In Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment, one of your main focuses will be to build relationships with heroines and other characters. Not only for dating purposes, but they’ll also help out more in combat when your bond is tighter. Dengeki shows us some other bonuses that come from good relationships.
While going on dates will boost your relationship with the heroines on a personal level, you can also bond with them in the battlefield. Each character will have their own unique AI that determines their fighting style.
To the bottom-left of the screen, there are three sections that are divided into attack, defense, and buffs. This graph displays the character’s AI preference and their efficiency in different parts of each respective group, like covering and hate management in defense, recovery and stun under buffs.
The AI will change and progress as you fight alongside your partners. Even if they excel at one thing, but you’d rather have them be better at another, you’ll be able to do just that by having them participate in combat and play the way you want them to.
As a bonus, you’ll be able to unlock special costumes for heroine characters by communicating with them and having them and meeting certain conditions.
While they’ve yet to reveal exactly how you can unlock these costumes, here’s a look at some of their alternate looks:
Asuna:
Silica:
Lisbeth:
Leafa:
Sinon:
Strea:
Philia:
In the previous game for PSP, they didn’t have a storage system, where you can put away weapons or items you’re no longer using. In Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment, they’ll be adding that, so you collectors out there won’t have anything to worry about.
Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment will be released on April 24, 2014 in Japan for PlayStation Vita.
