Sword Art Online: Alicization Rising Steel is Better Than I Thought it’d be.

People keep telling me to play new Sword Art Online games – but honestly, I don’t even know how many there are. I think Sword Art Online: Alicization Rising Steel is the newest mobile Sword Art game, right? Well I guess it doesn’t really matter as that’s what I ultimately ended up downloading and playing.
With over 53,000 reviews, and the general review being at around 4.4 on the Google Play Store, I was pretty excited. That many people couldn’t be wrong, right? Thankfully that turned out to be the case. Man, I was surprised by how good this game ended up turning out.
Like, no, this game isn’t nearly close to being the best mobile RPG I’ve ever played, but I was pleasantly surprised by how accurate it is to the latest season – or, two seasons of the Anime series.
You take on the role of Kirito.. or you play with Kirito.. which sounds weird but I’m being sincere here – I think we’re kind of like an unnamed person accompanying both Kirito and Eugeo through the game.. but at the same time we’re not really there. It’s weird. But it works.
So, Rising Steel as I’m sure you’ve no doubt guessed is actually based on the Alicization arc in Sword Art Online. However, while it does follow through with the story from the original arc, Rising Steel actually contains additional original content that was developed exclusively for the game.
Whether or not that’s going to have a positive affect on how much enjoyment you get out of it remains to be seen, but more content is never bad. Especially if it’s canon content.

Graphically, the game looks pretty damn good. The character models themselves, both in cutscenes and battle alike – and even when just exploring the varied different environments are incredibly accurate and faithful to the Anime.
I’ll admit that the movements are a little jarring and disjointed at times and lack a certain level of fluidity, but it’s beautifully crafted. While exploring you don’t have the ability to freely roam, instead, you move along either horizontally through the area, or vertically to move to a different level of the area you’re exploring.
There are random encounters while out in the field, and every field you explore results in a boss battle – from what I could tell those battles consisted of more or less a larger, stronger version of what you’d been fighting.
There are plenty of mechanics in battle, but it consisted more or less of choosing whatever the enemy was weak against and building up our gauge to utilize a special super duper mega powerful combo attack. I know that’s not what it’s called, but I feel like that’s generally what it is in every game that has this kind of system.
The skill effects you’re given access to are all very flashy – while the description page claims that the battles are as flashy as they are in the Anime, and trust me.. they’re not, they are in fact very aesthetically appealing to watch. Even if I did find myself skipping them 90% of the time.

It was really interesting watching the story play out. Admittedly I’ve only played for a few hours so far, but I wanted to get this out now as I’ll be going on a small vacation next Friday and won’t have time to play it for the next couple weeks. Thus.. I wanted to talk about it while the information is fresh on my mind.
While there are fun little callbacks to Sword Art Online and Aincrad, there are also characters from Alfheim Online and Gun Gale Online making appearances as well. This allows for you to recruit quite a team!
This is probably the best looking Sword Art Online game I’ve played on Mobile thus far, and I’m excited to see where it goes and how much of the Alicization arc is covered.