Bandai Namco, in collaboration with our comrades at Dengeki, held a special christmas stream for Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris, showing some new gameplay. The stream featured SAO: Alicization Lycoris Producer Yousuke Futami, who you can follow on Twitter for antics which will definitely make you empathic about his job and feel his love, his anger, and all his sorrow, like when the game's release date leaked a few weeks ago.

The gameplay sequences technically aren't brand-new but are longer cut of certain cutscenes we've seen in past trailers or gameplay. The first cutscene is Asuna meeting with Alice:

After that, we got to see a cutscene with Eugeo and Kirito, showing how awesome Eugeo's seiyuu Shimazaki Nobunaga is:

The rest of the stream included other things that might pique your interest. There's an unboxing of the game's Japanese Limited Edition starting the 19:09 timestamp. They showed some SAO t-shirts and goods from Dengeki at around 22:38. Dengeki also organized a fanart contest to win said goods, and they showed fanart illustrations starting 23:15.

In the past, Producer Yousuke Futami explained how Alicization Lycoris‘ story follows the first anime season of SAO Alicization but has some different story developments. We've seen plenty of gameplay of Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris till now, and it honestly doesn't always look great. However, developer Aquria should have the time to improve the game until May 2020. The final game will also include online multiplayer with up to four players. As such, I'm looking forward to see how Alicization Lycoris will turn out, even if I believe the Alicizitation arc is the worst part of SAO. Alicization Lycoris also has a new original female character like all the other main SAO games till now.

In a related note, SAO's character designer Abec/Bunbun also designed some characters in Project Sakura Wars, which we're doing a translated playthrough of.

Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris launches on May 22 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam. Pre-ordered copies will include four fan-designed bonus costumes and bonus in-game currency. If you wish to support DualShockers and like my unneeded opinions, you can preorder the game via Amazon.