It’s even more discouraging for me because I still don’t feel any significant investment or attachment to the characters or events.

I have put a few hours into this game but, that’s just small fraction of what it’s going to take to grind through this one. So, I’m far from clearing all of those additional floors, or the Hollow Area itself which features a lot of additional quests and monsters. The game, SAO: Hollow Fragment, picks up after this, with twenty-five floors left to clear, with a nasty boss at the end of each one. From what I have read about the anime, the story stops after the events of the 75th floor, which sees Kirito and crew defeating a Skull Reaper. The “players” must band together to clear 100 floors of monsters and reveal the truth.

Your mind however is active inside of a MMORPG, on a floating island with the giant castle known as Aincrad. A high-level overview of the premise of Sword Art Online would go something like this: you and many other folks are trapped in a Matrix-like comatose state. But if it’s popular enough to release in the States, even if only digitally on the Vita and even if the translation isn’t all that great, that’s definitely saying something. Having very little knowledge of anime and manga in general, I had not heard of this franchise before.

Sword art online hollow fragment