Choose Flight, not Fight | Sword Art Online: Lost Song Review

The latest attempt at bringing the video game-centric Japanese anime Sword Art Online to the gaming world introduces an interesting and fun new flight ability and some solid multiplayer, however, none of this outweighs the repetitive battles and bland story.

The game is set within the fictional MMO of ALfheim Online, the same MMO that the characters’ play in the second half of the first season of the anime. Lost Song does away with the weak story from the anime and decides to weave its own. As a new expansion called Svart ALfheim opens up for the MMO, Kirito and his gang jump in to complete the new content. When a new group of players called Shamrock is determined to clear the new content first, no matter what the cost, it is up to Kirito and his team to unravel the mystery that surrounds it all. Sadly, this is a bland and predictable new tale that squanders the opportunity of being able to tell their own unique tale disregarding the one from the source material. Fortunately, throughout Lost Song there are a lot of side stories to complete regarding some of the different characters and even most of these have a more intriguing narrative than the main story and are well worth a look into.

The Svart ALfheim expansion is made up of four different islands to explore, each including their own unique landscapes, although the environments vary from island to island, they are quite bland looking and don’t offer much more than just mostly open areas to traverse between dungeons. The ability to fly that is introduced in Lost Song is well-crafted and soaring atop icy mountains is quite satisfying. Throughout the first half of the campaign there is an altitude limit set for each map, restricting your ability to fly wherever you want, although as the game opens up flying becomes increasingly more rewarding.

Your main aim throughout each of the island locations is to clear out dungeons that are sparingly spread across each of the environments all while fighting countless enemies. At the beginning this sequence was quite fun, using different abilities, different weapons, magic and different skills to dispatch the small handful of enemy types and huge boss monsters, although as I got further into the game, I felt as if I was doing the same thing over and over again. Fighting the same looking enemies with a new coat of paint in the same looking environments. Each quest has you working your way through plain dungeons that all start to merge together, pulling some levers and killing some monsters on your way to fight a bigger monster which sadly, is often just bigger versions of the monsters you have been dealing with before. Sometimes you will take on unique bosses which have some pretty cool designs especially in the island clearing boss fights but sadly I even fought these guys later on with a new coat of paint. On the odd occasion, the boss battles kick you out of the dungeon and will have you soaring the open skies to take down huge flying monsters and as cool as this was, it brought along a whole new set of problems with the weak camera coming to the forefront, that would often leave me feeling disoriented as it quickly spun around as I lost sight of my gargantuan target.

The controls of Lost Song are easy to understand making it simple for newcomers to jump into the JRPG format, the ability to switch between weapon play and magic allows for some smooth combat although not as fluid as it could have been, restricting the combat by having a magic stance and a weapon stance, forcing you to switch between the two to use the different abilities. Combat is quite simple, using a barrage of heavy and light attacks like most other action games, although with the addition of magic abilities and different heavy hitting weapon skills that can be unlocked and used during combat keeps the combat engaging and on the surface seems quite deep. You can play as over a dozen different characters throughout the campaign of Lost Song switching out party members as you wish and using any combination of the characters to take on each quest, personally, I used the dual-wielding Kirito for most of my time but using the varied characters different weapons and skillsets was fun to play around with. You can even create your own player to use throughout the story and multiplayer.

Lost Song includes a home base of sorts in the way of a township, here you can accept new quests, change your party, go online, buy and upgrade new gear and socialize with your teammates. Although the RPG mechanics of Lost Song aren’t all that deep, in this home world you are able to equip unique gear that give you buffs as well as change and upgrade your weapons to inflict more damage. Side Quests and Extra Quests can also be picked up here, extra quests will challenge you to duke it out with old bosses and powerful enemies whereas as the more mundane side quests are restricted merely to gathering resources from killing enemies and killing more enemies. Joining the fun multiplayer is also located within this town and this is where you can undergo PvP duels or team up with friends to take on quests which are both some of the stronger points of the game.

The Sword Art Online franchise holds the perfect footing to create an excellent, deep, story-driven JRPG that we see in the anime. However, the ALfheim Online attempt here is anything but, a predictable and weak story partnered with some originally fun combat that sadly gets repetitive way too quickly mars the fun flight ability, stronger side stories and good multiplayer. Despite the game not being a horrible entry into the franchise, it certainly isn’t a JRPG that I will remember for years to come.

This review is based on a review copy of the PS4 version of Sword Art Online: Lost Song which is published by Bandai Namco Games and developed by Artdink.