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The world of Sword Art Online is alive on Nintendo Switch! Join Kirito and Eugeo as they explore the underworld to find Eugeo’s elusive sister Alice – and protect the world from the ultimate stress test!
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What’s the worst part about an open world game? your knowledge
Can is doing something – anything but getting stuck in endless cutscenes and boring arguments. The world of the game should make for a great video game: dramatic combat, stylish attacks, pre-built worlds of game rules and terminology. If the system around Kirito is interesting, you can forgive Kirito’s rags as a hero. 6347634 exist8900, they are not. Especially on Nintendo Switch. 6347634 During the first few minutes, you think you’re enjoying a captivating open-world experience. You can explore a large forest around the sleepy village of Rulid. There’s a village where you can get side quests from villagers who hate you, rivers where you can fish (a must for open world games), statues that give you extra experience for hunting certain monsters, and all number of hidden treasure chests. But over time you realize Alicization Lycoris doesn’t want you to explore – it wants you to sit down and read the story. As the story continues, with Kirito and Eugeo attending the Swordsman Academy, the story shifts gears into structured patterns: wake up, go to class, hang out around town until you want to kill an enemy in the fields as the story progresses, Then watch a cutscene where a nobleman plays a fool. Repeat several times. Just when you thought the story would add a wrinkle to the formula, it instead throws you into a series of endless cutscenes with no playable sequences in between. Thankfully, once you’re close to the point of no return, there’s a warning prompt, as you don’t get a chance to balance the cutscenes and the story-mandated battles that follow. 6347634  1000 Worse yet, how many stories have been truncated, going through text on a black screen To wrap up, describe what the characters do in order to make a good story. You could have let us play through Kirito and Eugeo participating in the Sword Academy recruiting them. You could have gotten us through the time Kirito and Eugeo were in prison, and let us make at least one failed escape attempt. But instead, the game is so stubbornly explained with all its lengthy lore and villainous motivation that I feel like I’m just sitting and watching an episode of the anime with a gamepad in hand. 6347634 Now, to be fair,
Alicization Lycoris
does give you the option to skip earlier chapters, especially for those who have already watched the anime or read light novels. But in retrospect, this was already bad design; for starters, why would you want someone to skip an entire section of your game? On the other hand, these chapters also expose players to the many intricate battles in the game. I said “intricate”, but to be clear: the battle is in Alicization Lycoris is a button mash thing. Of course, there are very sophisticated perfect dodge and parry systems that give you the power to do fancy special attacks and combos, and keeping an eye on your enemies for clues can prompt you to master the timing of a parry or a perfect dodge. However, combat will never ask you so much: you just hit the Y button and send your skill. There’s an interesting magic system based on taking time to charge and discharge the element, but it’s cumbersome and not as practical as just hitting the Y button. You can invest points to learn new skills based on different classes, but Kirito won’t be able to equip these new skills until later in the story. You have to play the complex combat system of this open world game the way it wants. Nothing to ask. 6347634 1000 If the game at least looks good, this won’t be so Oops. And, uh…it didn’t. In order to bring this game to the Nintendo Switch, compromises had to be made; when they spoke, their mouths twisted between spongy yawns and shut up, and they didn’t slap their lips. Textures are simple. Loading times are long; part of what makes the constant cutscenes so scary is that each scene has its own loading screen. 6347634 All this focuses on the most insulting part of this game: this full-price retail game has a loot system. Players can spend money to buy in-game currency that lets you (potentially) unlock new clothing components, emotes, or hair dye for your character. It’s just cake; why would a game with a crafting system cripple its own mechanics with loot boxes and cash shops? Why force players to pay to change their in-game hair color? Why make people pay more for such a miserable game? 6347634 1000
1000 is damage to its franchise . You can do a million and one awesome things with a similar concept and give people a world where they can run around like Kirito or Asuna and enjoy virtual worlds, at least it should be an enjoyable experience. Somehow, Alicization Lycoris190304 thinks it is fitting to snatch defeat from the mouth of victory. I want to like this game, I really like it. But as I write this review, I’m glad I don’t have to spend time on it anymore. It’s not at all what I’m supposed to feel from an open world game.
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