In Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, you play as an original character playing a shooter MMO set in the world of GGO. Here is our full Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet Review.
Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet is developed by Dimps and published by Bandai Namco. It was released on February 8, 2018, for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The Complete Edition included all the DLC and was released later on the Nintendo Switch.
I was hesitant to start this game, not having finished the 1st season of the anime yet. I did sadly get some minor spoilers about the anime, but that was expected. Something I didn’t expect was that this was an original game with its own story… kinda. They shoehorn in the anime storyline somewhere very late in the game as an introduction to Kirito-mode.
The game follows a character that you can create yourself in the MMO Gun Gale Online, so you are playing a game within a game. You get introduced to the game by a “real-life” childhood friend, but early on you will meet a few new faces exclusive to the game that drive its story… and Kirito’s crew, this one has a few ups and downs for me. I like Kirito, but I wish they would just give to spotlight to other characters in this game, like, Asuna got fully downgraded to a clothing maker.
Happy to see the characters of the early episodes of SAO return, but it does feel a little bit like a spoiler in some ways, especially because they are not even in the anime of the 1st season after their introduction, well, most of them at least. Playing this game made me realize this is a Haram fantasy anime. Everyone Wants Kirito, except me, I want more original games.
The gameplay is fine, but there is way too much explanation needed and I kinda wanted to close the game early on already due to how slow its start is, and the speed doesn’t really get any better. The game is padded out by some type of visual novel side stories that I rather would have seen happen as an actual quest because there are just way too many of the same quests that you need to just do over and over again without any real purpose.
I think I got carpal tunnel syndrome from the shooting because that was awful. If you play with pistols or an AR that only shoots 3 bullets, you see yourself spamming the shoot button over and over and over and over again… not something fun that I expected at the start, because the gun, in the beginning, had like an auto fire, something, not all guns have.
Every dungeon felt exactly the same but with a new layout. Don’t get me wrong, they were fun to do to a certain extent, but after a while of going through the same thing over and over again I got bored, mainly because the whole game is the same thing in different locations, but the only thing that visually changes is the overworld itself, not the dungeons. The same can be said about the enemies. Want new enemies? sure, just give the same enemy a new color, up the level, and change the name and here you go… So not really a new type of enemy.
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