Developer DIMPS Corporation and publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment’s latest cooperative action-adventure title ‘SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream’ is the closest we’ve gotten to a true SWORD ART ONLINE (“SAO”) experience. All though for me, it’s more like as close as we’ll ever get to a modern-day multiplayer ‘.hack’—because this game sure feels like it! Down to the weight of the game’s twenty plus cast members, a variety of play styles across the game’s five classes, and big baddies galore (mostly, anyway). Also, it’s the first Bandai game that’s let me change the display language directly from the game—very happy about that one!
Tangent aside, SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream marks the ten years or so of SAO games by the publisher. And this time, players can play as more than just the titular chubby-cheeked Kirito and his friends, but also some villains from chapters and seasons prior. Unlike every other console SAO production, this one is primarily online-focused, with a majority of your progression being tied to an online connection. Players will progress and procure weapons and items across Fractured Daydream’s single player and online modes, and I spent the last two months going through the game at a brisk pace before doing a bunch of grinding towards the end of the game’s first season pass to get an idea of how things have been working out for Kirito and company’s latest bizarre adventure.
Time for a full dive into a fun action game with quite a few caveats!
A Surreal Daydream
SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream starts us off with Kirito hanging out with someone he really shouldn’t be with—the villain of the Underworld, the Administrator. And yet, here she is, school uniform and all, side-by-side with little baby face here walking to school… Until she tries to draw first blood. A sword battle ensues on the bridge to school, waking up Kirito to the fact that things are very amiss. The facade collapses quite literally and before we know it, the Administrator and Kirito are in the fields of the original Sword Art Online MMO game. A truce is drawn and the two set out to find out just what the heck is going on, meeting friends (new and old), dead people, and scumbags.
As the player progresses through the game’s five chapters, they’ll slowly build up their roster of playable characters for the game’s online multiplayer mode. And as I mentioned earlier, across the game’s 21 playable base game characters, each one has their own play style based around their class and weapon. I cannot remember if the last SAO title, Last Recollection, allowed players to change a character’s preferred weapon but you can’t do that here. All that’s available for players is accessories found in dungeons and better weapons—of which you’ll be collecting lots of.
Getting into the nitty gritty of things, let’s talk about the character controller. Sword Art Online Fractured Daydream sets the camera justified left to the playable character all the while giving you near full 3D control of the viewable field. Each character has three skills plus an ultimate along with weak and strong attacks tied to the X and Y buttons. Both are capable of charge ups and can be chained with certain combo configurations. And then there are character-specific enhancements that can be toggled with the left bumper. Player movement is also tied to the class, with some units having heavier footprints than others, though thankfully there is no stamina system. Some characters can even fly! Mostly the girls—unfortunately the only guy flier is one of the gross-er characters from the series, but I’ll touch on that in a moment.
On a technical level, Fractured Daydream is simpler than Last Recollection since move sets are cut down a bit and there’s less weapons. But that isn’t a bad thing because the game does a good job of differentiating all the playable characters, not just through skillsets but also specific gameplay traits. Take for example Lisbeth, the pink-haired blacksmith with a mace and shield—she is primarily an attacker, but her charged normal attack allows her to charge forward with an attack that not only flinches enemies but also “guards” against incoming attacks. Everyone’s beloved fast fighting, purple-haired genki girl Yuuki shares Kirito’s kit but she doubles his speed and has a stance that ups the damage of her attacks at the expense of health. There are also the likes of Eugio, the young blonde man Kirito meets when he fell into a coma after an umbrella fight gone wrong. He can freeze enemies with his skills and that can come incredibly handy when filling stagger metres on bosses as the stagger will continuously build up and only countdown once the freeze status dispels.
Put together all these characters into 20-player mayhem and you’ll find that everyone has a useful role to play. Stuns and poisons will be handed out like candy, which is a good thing because Fractured Daydream will insist on spawning hordes of baddies at every given opportunity. Seriously, be it solo or online play, multiple objectives will have players play defence while scores of baddies repeatedly spawn and fire off wide-reaching area of effects (“AOEs”) in an attempt to knock down everyone and everything. But thanks to the player count, you’ll generally have little trouble clearing any co-op quest currently available (well, if you can find a match, but I’ll cover that shortly). Players can also take part in “chain attacks” that, while I don’t quite remember how they’re triggered, simply pushing in the right stick when your turn is prompted to deliver a massive attack unto the enemy that is then passed onto the next player to pull off. Pretty neat stuff.
Fractured Daydream’s combat really comes down to positioning and firing off attacks relative to the character’s attack patterns. Some characters end up feeling great to control but others end up being a struggle, particularly the gun-users like Death Gun and Fuka. SAO fans will know Fuka from the spin-off series ‘Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online’ series and yes, the short pink-donned protagonist LLENN is here too, but again more on that in a bit. Ranged weapon users like Death Gun have it tough because their guns have short range limits and more often than not, you’ll be fighting the camera trying to get foliage out of your view. Fuka, the grenade launcher-wielding runt, also has an issue where she’d technically be ideal for AoE damage… Except her attacks have a tiny and very specific hitbox that only seem to inflict flinch much less damage when either directly landing on a baddie or very close to ’em.
The best characters were easily the ones I’d never consider first picks, like Argo. Her kits allows players to keep positive frames on enemies at all times, all the while offering wide-ranging attacks and a fast base character speed to boot. Perfect for keeping the game’s rather limited enemy variety circled up and primed for thrashes.
Fractured Worlds, In the Literal Sense
Besides character kits, Fractured Daydream’s problems don’t take all too long to rear their ugly heads. Among the more noticeable ones would be the game’s level and world design, clearly built for the game’s free roam and cooperative quest modes and then hastily “cut down” to accommodate the game’s single player story mode. And by “cut down”, I mean poorly setting up invisible barriers around the mission zone and littering it with mission objectives, despite the in-game map showing you just the whole world map and not clearly defining the mission zone’s boundaries in any way.
And you know what, I could put up with this if it weren’t for the fact that the single player mode offers unlockable costumes and name cards that are scattered about in the game’s five chapters. The locations of these unlockables are but a daydream, forcing you to wander the map’s boundaries until you spot a floating byte or the boss that drops the costume. Some mission zones are very large, making you waste minutes running or flying past empty buildings and shrubberies in hopes that you’ll eventually spot the hellhound carrying what you want. Although, for what it’s worth, the draw distance is massive even on console and it’s neat seeing fellow players blowing things up way over yonder.
Fractured Daydream’s levels also effectively have zero interactibles beyond some brief platforming challenges and objective markers. There is nothing in the environment that players could use to their advantage (nor find themselves in detriment of) in this game, and coupled with a lack of Point of Interests quickly build up a repetition that is not very fun. And as I mentioned, this game only has a handful of baddies, namely spiders, lizardmen, automatons with swords and guns (good news Fatal Bullet players, headshots from these guys are not OHKOs!), and recoloured versions of them but with more health and the same attack scripts. Once you’ve read an enemy’s behaviour once, you can deduce future variants of them without issue for better or worse, but that’s when boredom begins to settle in. Sadly, Last Recollection also had the same issues and it’s a shame DIMPS couldn’t make the maps more interesting—especially since Sparking! Zero (same developer!) has plenty of things that collapse and explode in its maps.
While I’m covering the single player mode, I may as well cover the story too. Fractured Daydream takes place across multiple SAO worlds due to a new functionality test “Galaxy” gone wrong. Kirito and the Administrator are stuck, the former unable to log out and the latter supposedly being dealt with or dead (not too sure about this one, I never got past the part of the show where Asuna somehow fooled an entire government organisation and gains access to an off-sea research facility with a wig and some faked facial data). The two eventually meet the game’s original characters, two young ladies by the names of Fuuka and Neige, defending them from a group of player killers. Some talks later and the pair agree to help both find the test room that would help close down this rogue system once and for all.
So, over the course of the game’s twenty or so missions (side missions not included), the SAO cast will be split up, meeting new faces, dead ones, and ones that are traumatic to the right people. Fractured Daydream also acknowledges these meet ups for the first time in the video game project’s history as far as I can tell, meaning poor Asuna also gets to talk to her dead friend (and SAO favourite of mine) Yuuki again. Yuuki has always appeared in these games, likely because she’s a popular character, but I can’t imagine meeting up with dead mates and reunions with murderers and sex offenders is good for anyone’s mental health. But the cast persists, and the righteous ones do a good job of reminding the scumbags of the series whose blade their necks will meet if they cross the wrong line. Beyond that, the story itself isn’t really anything notable. Arguably two of the game’s chapters are filler and the original characters don’t get much in the way of screen time for me to care about ’em in any capacity.
Besides the negative interactions, there are good ones among the cast and if you’re an SAO fan, you can’t go wrong here. There’s a good number of positive interactions be it in story cutscenes and brief chatters in the game’s main menu and character select screen.
Fractured Service Times
I can’t help but feel that Fractured Daydream’s games-as-a-service approach is a bit… Fractured. Don’t get me wrong, there are some positives namely the free battle passes offered alongside paid DLC cosmetics and characters. From what I can tell, every eight weeks will denote a new pass and with it, comes a few name card stuffs, costumes, and currency players can build towards to buy some of the paid cosmetic packs—which is quite fair! But reviewing this game two months in, I can tell you, my good reader, that the servers for this game are as good as dead despite supporting cross platform play. Finding matches for the lower coop rungs takes forever and good luck for anything in-between, ergo you won’t be able to progress through all of them if you simply stick to the North American server.
And while switching servers is easy, your ping will take a massive hit. Enjoy an average of 154 milliseconds of ping as you rubberband all over the place as do the monsters. And it’s not like being in your region guarantees you a stable connection either. I was kicked out of Free Roam quests multiple times over the course of my playthrough through no fault of my own, wasting my time and losing all my drops and battle pass progression to boot. And when I said that Fractured Daydream is connection dependent, I really meant it. Playing offline cuts you off from every aspect of the game besides the story and this includes weapon crafting from the tab over. Worse thing is, if you are doing a story mission and your internet interrupts for whatever reason, you’ll be sent right back to the menu 15 minutes of your life flushed away wandering bland levels for collectibles.
And during my time with the game, I had also noticed that a collaboration event was running alongside the battle pass. However, the “details” button was blanked out and I didn’t really bother looking into it any further until the last week or so. Apparently, this collaboration event offers unlockables via serial codes that were given out over social media posts. Nowhere on the event notice did it mention this and as a result, I’ve apparently missed out on nine weeks of collectibles. Isn’t that just dandy?
But despite all that, when things worked out. When I found matches, I had some good fun running dungeons with folks. There’s something special about watching twenty people unleash explosions all over your screen, a health bar being whittled down faster than pizza leftovers in a family of six, and callouts coming left and right. SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream brings about the chaotic nature of MMOs I really haven’t seen in a long time, especially in casual play, and for all its caveats it’s not a bad cooperative action game—but do mind the fractures. ∎
SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Fun combat system with variety amongst the cast.
- Online coop quests are fun and flashy.
- Good amount of interactivity between cast members.
CONS
- Little mob variety.
- Empty large-scale levels with little signposting or interactables. Story mode cuts these levels down and scatters collectibles about, making them more annoying than fun to find.
- Foliage and the like has a tendency to obscure vision. Some characters, like Deathgun, have it worse off.
- Connectivity issues.
