes worth twice as much.

I also noticed that the quests in a certain wild area are constantly being added or taken away with time. There was one time that I checked the map and looked at the 1st wild area. There were two low level quests available. About 20 minutes later I was looking at the map again and those same two quests were still there but two others were added. Another 20 or so minutes passed and the number of quests changed again. This isn’t great if you’re wanting something specific but is great for variety and for something new every now and then.

Gameplay: 9/10

So how do you actually play the game? Is it an RPG? Is it an MMO? Is it a Visual Novel? Well it’s a little bit of everything, and then if we’re being honest, it’s even more than that. When it comes to the gameplay of Hollow Realization, it can be broken down into a couple main factors, each of which have are insanely complex and add their own level of immersion to the game.

1: First off you have the combat. At the basis of the game, you have just two attacks and they change depending on what kind of weapon class you are using. For the most part, they are a simple attack and a skilled attack. When you first go into the game you might think that it’s just simple button mashing but it’s a lot more than that. Each hit is only going to do a little bit of damage but if you can chain a bunch of attacks together you can get a wicked combo that will do a lot of damage.

You also get bonuses for timing your attacks perfectly. You want your attacks to be timed not only with your enemies movements but with the attacks of your party members as well. There’s also a big emphasis on blocking, evading, healing, and definitely communicating with your allies. Your allies play a big role in combat, especially when it comes to chaining attacks off one another or healing each other.

2: The next big aspect of Gameplay is friendship. There are hundreds of NPC’s that can be recruited to your party and all of them aside for the ones you are already friends with will start out as a stranger to you, which is level 1 on the friendship scale. Your goal is to talk to them A LOT until their levels rise and eventually they can join your party and once they’re really close to you, they will start using weapons and armor that you buy and give to them. This is insanely important when it comes to combat because the strength, skills, and specialties of your party in combat all comes down to the people you interact with, how friendly they are to you, and how much you spend on them.

3: One of the biggest gameplay mechanics that you will find in this game is called a Pallette. I know, it’s a big, possibly complicated word, but it’s really just a hotbar or keyboard shortcuts from other games, but way more intuitive. How does it work? At any moment during the game you can change your Pallette by adding attacks, skills, items, emotions, phrases, and commands to one loadout. Pallette’s are huge too, when you’re in the main Pallette page, only 20 are visible but you can scroll and will have access to up to 60 actions at once.

This will be very helpful in combat, especially on a Switch. Imagine you took a decent amount of damage and you need to heal. In most games you have to pause, then go to items, then find the item that you want to use, then pick who you want to use it on, and then confirm. Pallette’s streamline the whole process, all you have to do is press the – button to open the Pallette and press A on the item and it’s done.

4: There are also raids, which are exactly what they sound like. Think of the new raids in Pokemon Sword and Shield but imagine more rage and destruction. In this game, a raid is basically a battle against one mega boss and you can enter a raid with just your own party or enter with a plethora of other NPC’s. Even with 11 or so other people battling alongside you, you need a ton of preparing for a raid and they seem to last a while.

5: Lastly there’s also a big romance aspect to the game, but we’re gamers, girls aren’t really our thing. Though I do have to admit that it was well developed. I thought it was cool how the closer you are to an NPC, the more differently they react to you. That was a cool feature and resulted in lots of character development and changes in behavior and dialogue for each NPC. It’s cool watching an NPC go from being neutral or even passive aggressive towards you to becoming more open and then being best friends.

Grinding: 9/10

I definitely enjoy grinding in this game a lot more than I do in most other games, especially for RPG’s. In most games grinding can be tough, long, sometimes boring, and you just do the same thing over and over. With this game I find grinding to be very different, mostly because of how active the combat is and how fluent most of the movements are. Combat in this game is actually fun, attack, attack, evade, attack.

There are so many different ways to attack that each battle could result in a different experience each time. Even if you’re grinding against creatures that are a couple levels lower than you, they still require a few hits each. This means more active battles and less aimlessly plowing through creatures with one hit kills going from one to the next.

I also really enjoy the frequency in which the creatures respawn which allows for you to grind at your own pace. There’s never a lack of creatures to fight. You never have to restart a quest or leave the area and come back. Once you kill a group of creatures, you’ll most likely see another group not too far and move on to the 2nd group. By them time you’re done with those, the ones that you killed earlier will probably have respawned by then so you can go back and kill those and it creates an endless cycle.

You literally never have to leave the area that you are in. You always see where the creatures are and they respawn quickly so you are free to grind as quickly as you can. As a result, it’s insanely easy to rack up not just EXP, but col, items, and weapons if you put the time into it. Plus, don’t forget about endgame grinding, once you are in the more difficult areas and you grind like this, you won’t get that much EXP relative to your level but you will start bringing home some sweet loot.

There’s also a big need for grinding considering how many levels there are to reach. The base game itself had a level cap below 100 which wasn’t much fun but as different DLC’s came out the cap kept raising and now it’s in the hundreds, though you do have to beat the game and then certain parts of the DLC’s in order to access the different caps. But once you do, you can pretty much level up as much as you want, and once you beat the game and all the quests, this might end up being a reason for you to keep on grinding.

In the end, I ended up grinding so much that if there was a page that showed you all your total stats, it would probably say that I’ve killed thousands of creatures, if not more.

The only thing that I don’t like about grinding is the faulty EXP scaling system, which makes it much harder to level up than in normal RPG’s. In most games, the amount of EXP you gain is based on the level of the creature you kill, not the gap between your level and theirs, but that’s what this game does. Let’s say in another RPG you were level 80 and you needed 50,000 EXP to get to level 81. You battled a level 50 creature and got 3,000 EXP. The EXP you got would be way higher than hat you would get from a lower level creature but it balances out because you need more EXP to level up.

In Hollow Realization, the higher level you are above the creature you’re killing, the lower the EXP you will get. For example if you are level 15 and you kill something that’s level 20, maybe you get 20 EXP. But if you are level 30 and kill something that’s level 20, you’ll only get 1 EXP. Plus with each level you gain the total EXP you need gets higher so it’s really some kind of double negative because the work keeps getting compounded.

You gain a level and now you need more EXP to reach the next level but at the same time now that you are a level higher, the same creatures you were just killing are worth even less. You could be level 99 and be getting 1 EXP each from level 50 creatures and need a million more EXP to reach the next level. It can get pretty chaotic an d will eventually take such a long time to level up because of this system.

Replayability: 4/10

Despite the game being so much fun, and the fact that you can spend hundreds of hours playing the game and redoing the same thing over and over, I wouldn’t advise that you start the game from scratch to play it all over. This is because of save files, which are something that I’m going to bring up again in the Missed Chances section later on. Sure, if this game had the option for multiple save files, I would say go ahead, start a new game, but it does not.

Let’s say you beat the game and you easily put in more than 100 hours into it but you wanted to start from the beginning. Maybe you wanted to create a brand new character and play as them, maybe you loved the immersive amount of cut scenes and storytelling, maybe you just loved the thrill of leveling up. It doesn’t really matter because there’s only one save file, so if you want to start over with a new character, you have to permanently delete your one and only save.

It’s not worth it is it? You’re going to delete hundreds of hours of epic gameplay just to switch your gender and try that out? I didn’t think so. The fact that there’s just one save file limits what you can do with the game. Personally, I wouldn’t even risk it at all, even if I really wanted to start the game over, it’s just not really worth it. But when it comes to replaying old parts of the same game, I’m all for it, it helps with grinding and earning col, I’m just against starting over from the beginning with a new game.

Exploration: 8/10

For me, the exploration aspect of the game is high because there’s simply just so much space to explore. Even when you’re just in the Town of Beginnings, it’s huge. The town has four main areas and each one has a lot of ground to cover. In fact if you were to take all four areas and merge them into one open town, it would probably end up being bigger than most towns or cities in other RPG’s.

All the other wild areas throughout the world are just as big. Even the first wild area that you battle in would probably end up taking you two to three minutes to run from one end of the map to the other without stopping to fight. Then you realize that there are so many more wild areas to explore. The first map alone has probably a dozen or more wild areas, dungeons, and other places to explore, each of them housing their own unique lineup of creatures to fight, chests to open, and loot to find.

There is just one downside to this, which is why I don’t think it should get a perfect grade. I think there might actually be too much space. Having a large open space to explore and fight is great, but if you have too much and you’re forced to travel a lot by foot, that can also take away from the experience. Many of the areas in each wild area are kind of far apart.

Sure, when you’re battling a group of creatures, you’re able to see another group off in the distance, but physically travelling to the next group might take 15 to 30 seconds of just going through trees or water. Admiring the scenery is nice but if some of the gaps were closed and there was less distance between creatures and points of interest, you would end up having the same experience, but it would be just a little bit less time consuming.

Customization: 10/10

One of the things that hooked me right at the start of Hollow Realization is the amount of customization that you can do. Once you press new game, you’re given the option to fully customize how your character looks and there are so many options so that you can make the perfect character. You can choose your gender, hair style, eye type, mouth type, height, physique, voice, and more. Each type has a ton of different styles to choose from.

For example, there are more than 40 hair styles to choose from and more than a dozen voices to suit your character. This also doesn’t include hair color, eye color, which in addition to a bunch of preset colors it also has a fully customizable RGB slider for even more customization. I did the math and without even taking into account colors, there are more than 300 million different possible combinations for how your character looks and sounds. Then hair color, eye color, skin color, and the ability to have different colored eyes adds even more.

The only issue that I see with this customization page is that you have to pick what weapon you want to start off with. You can change weapons later and you can acquire all skills, but you start with a bonus skill attached to the weapon that you first choose and you start with a slight upgrade for that weapon. Off the bat that sounds good, but you’re stuck with it unless you start a new game, it would be cool if you could see the skills and the possible 1st skill attachment before you bind yourself to your first weapon.

Then once you’re in the game there are even more ways to customize. When you first start off, you’re stuck with Kirito’s outfit but throughout the game you can get a ton of other clothes and armor to change up your look even more.

You’re allowed to wear gear on your head, neck, body, wrist, legs, and waist, in addition to rings and charms. At the first chance I had, I picked out new gear and suddenly started looking less like the character I started with and more like Han Solo. All the weapons are also incredibly customizable but I will get to those in the next section.

Another great feature of customization is a thing called visual armor. It does not exist and yet it looks awesome! It lets you change the look of you or your friends without changing the gear that they are wearing. Let's say you're wearing a really powerful jacket that has like +1000 DEF but there's another jacket that you really like the look of but it only has +5 DEF. This is where visual armor comes in handy.

For The small price of 2000 col you're allowed to keep the stats of whatever gear you are wearing but visually you'll be wearing whatever clothing you want and it won't affect your stats. This comes in handy in two ways. We already mentioned the 1st, and that's that maybe the clothes you really want to wear aren't as good as the ones you already have on. The other reason this is cool is that maybe you can't actually available yet. You know, maybe you haven't gotten to tbe point where that specific piece of clothing is unlocked, or maybe you just can't afford it.

When you take into account the look, stats, and price, this is a steal. When I first learned about this, I had so much fun, I would go around town grabbing all my friends and look for the look that best suits them. The only downside is that visual armor is for armor only, as in helms, jackets/dresses, and shoes. This means you can't visualize other types of gear like other headgear, rings, charms, or belts. But even without those, this feature is still amazing.

Weapons: 10/10

In the average game, there isn’t too much customization with weapons. Look at a game like Skyrim and you see hundreds of different weapons with their own set stats and then there are ways to upgrade your overall skills. Look at game like Horizon Zero Dawn, where there are specific skills for each type of attack. But in my opinion, nothing comes close to the kind of weapon customization that you get in this game.

In this game, there are nine classes of weapons that you can choose from. They include Sword, Rapier, Scimitar. Dagger, Club, Katana, Two-handed sword, Axe, and Spear. Within each class, there are a number of different weapons that you can get your hands on. For instance if you start with Sword as your weapon, you begin the game with a Short Sword, and a Bronze Sword will instantly be available to purchase.

Plus, no two weapons are the same, even if they look like they are. When I did one of the very early quests, I got a 2 star Vulcan Blade sword as a reward. Then I did the same quest again and got the same sword as a reward but the new one had different stats. For example, one had 361 Damage Per Second, and 29 Strength. The other one had 370 DPS and 39 STR. This just goes to show how big the weapons customization is. You can probably have 20 copies of the same weapon but be able to rank them from best to worst without any upgrades or skills attached to them.

In addition to buying weapons, there are ways to craft overpowered ones and ways to upgrade the ones you already have into even more powered death machines.
The biggest feature when it comes to weapons is the incredibly impressive, complex, and possibly brain damaging skill system, in which you can safely assume it’s rocket science. Each weapons class has their own set of skills, which are all different from skills of other classes. Although some skills do connect to skills of another class, which only makes it that much more confusing.

Each weapons class features well over a dozen skills to learn, with a grand total of 145 main skills, many of which cost an arm and a leg when it comes to cost or pre-requisites. For example, if you are going with the standard Sword classes, one of the best skills you can learn is called 1H Sword 1. It costs 11 skill points which isn’t bad considering I had 24 after completing just the first three quests.

The real cost however, is that you need to be level 500 to learn it. I bet just getting to level 100 will take a ton of grinding, let alone 500, and that’s just to make you even stronger so you can play even more.

Then things get even more in depth because in addition to mastery, there are also mastery skills, which grant you and your friends even more bonuses and all kinds of buffs. If you really think about it, it’s as if each skill has its own set of skills. There are a bunch of quests that let you learn these new skills and upgrade them. Plus you can keep doing these with different allies so that they can power up as well, helping you make the perfect team. Unfortunatly, even I haven’t figured out how to work with these kinds of skills yet.

Party: 9/10

The game literally has so much to do, to the point where it’s either super confusing and stressful or amazing. There’s no middle ground. As soon as the tutorial ended and I was thrown into the Town of Beginnings, I didn’t battle or explore.

The first thing that I did was go up to every single player NPC and study them. Literally every NPC who is an in-game player can be added to your party and there’s more than 300 of them. I just walked up to everyone and studied their skills and other stats. Each player had a unique set of skills and attacks , and their stats were all over the place.

The first player I met was already level 23 but had no skills and a bunch of stats like VIT, AGI, DEX, and STR. I talked to them for a couple minutes, getting different dialogue each time so I can raise my friendship level with them, and then I moved on to the next NPC.

This is really a huge advantage if you want to build the perfect party but also is incredibly time consuming and is also a great way to customize your game. Once you find someone who has the right skills and stats for your party, you befriend them and then add them to your party, and then you can do that hundreds of more times and your party becomes super customizable.

It’s really just like Pokemon, but instead of catching a random Pokemon when you encounter it, it’s different people who you have to build a relationship with. Then you can train them and make them even better, and I took this part of the game way too seriously as I spent more than an hour trying to become friends with Brad and Rebecca.

Behaviors: 10/10

Perhaps the coolest feature of parties IMO are character behaviors. Every single NPC in the game has or can develop a set of personalities and behaviors such as Kind, Warlike, Airhead, Smart, Nosy, Cool, and so many others. When you are out in the field with your party, each member will be having one of these behaviors on display and one of two things will happen. Either they will cycle to the next behavior or you can encourage that behavior by pressing a certain button.

When you encourage that behavior, two things are going to happen. First, it’s going to be upgraded and will eventually reach a higher rank, which will increase the buff of that behavior. The frequency will also change, so the more you encourage a certain behavior, the more often that specific behavior will be displayed. I like this a lot because you can purposely build a character to be balanced or to use whichever bonus you want as much as you want.

For example, at the time of writing, I have Asuna at level 3 Kind, which prioritizes healing and has HP recovery 10%. She also is at level 2 caring which is another healing behavior and raises HP recovery another 5%. She also has Nosy, which raises SP. All 3 behaviors have different cool down times because of how often they were encouraged. On the other hand, Strea has the same behaviors but I prioritized Planner and Warlike, which raise both attack and defense.

This feature adds a whole new level of strategy to the game because you can’t just pick who you want to encourage and which behavior you want to upgrade. You can only encourage behaviors when you’re out in the field and the person you want to encourage needs to be with you. Plus you can only encourage a certain behavior when it’s being shown and it would be a waste to have a team of people with the exact same behaviors so you really need to plan carefully.

Once I began to understand the inner workings of this mechanic, I spent hours messing around with everyone’s behaviors and created the perfect teammates, which was so much fun. It’s also nice that encouraging behaviors also raises your friendship level with that character, so killing two birds with one stone.

Difficulty: 5

For me, this game is right down the middle when it comes to difficulty. At its foundation it’s very easy aside from the complex system which just takes time to learn. I haven’t seen any real challenges that made the game seem impossible or rage inducing. The only ones that I did see were no more than minor annoyances that made the game a little difficult by being very time consuming and require a lot of excessive grinding for almost no reason.

1: The creatures that you battle throughout the game are really tough and if you’re not careful they can either wipe you out or will take a lot of time to kill. I don’t know what it is about them but they either have a ton of HP or are made of metal because you need to keep attacking non stop. After playing for a couple hours I went back into the first wild area and I was level 8 but it still took me about 5 or 6 hits (Plus some from my party) to kill a level 1 boar.

There’s nothing stopping super overpowered creatures from showing up either. During my first trip through the 1st wild area, I made it around half way through and a giant level 95 creature appeared out of nowhere. I was only level 6 at the time. You gotta keep grinding and leveling up non stop if you want to put a dent in these guys.

2: It’s nearly impossible to get col in the game, especially when you’re first starting out. You have no idea how many times during my first 10 hours playing that I really wanted to buy something but couldn’t because I simply had no B, even though the stuff I wanted was cheap. The only guaranteed and worthwhile way to earn col in this game is to sell stuff to the different vendors. You get no money at all from drops after creatures and not all quests offer col as a reward.

So if you want to make a living here, what you have to do is go to the wild area and kill creatures to pick up items, and you also have to pick up random items thrown around the map and open chests. Then you bring all that stuff back to the Town of Beginnings and sell all of it. But guess what? You won’t actually get a lot from doing that so you have to go back out into the wild and repeat it again and again and again until you have earned a lot.

Later on, the amount of col that you get from selling the super valuable stuff and from completing quests that are 20 times harder and longer will be a lot higher. However, until then you are stuck grinding over and over and over just so you can get a cheap low level weapon to help you move forward inch by inch. Also, even if you get a decent amount of col for an item, the price might be a warning that it’s a rare and important item so you might have to think again when it comes time to sell it or not.

3: Lastly, it’s somewhat difficult to actually raise your friendship levels with someone because of how much time it takes. You have to go to the NPC that you want to raise the level of and talk to them. That only takes a few seconds but you have to do it again and again. Getting my friendship with Brad from level 2 to level 3 took around 10 minutes of just talking, and it’s going to be a lot more getting him to level 4 and 5. By the time I got Rebecca to the start of level 5, it had probably took me around 3 hours of being focused on raising her level.

You know that episode of The Simpsons when Homer uses one of those toy bird clickers to keep pressing a button on his computer? That’s what you need. Put that by your Switch in a way that it will keep pressing the A button to talk, then leave and let them keep talking. It probably would take an hour or more to full max out an NPC’s friendship level even if you do this.

Other than that, the game itself is incredibly easy, especially when it comes to most battles. If you are built to withstand a certain creature, you will never die. If you know what you are doing in battle, have the right gear, and know the specific patterns of each creature, you’ll rarely lose HP. When you do take damage, it’s easy to regain HP automatically, with the use of items, or from the help of your allies. Plus if you see a battle you know you can’t beat, just run away and train for hours so you can try again. I take pride in the fact that I have not yet died, despite some battles taking like 5 minutes because of careful attacks and retreats.

Damages: 7/10

What don’t I like about the game? It’s not really what everyone else says. All the reviews I ever saw of this game say it’s good and has great potential with some of the features but that the s gets dragged down or that some of the features are too complex, or that at times it becomes overbearing as its way more visual novel than game.

I didn’t fully see those problems myself because I found it enjoyable not having to stress out over grinding or being super focused and in hardcore gamer mode all the time. It was nice being able to switch between playing a game and sitting back watching the story and characters unfold like watching a movie or reading a book.

It just made the game feel more relaxed so those weren’t the problems that I saw. My main issues with the game were control based and are as follows.

1: The A and B buttons were pretty much inverted and threw me off for the first 10 or so hours. I booted up the game for the first time and it watched all the studio logos and up came the option to chose my language. I didn’t know any better and pressed A and then all the logos started playing again.

It took a while for me to realize that the A button was to go back and the B button was to confirm. This is throughout the whole game too, not just turning it on. When you’re in the main menu or the menu in the game, it’s always B to confirm and A to go back. This is something you can get used to, but all it takes is 10 minutes playing another game and when you switch back to SAO, your brain will be wired back to normal.

2: The joystick is useless in menus. I was in the main menu and realized the joystick didn’t do anything for navigating. When customizing your character you could only use the buttons. It was a bit confusing and time consuming. It’s not something major but it adds up every time you’re on a menu.

This is cool in a way because when you “pause”, the menu shows up and you can keep moving around using the joystick while using the buttons to access your menu. However this leads to two additional problems. A: If you’re able to play the game while paused, then it’s not paused at all, the game goes on around you while you’re looking at items, changing controls, or looking at your skill tree which takes up almost the whole screen. B: There’s no reason to be able to play and be on your menu at the same time considering that the joystick and d-pad are both on the left controller. It’s very difficult to be able to use both at the same time.

3: Movement in combat is sometimes slow and laggish. When you’re moving around the cities and landscapes, movement is fluent. But when you’re battling, it starts to slow down. You’ll be up close to an enemy launching a wicked chain attack, but when you’re done attacking and want to back away from the enemy, there’s a slight delay between your last attack and when you actually start to move.

There are also times when you will turn randomly or when the enemy moves, you can’t turn fast enough. As a result, your next couple attacks will just hit the air until you can take some time to readjust. It makes me think of the wonky physics of GTA V in how slow turning is sometimes.

4: Way back in the animation section I mentioned how there were times I would battle a big boss and other NPC parties would join in. In many of the wild areas, there were usually 1 to 3 NPC teams roaming around, usually minding their own business. While it is cool to have extra NPC’s for when you’re battling a tough creature, most of the time the AI just gets in your way. Sometimes I’ll be battling and one of the random NPC’s would steal my kill.

Sometimes I would be on my way to a battle but the random NPC’s are already there and kill the creature before I could get there. Other times, these random NPC’s do so much of their own damage that my own chains get ruined or cut short and sometimes they leave a battle early and you end up taking extra damage.

5: The loading screens were a total pain. There are loading screens in every game and a lot of them are really long too (I’m looking at you GTA V) but this one is a real pain. When I first started playing I didn’t really notice it much because I didn’t do much traveling between locations but later on it became intolerable at times. I would be in one area in the Town of Beginnings and I would go to the next and I ended up timing the load screens because I realized how bad they were. The load screens ranged from 33 seconds to 41 seconds EACH TIME. When I was really into the game, I was putting in around 6 hours a day, and that equated to around 40 or so minutes a day of lost gameplay just because of loading.

The load times were just the tip of the iceberg because most of the time, despite a 30 second+ load time, not everything would load in right away. For instance, after waiting so long to enter the Market Street area of the Town of Beginnings, I would see a few floating quest icons for 6 to 10 seconds because the NPC’s haven’t loaded in yet. When I enter a wild area, the creatures themselves also don’t load in for a few seconds, despite being able to see their name and health bar on screen. This just creates so much wasted time that I could have spent doing something else in the game.

6: Many skills reset when doing animation pausing actions but don’t reset the cool down timers. This can be a pain when you are trying to multitask, like trying to encourage someone and pick up an item at the same time. For example, when you use the encourage skill, the action isn’t complete right away, it takes like a second or 2 for the receiving character to receive and then for it to be input. If you do an action that pauses animation like opening a chest, picking up an item, or starting and finishing quests, the action part of the skill is stopped.

The game acts as if you never used the skill, for example, the option to encourage someone will still appear, and the effect of the skill will not appear. However, if you try to perform the skill again, you will not be able to because despite the actual skill not going through, the cool down timer officially began, and depending on the skill, you will usually have to wait anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds before you can use it again.

It’s easy to forget too, I’ve probably done this dozens of times already and hate myself for doing it because it creates a delay of all your next actions.

7: After I played for around four hours, the game crashed. I was in the Town of Beginnings and I was going to a different area in the town but I wasn’t able to do anything. Most of the visuals loaded but my character did not and I was unable to move or access any menu. So I had to close the game and restart it, fortunately the game recorded everything up until the last second so the game loaded in the area I was trying to go to. This didn’t happen often, maybe once after two hours of continuous playing, but was annoying when it did.

Missed Chances: 10

The game isn’t bad other than a few minor inconveniences but I really think the developers missed struck out by not having certain features or content in the game. After playing for my first 10 hours, I thought of three major features that the game lacks that would have made the experience much more enjoyable, especially considering that most of these features are common in other games.

1: This is one of the few games that only allows you to have one save file, and for a game that has so much customization, it would have been really cool to be able to start over and try out a brand new character. Of course, you can do that and simply start a brand new game, but at what cost? The save file and character you put hundreds of hours into will be gone forever. It’s just not worth it. Multiple save files would allow you the freedom to explore the boundaries of customization and have even more fun with your characters.

2: I think it would have been cool if the game had a real day-night cycle. It seems like the day-night cycle the game does have is flipped because it’s on Japanese time, so I haven’t spent much time playing during the night but noticed a some ways where it could have been better. First of all, it would have been cool if a day-night cycle changed which creatures appeared or how strong they were. I remember playing Pokemon Gold 17 years ago and when the sun went down, Hoothoots would come out.

This would have been a great excuse to make creatures more powerful at night or to swap them out for different ones. A day-night cycle would have also been brilliant for the MMO aspect of the game. SAO is an MMO and many of the NPC’s are “players” who are logged into the game. What if a day-night cycle dictated which NPC’s were logged into the game? You could only run into, talk to, befriend certain NPC’s during the day and others at night. I think this would have been much cooler for such a game. But in reality it looks like it’s more of a cosmetic feature.

3: An actual story would have been great, something with real stakes. I already mentioned this a bunch but this is literally a game about people playing a game. There’s are no consequences or life or death situations and the only real plot is again, about is literally about playing a game. It’s Inception but without anything really. I feel like the game could have at least had some sort of a plot with real-life consequences to make the journey feel more rewarding and not just following your favorite SAO characters around a video game.

It wouldn’t even have had to follow the story of the original Sword Art Online by being trapped in the game. There are plenty of other ideas where a video game can have real consequences. Heck, look at Ready Player One, that was about a virtual reality game that became so big that most of the worlds economy and political structure came from within the game. I just feel like there could have been a lot to work with in this department.

4: For a game that so heavily promotes such a large assortment of NPC’s that can be turned into party members, it sure makes it very hard to do so. I think it would have been very cool to be able to track down certain NPC’s easier. For instance, when I wanted to talk to Brad to raise my friendship level with him, it usually took like 5 minutes just to search through every map in the Town of Beginnings before I could find them.

Then I found out that you can look at their info in the friends page and it tells you where they are in the Town of Beginnings. But then again, each section of the map is still pretty big with a dozen or more NPC’s roaming around, so it’s still a bit difficult to pinpoint where exactly they are. It would be nice for a way to have them come to you or to automatically go to where they are.

Building these friendships is also very time consuming and pretty confusing. When I got to level 2 (acquaintance) with Brad, I had to talk to him about 50 times just to max out acquaintance. Then I had to actually accept a friend request from him to reach level 3 and I had no idea that I had to do that until I was randomly checking my friends list an hour later.

5: This next one is like the finding NPC’s ones, so it’s not really a feature but more of a change that would have made the game a lot easier and way more fun and productive. After clearing out the first few quests I realized that I found so many cool weapons. I looked into my equipment page and saw that I had like 8 sword and a bunch of other weapons in the other classes as well as some cool armor as well. But I was already decked out with the best equipment that I had on me, so what do I do with the leftovers?

I really wanted to upgrade the gear of my party members. They have terrible weapons, always getting themselves killed and I wanted to make them stronger but I realized that there was no option to give them my equipment. I hated that. I was like what’s the point of having a party to begin with if you can’t even make them better? After doing a lot of research I found out that you can give equipment to your party members, but there’s a catch.

You can give weapons to those who are at a level 4 relationship (Close friends) and that’s hard to get to. Just getting Brad and Rebecca from level 2 to level 3 to get them to join my party took around 10 minutes each of just talking, so I hadn’t even attempted to get them to level 4 yet. But wait, there’s more, you can only give weapons at level 4. If you want to give them armor you have to send them all the way up to level 5. I really think the game would be a lot better with an easier and streamlined system for giving weapons to party members, this one really just makes no sense at all.

6: I love the complexity and ingenuity of the massive skills system, there’s more than a hundred skills and those skills have all sorts of sub skills and upgrades. But they can get really confusing as a result of the descriptions. Sometimes they are hard to read or they just make no sense. Reading some skills are kind of like learning how to play Yu-Gi-Oh! For the first time and having to learn what each card does and how to use them, which is super hard for the first timers.

Let’s take a look at the very first skill that I learned. When I first started the game I chose the Sword class and the first skill that was assigned is called Horizontal Arc. Here is the description of what it does.

[Slashing] Hits: 2 (STR: 80% DEX: 100%)/Combo Attack (Mob)Defense -15%/60 sec.

Just looking at it on the screen hurts my eyes and brain because all the different symbols, numbers, and words smooshed together make it difficult to actually see. But what does it even mean? What is a mob? Are you dividing your strength by the number of attacks? Does -15% DEF last for 60 seconds or is it divided by 60 seconds?

I DON’T KNOW.

There’s one skill that reads [Thusting] Hits: 3 (AGI: 120%)/Charge Attack. So is it a charge attack or a thrusting attack? Is your AGI actually 360% because times 3?

As you go down the line, skills have even more diabolical descriptions that really make you think. I had to pass on a few skills because I had no way of actually knowing if it was better or worse than the one I was currently using. It would have been amazing if the skill system was easier to understand or I don’t know, used real words or something.

7: I briefly mentioned this in the Grinding section, but I think the game would have been much cooler if there was a stats page that showed everything that you’ve done and accumulated throughout the hundreds of hours you’ve played. Most games have such a page, many of them with all sorts of information. While it wouldn’t actually improve the game or the mechanics, it would have been a nice touch being able to see how far you’ve come with your character other than level and stats like ATK and DEF.

It would have been cool to be able to see things like how many total creatures you killed, total col earned, total distance travelled, chests opened, quests completed, weapons found, weapons made, etc. An RPG that does not have some sort of a stats page is rare and it couldn’t have been left out because of space issues seeing as how much stuff the devs did manage to shove into the game, so this definitely was something truly missed.

Overall: 8.2/10

When it comes to Hollow Realization, it’s a lot more than just a mixed bag. Sure the game has a couple aspects where it fails like with the story but there are also a lot of ways in which the game thrives. It’s not as dark or compelling as other RPG’s and it has its fair share of not great mechanics but it’s still a lot of fun and has so much to offer, especially to those who re already fans of SAO in general.

The price tag is a big much though. The regular price is $50 and I don’t really think paying full price is worth it unless you know you’re going to get 50 or more hours out of the game, which is what most people say you can get. Other than that, if you plan on getting the game, I would recommend waiting until the price drops again or picking up for another system.

I do have to bring up most of the critic grades that I have been seeing for the game over the past few years. Most of the grades and ratings and reviews that I have seen put Hollow Realization in the area between 65/100 and 75/100. But here’s the thing, critics grade games on an overall standpoint and how good they are on their own, not within a genre or within a fandom. That’s where the fans o1f SAO come in. If everyone who played this game wasn’t a fan of the series, then yes the grade suffers because it would be lacking in a lot of ways.

But when you’re exclusively aiming the game at SAO fans, the grade is going to be higher than a general “This is what this game is” review and grade. If all these reviews were aimed towards those who were fans of SAO, the grades would be higher, probably between 75 and 85 instead of 65-75, which is why my rating of Hollow Realization will sit at a decent 8.2 for those who would get the game because they like SAO. Those who don’t should stay away.

I know there won't be a lot of people who put this game highly, and an 8.2 is good but not great, but for me this has already became one of my 3 most favorite Switch games, and I have more than 50. I still have many more hours into the game and I'm pretty sure that it's going to eventually become one of my most favorite video games of all tine, and that is not something that I say often.

Graphics: 10/10
Animation: 10/10
GRAPHICS: 10/10
Voice Acting: 9/10
Music: 7/10
SOUND: 8/10
Story: 4/10
Quests: 8/10
Gameplay: 9/10
STORY: 7/10
Grinding: 9/1 0
Replayability: 4/10
ADDICTIVENESS: 7/10
Exploration: 8/10
Customization: 10/10
Weapons: 10/10
Party: 9/10
Behaviors: 10/10
DEPTH: 9/10
OVERALL: 8.2