I think a really critical part of any gaming experience particularly in a time where instruction manuals are a thing of the distant past, is to introduce new players to the game in a coherent and simple manner. If the controls actually are complicated when they are all eventually revealed, this needs to be done in a slow yet understandable manner. One thing you don't want to do is have a tutorial the likes of the infamous Driver game where almost nobody could make it out of the intro area.
While Sword Art Online is clearly a large game with a reasonably large following, this doesn't mean that everyone that starts to play it is already familiar with the controls and can just blaze through the intro area. This was a problem with Destiny 2 and well, it is also a problem with Sword Art Online.
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First off, what is Sword Art Online? Well apparently it is a wildly popular "light novel" series that was released in Japan and was something that teens and people in their early 20's gravitated towards. I only found that out by looking it up and discovered that it has been around for since 2002 and has maintained some level of popularity, mostly in Japan.
As far as I could tell from the little bit of it that I played, it is an RPG that is action heavy with you controlling one character and the other 2 in your party acting somewhat independently. This seems to me as though it could be fun although the few battles that I encountered were pretty spastic and lacking in me having any sort of control as to what the hell is going on. That's all fine and dandy and this is not the first game of this sort that I have ever encountered. Normally, I can enjoy this sort of thing for a bit provided that it is simplistic enough that I can go in and out of playing it without needing to take notes as far as the control scheme is concerned.
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As far as I could tell, there is a LOT going on on the screen but honestly, you don't need to concern yourself with every little detail and this is good seeing as how I can't imagine that someone actually would be able to do so.
I was thrust straight into some action after intentionally skipping the intro story screen. I regularly do skip the story because I don't actually care what the story is if I don't like the gameplay. I thought the gameplay was fine and simple enough for a dumbo like me to be able to figure out but there was a very glaring issue that prevented me from even getting out of the starting area.
There was a tutorial of sorts that was attempting to you learn the system of striking an enemy just before they attack in order to get critical damage or something like that. This wasn't evident enough for me to ever figure it out and all the while me and the two girls that are with me are just striking the hell out of some buffalo sized something or other that we cannot progress until we take it down.
Dude, I tried everything to give the system whatever it is looking for in order for me to get past this part but nothing I did was working. For people that are already familiar with the litany of game releases with the same title this is probably something they consider to be extremely intuitive and probably were able to do it on the first try. However, seeing as how I have never even heard of any of these games, let alone played through them, I was completely lost and after about 15 minutes of trying and failing to do what the tutorial was demanding of me, I just switched it off.
I may have given up too early and I don't want to pretend as though this is going to be a fair review of the overall game because I saw extremely little of it.
I walked away from this one because man! If you can't even manage to navigate the tutorial how the hell are you going to have fun playing the actual game?
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The game looks good even though for my taste the game was very loud with the constant screaming of your party and the music going on at the same time that is so ubiquitous of Japanese games.
So as far as I am concerned this is a terrible flaw of this game. I am not a top-tier gamer, but I am also not retarded yet I simply couldn't get past this very early section of the game and there wasn't any sort of help available either. I was just stuck in this loop of fighting this sub-boss that is in so many games in order to teach you how to play. It didn't do a very good job of teaching you.
it's literally the first thing you do and this is where I was stuck. You clearly aren't doing any damage and I know that it isn't just me because there is a game streamer with 60,000 followers that was stuck on this exact same thing for around 10 minutes getting just as frustrated as I was. He persevered though, whereas I have zero patience for this sort of thing and threw in the towel. It took someone that does this as a job 12 minutes and lots of "I don't know what the hell is going on" in order to proceed and I'm afraid I just don't have that sort of patience.
Overall this game received "mixed or average" reviews and I can kind of understand why. If a game is this perplexing right out of the gate I think that a lot of people are going to be hard-pressed to even try to get into it.
So that's the 3rd game in a row that I have tried and failed to get into and now I am off to the next one which will likely be the same. It's called Odin's Sphere and it kind of looks like it is exactly the same as this one. haha. I don't really know what to head towards next but as far as this one is concerned, it was a "one and done" for me!