The world of Hollow Realization feels a bit too safe.
“Work smarter, not harder” is something I would have loved to tell the team at Bandai Namco behind Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of smart ideas in this action-based, single-player, faux MMO, but its tangle of gameplay systems feels like a dense pile of stuffing that never gets stitched together into a coherent whole, and its story lacks the urgency and gravity that made the anime great.
Hollow Realization takes place after the main story arcs of the Sword Art Online anime series, and sees its many likeable characters return to a virtual world that’s in many ways reminiscent of Aincrad, where they were once horrifically trapped.
The show’s original premise, where perishing in-game resulted in real-world death, is a setup that immediately introduced tangible stakes and a sense of urgency - two things that Hollow Realization sorely lacks. At first, I enjoyed the fact that the characters weren’t in any immediate danger; I relished the opportunity to see them relax and actually enjoy their game for once, especially given how the opening cinematic strongly implies that the other shoe is going to drop momentarily anyway. But after dozens of hours of casual camaraderie over farming runs and item shop bargain-hunting I grew impatient with the story’s snail-like pacing and relentless cheer - both of which betray what made the anime great.
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I grew impatient with the story’s snail-like pacing and relentless cheer.
I certainly can’t fault the amount of story content though, which is both fully voiced and quite plentiful - so much so that 50 hours wasn’t enough for me to see its completion. It’s the style and frequency with which the story is presented, though, that makes it feel obtrusive. At times, it felt like I could barely play for more than an hour without being stopped for long stretches to watch mostly static character portraits talk at each other. I get it: they’re all friends. That doesn’t mean I want to get roped into a 15-minute-long dialogue scene over what kind of food one of them wants sell at her in-game shop. My pre-existing affection for the characters was enough to keep my attention initially, but before long my event log was clogged up from pending conversation events with party members - which I dutifully started ignoring so I could get back out into the field.
Out in Hollow Realization’s large and interconnected combat zones, enemies are plentiful, as are randomly occurring events for you to participate in for extra XP and sometimes a shot at a rare high-level monster. Though the events are mostly simple “kill X of these” quests, they gave shape to my exploration and kept me coming back to areas I’d already cleared in search for better item drops. That focus on rewards became vital as I opened up the six main areas, each of which house 10 to 20 roamable areas. It’s an overwhelming amount of real estate to cover, which adds quite a bit to the fake MMO veneer.
More Than Mashing
The one-button combat seems simplistic at first, but there are a number of little nuances that prove worthy of the time required to master them. Properly timing the last hit of an attack chain gets you a sizeable damage bonus, while perfectly parrying incoming attacks stuns your attacker while replenishing your mana, giving you the resources and time you need to press the offensive. Landing a special attack within a certain window while an enemy recovers from using one of theirs temporarily weakens them, opening them up to bonus damage from all sources. Moments like this are perfect opportunities for commanding your AI party members to coordinate their assaults with yours. Communication goes both ways too; they’ll prompt you to switch places with them, attack in unison with them, and more. It’s even possible to remind them to heal, ask them to draw aggro, even take evasive maneuvers when you see a big AoE attack inbound. Leveraging all of these little elements properly allows you to efficiently down groups of enemies well above your level, and perfectly reading a powerful foe’s attacks and shutting them down while building a long, damaging combo feels really satisfying.
The big area bosses simultaneously represent the zenith of Hollow Realization’s combat systems, and the most concentrated expression of what’s wrong with them. They’re hulking in size, and their multi-formed assaults require you to work with three other parties of AI-controlled adventurers just to have a chance. This would be exciting if those other parties had half a brain, but more often than not they get themselves wiped in the opening minutes of what sometimes amounts to a 20-minute battle. Finishing the fight on the strength of your party alone is certainly doable with the right tactics/gear, but the over-zealous auto-targeting system doesn’t help either. Finding a short window of opportunity to attack a specific limb of a boss only for your character to sail past it to hit another definitely made certain bosses more frustrating than they needed to be.
What Does It All Mean?
Underpinning the action are a group of systems designed to both simulate many elements of MMORPGs and to provide ways for you to build your relationships (romantic and otherwise) with your party members, and even random NPCs. Here especially, it’s clear that the developers put a tremendous amount of effort into the nuts and bolts of Hollow Realization - a fact that makes the lukewarm results all the more disappointing. There’s plenty of complexity here, but very little of it makes the experience significantly deeper.
For instance, by complimenting your comrades in battle you can encourage certain personality traits in them which, over time, affects the frequency with which they perform certain types of actions and a slew of other stats and effects. Right there, I’ve just given you about as much of an explanation as the game gave me. Even after figuring some of it out contextually and checking both Japanese and American message boards, no one seems to fully understand what all of these icons and stats actually mean. As a habitual min-maxxer, I was as surprised at my inability to fully comprehend this system as I was that my inability to do so wound up being irrelevant to success.
Skill trees and the oddly nuanced blacksmithing system suffer a similar problem: their menus are a mess of icons, numbers and abbreviations with little to no explanation. The description for the skill “Decoy” reads:
“(Mob)Aggro Down (CRT) -10% / 30sec. Increase Aggro”
What?! I know what a mob is. I know what aggro means. I can surmise that CRT means “crit,” and not “cathode ray tube.” But what is the supposed relationship between them here? Do my critical hits lower the target’s aggro while this skill is active? Do they just generate less aggro? If so, why does it say “Increase Aggro?” I ran a heavy crit build and I never noticed any difference in monster aggro after popping Decoy, so I guess the fine details are irrelevant anyway? I love getting lost in the minutiae of RPG skill trees, but not if they’re unintelligible and ultimately meaningless.
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I felt like I was only passively participating in the development of my character.
At least the different passive skills of the many blacksmiths you can find have an accompanying legend to tell you what they’re for, but that only revealed how needlessly opaque the system is in the first place. “Intuition” and “Eye For Detail” aren’t really great descriptors for what’s actually just a bonus crafting success chance. I ended up simply sticking with what I was able to piece together and ignoring the rest, which (despite being more than sufficient for me to succeed) left me feeling like I was only passively participating in the development of my character and his comrades.
Even after considering these shortcomings, I still appreciated the lengths the developers went towards imbuing Hollow Realization with the kind of complexity that’s usually limited to MMOs, but it also makes it all the stranger that the actual online portion is so limited. You can form a party of up to four human players online and fight super-high-level named mobs without all the story interruptions, but to do so you have to quit out of your single-player game completely and then launch multiplayer from the main menu. There was an interesting opportunity here to seamlessly blur the line between real and simulated MMOs, but Hollow Realization sadly misses it.
The Verdict
A lot of effort was clearly put into Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, because almost every aspect of its gameplay has an underlying set of properties and nuances to come to grips with. While I usually love that kind of complexity, here it rarely felt meaningful or even coherent. Paired with a story that lacks the stakes and urgency of the source material, it leaves Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization feeling pretty tepid aside from its enjoyable combat.
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