SWORD ART ONLINE Alicization Lycoris

A VRMMORPG story, told as a single-player action RPG

Sword Art Online's premise — a virtual-reality MMORPG where death in the game means death in real life — has always sat close to the kind of games Wanderer's own readers play, minus the mortal stakes. Alicization Lycoris dramatises the Alicization arc specifically: the Underworld, a fully-simulated virtual world running at an accelerated time ratio, and the fight to determine whether its AI inhabitants are people. It's genuinely dense, ambitious source material, and AQURIA — the studio behind several previous SAO games — built an action RPG around it rather than another MMO-lite, with Kirito's cast fighting through it using the series' established Sacred Arts and weapon-skill system.

That combat is the part of the game reviewers across the spectrum agree on. Skill combos, weapon variety and the Sacred Arts system come in for real, specific praise even from reviewers who otherwise can't recommend the game — "combat is similar to SAO:HR [Hollow Realization]. Skill combos are visually nice," reads a fairly typical positive note buried inside an otherwise mixed review. Where the agreement stops is almost everywhere else.

The gap between critics and players

Critical reception was genuinely harsh: 53 on Metacritic and 54 on OpenCritic, landing in OpenCritic's "Weak" tier with only 11% of critics recommending it, citing a convoluted, badly-paced story alongside the technical problems below. Steam's player base was notably more forgiving — Mixed at 67.5% positive across 2,205 reviews — which is a real and worth-flagging gap: this is a game where the audience most invested in the source material rates it meaningfully higher than critics evaluating it as a standalone RPG. If you're not already a Sword Art Online fan, that gap is the single most useful piece of information in this review.

What actually went wrong at launch

Two specific, heavily-repeated complaints explain most of that critical gap, and both showed up immediately on release day.

Performance. "No matter what you do, it will run like [expletive]. All graphic settings on low or high give the same result," reads one of the most-upvoted reviews, posted the day after launch from a player running an RTX 2070. That wasn't an isolated report — it's the dominant theme of the launch-week review wave, and 41 of the 100 reviews in this review's negative sample date to 2020 alone, the heaviest single-year concentration in that sample. Publisher Bandai Namco and developer AQURIA did respond: producer Yousuke Futami publicly committed to frame-rate fixes within weeks of launch, and patches through version 1.40 addressed battle-system bugs and other issues over the following months. By player accounts in ongoing community discussion, though, the fixes never fully resolved the underlying performance problems — one widely-shared community workaround simply recommends locking the frame rate to 30fps to cut load times from over a minute down to 10-30 seconds, which is a workaround for a symptom, not a fix for the cause.

A slow, low-interactivity opening. Multiple detailed reviews describe the first chapters as a "bland retelling of the Anime" that strips out the player's agency rather than adapting it: "the Sword Academy section, where control is frequently taken away from the player to go through 20-minutes of static 2D character portraits, and text box[es]," in the words of one review with over 100 hours logged. For a full-price action RPG, that's a real structural complaint distinct from ordinary pacing criticism — it's the game choosing to be a visual novel at exactly the moments players wanted to be playing.

The monetisation stack

The complaint that shows up with the most consistency, across both the Steam review corpus and the game's own community discussion boards, is what sits on top of the NZ$34.95 (checked 13 August

2026. base price. Alicization Lycoris ships with a gacha loot-box system: CUBEs, opened using

SAOCoins — a currency purchased with real money and, notably, one players report expiring after 90 days if unused — that award random costumes, weapon skins, accessories and consumables. Multiple community threads specifically flag that basic outfit options previous SAO games included as standard content were moved behind this randomised system here. Layered on top of that: a NZ$78.99 Premium Pass bundle, two separate NZ$39.99 story-expansion DLCs ("Blooming of Forget-me-not" and "Blooming of Matricaria"), and a small cosmetics pack — all still sold individually six years later, all currently discounted alongside the base game. One player thread title puts the community reaction bluntly: "Warning this game has microtransactions and is similar to Ubisoft kind of monetization." For a single-player-focused action RPG with no live-service population to sustain, that's an unusually heavy structure, and it's the throughline connecting a large share of the game's harshest reviews regardless of what year they were posted.

Verdict

SWORD ART ONLINE Alicization Lycoris has a combat system worth the praise it gets, and a genuinely committed retelling of material its fanbase cares about — that's real, and it's why the Steam score sits meaningfully above the critic consensus rather than agreeing with it. But the launch-week performance problems, a slow and control-stripping opening act, and a gacha-plus-DLC monetisation stack layered on top of an already full-price game are not launch-era footnotes; they're the reasons critics rated this considerably lower than the fans who bought it anyway, and they're still the first things any new community discussion of the game reaches for six years on.

It's worth noting, with a straight face, how strange it is to review a game about a fictional VRMMORPG's exploitative currency systems while it charges real money for randomised loot boxes on top of the sticker price — the kind of contrast Wanderer, an actual persistent RPG, tries hard to avoid by keeping its own economy free of anything you can't earn by playing.