Despite the fact that the PS Plus April lineup has yet to be announced by Sony, a leaker by the name of Billbil-kun from French website Dealabs has confirmed two games that are going to be on the list, those being Lords Of The Fallen and Sword Art Online: Fractured Daydream. We all know about Lords… but what is this Daydream game?
Fractured Daydream came out in October 2024 and is the 10th anniversary game of the original anime adaptation of the Sword Art Online manga. It is based in a new system of ALfheim called Galaxia that characters from all across the franchise have been sucked into and the only way to fix the timeline and escape is to kill giant monstrosities. Here’s the original Crunchyroll trailer…
The premise of SAO: Fractured Daydream is that five teams of up to four players have to work together to bring down giant raid bosses while simultaneously competing with the other teams for points. Along with the co-op portion of the game there is a 15-hour long solo story mode that provides context on the world, if that’s more your cup of tea. You can pick from 21 characters originating from other Sword Art Online games that have all been displaced into galaxia and are now forced to work with friends and foes alike.
Now that you understand the basics of the game, you’re probably thinking about whether or not it’s worth picking up. With a 68 percent on metacritic and many complaints of it being a repetitive loop without enough variety in locations, enemies and objectives in co-op it is certainly not an easy choice to make.
Making things worse is a low player count, so long wait times and people often being matched with bots to pad group numbers leading to frustration with bad and uncooperative NPC AI. The game also doesn’t have the immersive feel you might want as the bosses have clunky movement and a lack of audio cues making them feel lifeless
A final complaint is that the game has aggressive monetization with both cosmetics as well as eight additional characters that can only be obtained through pieces of DLC costing an additional $40 in total.
In the end I would say that this game is worth your time if you’re a fan of the mange or want to give the genre a try and well, if nothing else it’s gonna be free so you can always get an afternoon’s fun out of it before the repetitiveness sets in. You will need 45Gb free space to download the game. Sadly, this one is for PS5 only, so PlayStation 4 owners are left out.
Check back tomorrow after the official release of the list for a piece on the other announced games for the month or check our sister site PocketTactics for their up to date guide to the best JRPGs.
