Started playing ソードアート・オンライン ラスト リコレクション bc it’s 60% off on Steam (publisher sale. Can get even cheaper via Fanatical), and it turns out my computer can actually handle it.
As someone who’s played and beaten almost all the SAO games, I think this one has the best new player experience out of all of them. The onboarding is never info overload, the mechanics are explained with decent clarity. It’s divided up btwn story parts, in a way that doesn’t feel like they go on forever (in older SAO games sometimes you’d just be stuck in story for a good 30-45 minutes), etc.
Combat (and the UI in general) is greatly simplified (some feel too simplified), and most of the language isn’t overwhelming for me anymore. Tho I occasionally get lost in the longer mechanics tutorials, but I suppose I could always reread them. Personally I’m happy for simplified combat, bc mechanics are not why I’m playing the game.
If you’ve played the Alicization game, it’s definitely the successor to that, but so far the story is much better so far, not to mention you’re not playing through source material. Plus the setting is the - largely unexplored by the reader - 暗黒界 / Dark Territory. It also helps that you’re starting out with a full cast + (some) abilities and decent weapons. So you can play as your fav character from the very start.
I’ve been trying to speak along to as much of the story parts as I can. Some of the speech patterns are familiar, and others are not exactly what I’d expect, but so far the story language is easier than Alicization. I’m only 4 hrs in though, so that could definitely change.
Otherwise not quite playing, but I started watching the story scenes for 空の軌跡 FC again. I can mostly get the language in realtime, with some lookups, but I’m not sure I totally follow the overarching plot (it doesn’t help that I keep pausing for months and then picking it up again). If I had a Vita I’d play through it, but I only have the original PC version, which doesn’t have the voices (but does have the old school character portraits), and anyway the story is more my interest.
For once it seems like they’ve offloaded all the fan service to the DLC - which is a really nice change for me (tho lots of reviewers seem grumpy about it)
