I have followed the Sword Art Online games more than is healthy for someone with a wide variety of games I want to play, but Sword Art Online: Fractured Daydream grabbed me instantly. The trailer of the reveal and my mixed reactions to Sword Art Online Last Recollection made me skeptical of the series moving forward. Even though I was skeptical, I tried it at Pax West 2024 and was hooked on playing the game. Dimps was the developer of Fatal Bullet and I figured the gun gameplay was good, but what I wasn’t expecting was how many of the other characters were great to play as.
The Loop
Sword Art Online: Fractured Daydream has you in four-person parties where you select a character from a list of roles. It is important to choose a diverse party for the best party builds. You have fighters, support characters, rogues, rangers, mages, and tanks. The goal of the game ultimately in the two maps we had access to in the network test was to have the highest score between the five parties on the map. The first phase is a build-up phase that isolates the parties into their sections of the map. They are given an objective, which can be defeating enemy bases or defeating certain enemies. Once that is done, a portal opens up that takes you to a much larger section that is combined with all five parties on the map. Defeating enemies in these phases gives you experience points to level up as well as extra drops that increase your base stats. You can also find tough enemies to fight near treasure chests. The harder to defeat the enemy, the better the treasure inside the chest usually is.
The treasure inside these chests are usually mods. A mod is something you can equip to your character that will increase your damage, critical hit chance, health, or other stats. You can get white mods, green mods, blue mods, purple mods, or golden mods. The golden ones have the biggest boost you can grab. Your character can only hold one mod at a time. If you grab a mod, you have to drop the one you are already holding onto your character.
Once you are done with the first section you start the second section with an objective that is usually a giant co-op one that forces all five parties to cooperate on a single thing. A common one I would get is activating a tower while enemies are attacking in full force. You can have players work on helping activate the tower, or defend the other players by defeating the enemies attacking those who are trying to activate the tower. The third and final section opens up once this objective is completed.
A portal opens up and takes you to a boss. For this demo, the boss was a familiar one to those who are fans of the Sword Art Online series, Illfang The Kobold Lord. Your goal is to land the last hit on the boss to get a big boost to your score. The player who gets the last hit will get a focus on their character right as the boss dies. This is also a fun incentive. The final bit of the level ends with a reveal of which party had the highest score.
The second level the network test lets you have access to is the Boss Raid. This level has you start it as level one and you have to defeat enemies around the boss to get experience points. There is a small amount of enemies so you have to make sure you can defeat as many as possible before the players in the other parties do. This has a 20-player mass against one giant enemy that has you fighting to get as many kills as you can to boost your stats before the harder phases start of the boss. Once you get the boss down a health bar or two its next phase begins. This can be tough if you focus so much on the boss the enemies stick around as nobody will be ready for its final phase without some more health and damage.
Focusing the game on fighting and working together with a party you are in, makes this a live service game I would actually play. You are playing PvPvE in a much better way than I was expecting. Rather than you actually going head to head against the enemy players, you are just trying to reach the highest score between all the players. This will be a game I keep my eye on, I hope the full game is as fun as what this play test demonstrated.
SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream is a multiplayer-focused adventure based on the popular SWORD ART ONLINE series that will be released worldwide on October 4, 2024. SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream is available now for digital pre-orders on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
