In Sword Art Online: Lost Song, you step into Kirito’s shows and go on an adventure in Alfheim, here he meets characters from the anime but also original new friends. Here is our full Sword Art Online: Lost Song Review.
Sword Art Online: Lost Song is developed by Artdink and published by Bandai Namco. It was released on in 2015, for PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4. In 2018 the game would release for PC on Steam.
The story follows Kirito while he tries to complete the game… Yes, that’s everything. There are some subplots going on with Rain, Seven, and the guild Seven owns, but that story was super underwhelming and didn’t give me really any reason to care in any way other than to push the story along at times. There is not really any evil we are fighting against but you do battle against the clock because Seven’s guild wants just like Kirito to finish the game 1st, but there isn’t really any tension or battling going on because Seven becomes friends with Kirito pretty early on.
they totally changed the story of the 2nd half of the 1st season, and while the story is original, they somehow managed to make it even worse than the fairy dance arc in the anime. There are even characters like Sinon, who got introduced in the 2nd season but there isn’t really any explanation other than them saying “oh yeah we met EVERYONE in SAO… even though they were never there in the anime. Even characters like Recon got more screen time here than in SAO season 2… A character I didn’t care about back then and even less now due to how they portrayed him here.
Kirito still is the all-knowing guy, but unlike the anime where it builds stuff up and you kinda see him learn about some things, here he just randomly spouts stuff out without any pre-established text or info. It kinda goes against how he is in the anime where it clearly shows or explains things he comes up with, like what happened on floor 75 in the 1st half of the SAO anime.
It somehow feels like they made this game’s story based on just reading a small bit of the introduction on the SAO wiki page, every character comes from the SAO game, even the characters that got introduced after. They somehow managed to butcher most of the pre-existing stories, especially the Zekken/Yuuki arc from season 2. In my review of season 2 of SAO, I’ve said multiple times how it’s the best part of the whole season due to the emotion behind it. Somehow they managed to fully strip the importance of it and made it more of a small obstacle for them to talk about.
Most of the story is being told in “visual-novel” style with just a bunch of text and character art, a bit boring in my opinion, but at least we got a few nice drawn art pieces at times in between some bits that were happening. I think there were only about 5 actual 3D animated cutscenes, and they were absolutely stunning and made the visual novel style seem even worse than it already was. There are actually also a bunch of side stories that reward you with some items or outfits for characters, some tied close into the anime story… as I told before about Yuuki…
the combat and controls are forgettable and annoying to use, I played for about 45 minutes on the 1st day but ran out of time and when I played the next day I remembered absolutely 0 of how to control anything. This was a bit annoying at times, but when I finally did really get the hang of it, the gameplay felt actually pretty great around the middle of the game, but of course, this came with some downsides.
pretty early on you need to defeat some strong lizard guardian, dodging works terribly and he is way too overpowered. The game tells you to get stronger… but doesn’t tell you how. Looking at the achievements in steam, more than 60% of the people already dropped off at this point. Here I felt like the gameplay was more in line with a souls-like/hack n slash game than an actual action adventure game. Kirito doesn’t feel like the strong character he actually is, his powers are just lacking in both strength and the visual epicness of his skills.
I ended up lowering the difficulty to easy somewhere when the enemies started to hit level 380, not because it was getting necessary harder, but more because the bosses became 15-minute damage sponges. It just became an annoyance and wanted to get over it at that point and not spend 15 to 25 minutes just hitting the bosses over and over again. the difficulty didn’t change anything other than give the bosses less health, this was actually pretty nice and I started the game a lot more as a chilled-out experience.
This game looks like a PlayStation 2 game, the world feels empty and ugly. The only things that look alright are the enemies and characters, but even the characters apart from the main ones look generic. The game had the same few bosses and enemies that just get another color to reskin and give it a new name, and they were not really that original either. Other than the bigger bosses, most of the bosses just got annoying and became my main reason for lowering my difficulty to easy.
Another thing I hated was the camera angle. At the main city, the camera is a bit too close to the character, got pretty annoyed by it early on already and that kept on throughout the whole game, but nearing the end this problem expanded to enemies as well due to how they moved. It was just a bit of a mess at times that could have been resolved by just putting the camera back a tiny bit.
after about 20 hours and after I completed the story, I had kinda seen it all. I did go for some extra easy-to-get achievements, but to get out of my way to grind things felt like it was just too much work. For the $4 I paid for it, I’m actually pretty happy, but if the game would be anything more than $10, I would not have bought it.
It might sound like I’m totally bashing the game, and I totally am, but in the end, I actually don’t regret playing the game as much as I did. Sure, the gameplay was repetitive, the flying was awful, it looked like a PS2 game with its world (and there are only 4 worlds btw that aren’t even that good), and they butchered the story, but I still had some amount of fun non the less even losing sight of time and playing until 4 am on both days that I played. And my final point is fan service, it was great, you could play with every girl in a bikini.
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