After being revealed in the February 2024 Partner Showcase, Bandai Namco has today announced that SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream will be heading to Switch on 4th October.
The new trailer (above) tells you everything that you need to know about the Fractured Daydream story. It looks like your standard multiverse affair. There has been a breach in time and space. Characters from across the Sword Art Online anime are gathered in the same version of Alfheim Online. There are unexpected alliances and rivalries as you try to put the timeline back together — Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.
Expectedly, this new story trailer doesn't show all that much gameplay (though we have the announcement trailer for that). For those curious, Fractured Daydream is a multiplayer-focused adventure, where you join a team of up to 20 players to defeat foes and get the timeline back on track. If hack-and-slash is your jam, this looks like it could be up your street, with cross-play enabled so you can team up with SAO fans across the world.
Aside from all the hacking and slashing, Fractured Daydream's big pull will likely be the interactions between many different Sword Art Online characters. The gameplay may well be strong enough to pull in those who haven't watched the anime before, but we'd wager that the larger appeal will come for those well-versed in their Alfheim lore.
Naturally, Fractured Daydream comes in Standard, Digital Deluxe or Digital Premium editions. The latter two include character packs, DLC worlds and cosmetics.
The history of Sword Art Online games on Switch has been, uhh, somewhat rocky. While we found Hollow Realization to be a pretty solid JRPG, both Fatal Bullet and Alicization Lycoris have only been for very forgiving fans of the series. Here's hoping that Fractured Daydream can fall in with the former camp, eh?