Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization is Coming to PS4 and Vita

Sword Art Online, the popular anime, has a brand new game coming out in the Americas on November 8th, 2016 for the PS4 and PS Vita. The game is called Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization and before jumping into the gameplay, let's cover some of the costs. If you pre-order the digital version, you get a premium theme, Nightwear Costume (Female), Maid Costume (Female), GOD EATER Soma Costume (Male), and the GOD EATER Livie Costume (Female). You can also buy a season pass for the game, giving you access to three DLC packs that include new maps, stages, quests, scenarios, enemies, characters, and boss fights. The season pass alone will be priced at $24.99 USD and you can pre-order the Digital Deluxe Version of the game for $84.99 USD, which comes with the base game, the digital pre-order bonuses, and the Season Pass.



It's a little odd to me that the game is $60, the Season Pass alone is $24.99, and the Digital Deluxe Version is $84.99. All they did was add the two numbers together. Normally, games will offer some sort of deal when you could get everything included and only pay half the price for the Season Pass if you bought it as a bundle. By making the cost of the bundle the exact same price as the two individual items added together, people can easily just want and see if the DLC is bad before buying the Season Pass. There's no reason for a player to buy the Season Pass right away, unless they just have a lot of faith in the game.

Being a huge fan of the Sword Art Online anime, I'm pretty disappointed with how this game looks. It's very slow and enemies don't really seem to react to much. With all of the crazy combat you see in the show, you would think they would give the enemies quite a lot more movement and dynamic attack patterns. In addition to the sleepy enemies, you have no customization of your character. You only see the characters from the show, and aren't allowed to make your own player model. Honestly, the anime is about an MMO game that takes place in Aincrad. Instead of making games to expand upon the storyline, just make an MMO that's identical to the game in terms of location and playstyle. People would flock to it and it would have a ton of potential. From what I've seen of Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, I think the anime would do a much better job telling the story than this new game will. To me, the game looks really lazy, but hopefully things improve with time because I really do enjoy the series.