When Bandai Namco announced that they were porting the Vita version of Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment to the PlayStation 4 in May 2015, I had my doubts. The Vita version had a dodgy camera, repetitive dungeon themes, and a really bad western translation. The PlayStation 4 version of the game was titled Sword Art Online Re: Hollow Fragment and I had the opportunity to play the game at E3 2015.
The upscaled character avatars and models are beautiful. Sadly, this type of attention was not given to the dungeon or field enemies. In this instance it is visible that this is not a PlayStation 4 game and it is clearly a port. The blocky textures mimic old PlayStation 2 polygons as they stand out next to the redone character models. I would like to add that the colors are gorgeous and during the cut scene conversations with the characters from the game the artwork is nothing less than impressive.
I was worried that the repetitive nature of Sword Art Online‘s battle system would not translate well over to the console version, but after a few fights, I was having fun finding more and more beast to destroy with Kirito and Philia. The fighting was smooth with no frame rate issues even when special moves were being performed at the same time.
Re: Hollow Fragment has been completely re-translated for the PlayStation 4 and during my playthrough I saw no issues with that. So, in the end, I can say that I had a very pleasant experience with Re: Hollow Fragment, though the game is a true Vita port, visually, the added content and upscaled character models should be enough to bring old players back and maybe gain new ones.
