Sword Art Online: Memory Defrag is an excellent mobile action-rpg that offers small doses of intense action against challenging foes, but fails to provide a real path to success for free-to-play players.
Memory Defrag is an alternate history version of Sword Art Online, one in which the anime universe and video game universe (from the PS4/Vita games) are merged. Though the main story more closely resembles that of the anime and light novels, characters from every iteration of SAO appear in the game, such as Lux from the Girls Ops manga or Seven from the PS4/Vita game SAO: Lost Song. These characters are brought together in mini-stories that constitute the game's events.
The gameplay of Memory Defrag is excellent. With a single finger, players move around the screen with ease, sprinting, dashing, jumping, and dodging. The same finger allows the player to attack, block, parry, unleash special moves, and switch characters. It's a fluid system that plays amazingly well and rarely leaves the player wondering why their character isn't doing what they want. Learning to parry, combo, and chain special attacks can lead to devastating effects and damage to enemies, and failure to do so can likewise end with disaster. It's a system that rewards skill and gives the player a sense of accomplishment when they win.
The best way to learn the system is to play through the single-player story mode, which covers the entire Aincrad arc of SAO, and the beginning of the ALO arc. This lets the player face various mobs and bosses, and get used to the systems in the game. Strangely, though the game has slots for the entire ALO arc, as well as the GGO arc, the single player story for those arcs is not finished, and has not been updated since the game launched in the US this last January.
 |
| Various current extra quests available in the game. The left shows a temporary ranking event, floor clearing survival event, and free 4-star unit event. The right shows an equipment creation event, and two boss/farming events that have been available since the release of the Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale movie. |
Once finished with the single-player story, they can then move to extra quests. These quests are the various events, such as ranking battles (player high-score competitions), story-unlocks (usually to get a free character), floor clearing survival (each character has limited uses across multiple levels), equipment creation (farm equipment for characters), and more. These events provide items for players, short side-stories (such as a new pop-idol game all the characters try, or a wedding competition where all the girls fight for the chance to marry Kirito in ALO), and boss fights. Though the stories are fun and great for SAO fans, it is the boss fights that make the game what it is. All extra events have boss fights that players can go up against either alone, or with up to two other players. These fights range in difficulty, but most challenge players to dodge, chain attacks, and parry at the right moment. Each boss has different animations and attacks, so a player who has perfected combat against one boss might not fair so well against a different one. These fights take anywhere from thirty seconds (if the player does everything right with element-advantage characters) to over six minutes or more. Players will do them many, many times as well, either to increase their score in ranking events (which pit about 200 players against one another in ranking groups) or to farm for item drops (such as armor or upgrade materials). Though it can get repetitive at times, the frequency of events, a new one nearly every week, keeps the action fresh and enjoyable.
Further variation comes from the player's roster. The player will take into each mission up to three characters. These characters wield one of eight weapon types (sword, rapier, dagger, mace, spear, bow, gun, staff) and seven elements (neutral, earth, water, fire, wind, light, dark). Each weapon is good for different types of enemies and have different characteristics. For example, the three ranged weapons cannot block, but have generally high burst damage. The mace is slow, but such characters have massive amounts of HP and can block a lot of attacks, while the dagger user is very fast but can only block one or two hits from a boss. Characters have a set weapon type, so if a character is a mace user, their stats will level to match that. Elements are used to get advantages in combat over other elements (earth>water>fire>wind>earth, light><dark), and can provide bonuses when paired with weapons and armor of the same element as the character.
 |
| Two examples of bosses from the game. On the left, OS Asuna uses her Mother's Rosario SS3. On the right, Nurse Asuna from the cosplay banner (below) parries the griffon's attack, which gives a window to attack, or switch characters with the entering character using an SS3 attack (hence Lizbeth's comment at the top and flashing portraits at the bottom). |
Each character also has three special attacks, and three 'battle skills'. The special attacks usually consist of two standard attacks for the class (such as the piercing dash 'shooting star' nearly every rapier user has, or the healing ability common among staff users) and one character specific super attack (known as an SS3 in game lingo). SS3's vary in effectiveness, and range from OS Asuna's Mother's Rosario (shown above) to original thematic attacks, such as the pop idol version of Sinon whacking an enemy with a microphone. These attacks can also cause special effects, such as reducing enemy defense or self-healing. Battle skills usually increase attack or HP by a set percentage, but sometimes do things such as increasing the combo window (which allows for attack increases when a player is not hit by enemies) when under the effects of a buff. This variation provides a great deal of replay ability and customization when creating rosters for fun or to challenge high scores.
Memory Defrag has one giant negative however. Like every free-to-play game, it has a method of making money - in this case a gacha draw system. It is one of the worst gacha systems I have played, lacking the pseudo-guaranteed rewards many others have with stereotypically bad rates. The game presents banners to the player that will feature certain characters or weapons, such as a fairy tale banner featuring characters dressed as fairy tale characters, or a fire banner featuring fire-element characters only. In each banner, the only four-star units (1-star being common, 4-star being super-rare) will be specific to the banner, but all other characters or weapons will be from the same general pool. The chance of getting a four-star character or weapon is four percent, and there is no guarantee that a player will not pull duplicates. If a player fails to pull a four-star, there is no method to guarantee they will ever get one. It doesn't even have the system games like Fate/Grand Order or Tales of Link have that guarantees certain rarities in multi-pulls. If a player does pull a duplicate character, they get hacking crystals, which allow them to increase a characters maximum level by five, which while useful doesn't feel like adequate compensation in any way. For duplicate weapons, the player can use the weapons, or trade four gacha four-star weapons in for a four star of choice, or upgrade a four-star weapon to five-star status if they have five copies of that same weapon (something nearly impossible for anyone but whales - people who spend large amounts of money on the game).
 |
| Two current banners for the game. The one on the left is the persistent Ordinal Scale banner that has been available for months, while the one on the right is the Cosplay Banner that is currently available through the end of the month. |
This is extremely important because doing well in the game is dependent on character/weapon rarity. Though a player can play and enjoy with three-star rarity characters and weapons, it is much more difficult to complete higher tier bosses, and impossible to compete at the highest level in ranking events. There is a great deal of skill required in Memory Defrag, much more than many other mobile rpgs, but there is a cap to what players can do based on their characters. For example, a three-star character with equivalent weapon might have 3,000 attack power, but a four-star character with equivalent weapon will have 4,500 attack or more. This means that the lower rarity character must attack more and take more time to defeat enemies, capping their score in events, and making some bosses far more difficult. It's a painful reality in a game that has so much skill based action. Free-to-play players either need to get supremely lucky when they pull for characters, or rely on the free four-star's released monthly, which while useful, are universally worse than their paid counterparts.
Sword Art Online Memory Defrag is an excellent game that combines slick skill-based gameplay with detailed 2.5D sprites and environments to create a nearly perfect mobile experience for SAO fans. However, the paid gacha system is one of the worst I have ever seen due to the lack of a safety net and virtual requirement of rarer characters to succeed at the highest levels of the game. It creates a difficult situation that can punish free-to-play players, but doesn't necessarily reward pay-to-play players either. That written, the game provides a unique experience that is satisfying and challenging to play.
Sword Art Online Memory Defrag: 8/10
Note: I have had Memory Defrag since launch in the US, and have played basically every day since. I have put money into the game, and have many four-star characters, but I have many friends who play for free, and I have seen the struggle they have with elements of the game. I consider myself a skilled player, and have finished in the top 10 in my bracket for most ranking events. For reviews of the Sword Art Online anime, click here (Season 1), here (Season 2 and Extra Edition), or here (Ordinal Scale).
0 Yorumlar