Sword Art Online Re: Hollow Fragment: Achievements & Stuff

English is not my first lenguage.
You can ask about anything in the comments.

Here are some useful guides I used while playing the game and making this guide.
Some of them are outdated or have translations for the PlayStation version.

https://psnprofiles.com/guide/1606-sword-art-online-hollow-fragment-trophy-guide

https://psnprofiles.com/guide/4980-sword-art-online-hollow-fragment-hollow-mission-implement-guide#-Discard-Area

https://www.youtube.com/@HavianCritDmg/playlists

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/163460-sword-art-online-re-hollow-fragment/72728123

https://www.neoseeker.com/sword-art-online-hollow-fragment/faqs/1448432-sword-art-online-hf.html

You will only need this if you’re going to use the Hollow Missions psnprofiles guide I linked earlier

Steam version – PS version

Hollow Area areas:
Selvendys Forest Area – Serpentis Sea of Trees Area
Bestia Gate Floating Ruins Area – Bestea Gate Floating Ruins Area
Graceleaf Bay Area – Graysreev Cove Area
Driogeer Skycaves Area – Ginriogia Great Void Area
Alevaste Otherworld Area – Arlebast Otherworld Area
Abandoned Area – Discard Area

I’m obviously not gonna translate every single implement and location

You can easly check the location’s name by looking for implements goal

for example:

You wanna know where is this “Corridor of the Oppressed (Ginriogia)”
You already know that Ginriogia is the Diogger Skycaves, so you need to find where the “Corridor of the Oppressed” is. You do it by going to the list of Diogger Skycaves Hollow Missions and searching for one with the corresponding location name.

In this Hollow Mission you need to kill lv130 NM knight “a” and lv130 NM knight “b”
Now you search for the mission with the same goal in the Multiplayer menu. Check the mission’s rank. In this scenario we need to look for a mission with rank 2.

We can see that the enemies have exactly the same names in both versions (it won’t happen that often), so that must be the same Hollow Mission. We find out that the “Corridor of the Oppressed” translates to “Hall of the Exploited” and “Double-Headed Automatic Knight” translates to “Twin Mechanical Knights”.

• Going “New Game+” doesnt reset Hollow Area progress.
• Don’t bother doing requests from npc’s from friends list. It’s meaningless.
• Note every completed Hollow Mission
• The stars on skills say what your mastery of them is. Your first star is done after using the skill 100 times, your second after 1000, and your third after 10,000 times. Every star makes the skill stronger.
  

• You can buy Veil potions in the town. They make you invisible to your enemies. They are necessary for some Hollow Missions where you avoid enemies.
• In singleplayer, you can open doors and chests when focused by an enemy. In Multi, you can’t do that.
• In singleplayer, the game saves only when you change locations, so if you die, you will get back to where you came from and all your progress will be lost. In multi, when you die, you go back to the communications room. All your progress will be saved. That’s one of the reasons why MP is better for doing implements.
• Click ” ` ” to open console and check current events.
• The option to edit skills in skill menu is useless
  

Each enemy has its ATTACK and DEFENSE. If their ATK is higher than your DEF, they will hit you for 100% of their DMG. The same goes for you. If you want to deal the most damage, you have to have a higher ATK than your enemy’s DEF. Critical Hits are just hits that are guaranteed to deal 100% of DMG regardless of the ATK-DEF difference.

Every 2 STR adds 1 ATK
Every 2 DEX adds 1 ACC
Every 2 VIT adds 1 DEF
Every 2 AGI adds 1 EVA

Each stat’s effect:
Damage – auto-attacks damage
Attack Delay – frequency of your Auto-attacks, aka. Attack speed.
Ultimate DPS – Damage Per Second of your Auto-attacks. If you care about your aa’s, you should focus on this stat.
ATK and DEF – explained higher
STR – makes your skills stronger
VIT – raises your HP
AGI – not sure myself, probably just for the Evasion and shield blocks.
DEX – gives ACC and scales with most Dual Wield Skills
ACC – lowers the chance of missing
EVA – gives chance to dodge

Every skill has its own scaling stat. For example, the skill below scales with Dexterity; however, every skill in the game has a hidden 10% Strength scaling.

Your character will begin to auto-attack when you are idle.
Burst attacks are auto-attacks that deal way more damage but consume Burst Gauge.

You use burst attacks by clicking LMB
Recovery of Burst Gauge is determined by Risk Level. The lower the better.
The risk level goes up when you do absolutely anything, but mostly by using sword skills. To reset it, use the switching option with your squad mate.

Exact attacks are burst attacks used in a perfect timing with each other. You will know when to use the next burst attack by looking at a blue circle that appears after each attack (only if you have any burst gauge).

Exact Step is performed when you dodge an attack with Step skill in perfect timing.

Auto-Evade is evading with your Agility stat.

Extra Auto-Attacks can be performed when using battle skill buffs.

Hate is one of the least important statistics. Basically, enemies will focus on a target they “Hate” the most.

GEAR – Weapon

First of all, 99% of weapons you get throughout the game is irrelevant. I’ll be only talking about 1H swords, as I’ve only used them. There are 2 swords that you can get that make somewhat of a difference. The first of them is Elucidator, the last hit bonus for the 89th floor boss. The second of them is Lingering Heart, which you get after an event with Lizbeth on some floor (I can’t remember which; probably early 90s). After you get those swords, the next and final milestone is getting Saintblade: Ragnarok – the best 1H sword in the game. You get it after clearing all enemies in less than 3 minutes in “The Sacred Sword’s Rest”.
There are like 4–5 enemies and they spawn one by one. After each enemy is defeated, you will receive a debuff. Use cleansing crystals or debuff resisting skills after each enemy to make the challenge possible. You can also buff yourself just before entering the room in this location. The fight will start once you open the door. If you have completed the challenge after 3 minutes, you can close the game, and it will re-open just before the challenge room. You can repeat this challange and get multiple swords.
Battle Skill for cleansing debuffs:

After you get Saintblades, you want to upgrade them. I recommend going for DEX with Bedrock Ore, or STR with Carmine Ore.

GEAR – Armor
I didn’t find Arms, Back, Head, Legs or Waist gear that important. Equip yourself with what you think is best for you. Body armor is a little bit more important. I used what had the best offensive stats (Shadoweater Suit – Last Bonus for 96th Floor Boss).

GEAR – Accessory
I used Rings and Charm to deal as much damage as possible. That means I was sacrificing defense for the sake of attack. There is also one ring thats overall good and can be used in any build (Resonant Ring).I’ve also read that there is a powerful charm (Ankh charm), which you can buy at floor 76 after clearing floor 98 but before clearing floor 99.

EXP BOOST
There are some items that increase your exp gain if you wear them, but the exp boost from gear only stacks up to 20%. That means only 2 pieces of equipment will give the Exp Up effect.

MY FINAL GEAR AFTER CLEARING THE WHOLE GAME

Each weapon has its own esoteric/arcane skill, which you unlock after completing the abandoned area questline. Esoteric skills are the most powerful.

OSS chains are sword skills combined in a combo. You do them by activating the next skill in succession in a short time frame that is different for each skill. You’ll know when to do it by looking for a purple light that appears while performing almost each sword skill. You can only activate OSS chains with 2 skills combined until you complete certain implements. This technique is very hard to use, so I don’t recommend learning it. I completed the whole game without using more than the basic one.

All battle skills can be obtained through skill trees or through implements. Skill trees unlock after mastering a weapon. The best way to master a weapon is to use auto-attacks on attack speed buffs.

MUST-HAVE SKILLS
EXP BUFF
Keep it active all the time.

Offensive:

Grants True Strike which makes you hit every attack and not miss anything.

Makes you cast your skills quicker. Especially useful for Arcane Skills.

You will deal 100% of your dmg.

Healing and cleanse:

Best healing skill; heals the entire party

Second best healing skill; heals only you

Cleanses debuffs

OPTIONAL USEFUL SKILLS

Offensive buffs:
Raises ACC

Raises DEX and shortens Skill Lock (not sure what that is, but perhaps it’s the time your actions are locked after using a skill).

needs a target to use

Defensive buffs

Debuffs

Other
works the same as Q-stun

SKILL SETUP
I recommend leaving some skills unlearned to fill up your setup with gray blocks and make the menu clear. Here is my setup.

Don’t pay attention to unmissable achievements related to the story. What you need to focus on is getting everything you need in one playthrough. To do that, you need to:
– Get every last bonus
– Make all other “players” in boss battles survive
– Not miss any CG (they are often related to floors)

1. The game is split into 2 parts: Hollow Area and Aincrad. They both have their own independent stories. What you want to do first is complete the whole Hollow Area quest line before even starting Aincrad. This will bring Philia to Aincrad.
2. Get all heroine-related CG’s. More about that later.
3. Go through all floors 76-100 while getting every Last Bonus, protecting every “player” and completing every event.
4. Defeat Yuuki
5. Get all heroine ending CG’s
6. Grind to 200lv
7. Kill 100 HNM’s
8. Do 100 Implements
9. Complete Hollow Missions
10. Upgrade weapons 200 times

In the current version of the game, you need EVERY CG that is in the game – all 78. You will get most of the CG’s by completing floor events.

• You need to complete the hollow area before floor 88 to get CG #68
• You need to beat the final boss before saving Strea (Advanced Test event) to get CG #47 and #46 (not sure if 46 too). AFTER beating the final boss, if you click “continue” on main menu, the game loads back to the moment before floor 100, so you can THEN save Strea and get CG #54
• You need to beat Yuuki once after defeating floor 100 boss
• You need to beat floor 100 boss after choosing Yui.
• You need to do Sachi’s questline.

SACHI’S QUESTLINE
1. Head to this location alone and speak with Sachi. Leave the area and redo the same thing three times to get acces to her quest.
Location name: Strait of the Offering

2. Get Sachi to your party and go to the Research Vault. You can then trigger an event there and earn the CG.

WHOLE GALLERY SHOWCASE

MAIN heroines: Asuna, Lisbeth, Leafa, Sinon, Silica, Strea, Philia
SIDE heroines: Argo, Sachi

To get CG’s related to the “additional” heroines, you only need to raise their affinity rank to 5 and enter the garden with them.

To get every CG related to the “main” heroines, you will need to:

• Bridal carry heroine to the bed in your room
• Defeat the floor 100 boss with each heroine.
• Complete the “Request for Kirito” of every heroine

BED CG’s
You can get bed CG’s without raising affinity rank 5. You only need to get the girls’ mood to level 5 to carry them. However, I recommend maxing out affinity rank, as it is needed for other achievements and makes you able to carry heroines without mood. Mood is a temporary statistic that is raised the same way affinity is.

You can check the current mood and affinity rank when talking to the heroine.

To get the CG you need to bridal carry a girl into your room and walk with them to the bed. If anyone sees you carrying the heroine, she will get off you and her mood will reset. The best way to do it is waiting by stairs in the tavern for when no other NPC is close to you or even looking your way.

WARNING!!! There is a bug that makes the heroine you are carrying get off you after the loading screen when you enter your room. To prevent this from happening, you need to hold “W” the whole time you are on the loading screen.

RAISING AFFINITY RANK
The best way to grind it out is by chatting. There are several places to talk with heroines, but undeniably the best place is the garden. What you want to do is form a party with them, go to the gardens and sit on a bench. The heroine will sit next to you and there will be orange text bubbles appearing above their heads. When they appear you want to start a conversation as you earn A LOT more affinity when you chat then.

To enter the garden, you need to teleport to the Abandoned Area via this yellow portal:

Then, go through the way the console is facing:

To sit on a bench, press “V”.

It happened to me that heroines sometimes stopped giving the orange bubbles. When that happens, just go to bed and come back.

Each heroine has their own orange text bubble lines. Each line has one designated correct answer. You will need to learn whether to answer “…” or “nice” to each line.

100 FLOOR BOSS CG’S
After you beat the game the first time, you unlock the option on the main menu called “Last Battle”. It enables defeating the last boss again. Do it with every heroine as a partner.

REQUEST FOR KIRITO
Each heroine has 4 requests that you can complete by doing tasks with the girl in party. You will see a pink bubble above their heads when they have a request for you.

You can also check the current request with the girl when you talk to them.

Here are the quests for each heroine. Info from one of the guides listed above.

After completing all their requests, you are asked to go with the heroine to the garden, and there you will get the CG.

There are two missable achievements related to beating floor bosses. The first one is “Not on my watch!” and the second one is “Beta Tester”.

NOT ON MY WATCH
You need to kill every floor boss without letting any raid members die. If one dies, force close the game. It will reload at the Teleport Gate. To see if any member died up to this point, check the guild page.

BETA TESTER – Get every Last Attacking Bonus

Last attack bonus is a reward for landing a final hit on the boss when it dies. The easiest way to get it is to use sword skills with a lot of hits when the boss’s HP is very low. To see if you were able to get the bonus, simply check the result screen.

If you didn’t land the last hit, force close the game while on the result screen and try again.

There are 24 items you have to get to earn the trophy. Store all the last attack bonuses in your room’s storage and pick them all up before defeating floor 99 boss. You should get the trophy once you get the 24th item in your inventory.

Here is the list of the items:

The achievement says that you need to reach level 150, but it’s actually 200. This is the most time-consuming achievement in the game. It makes everything easier, so I recommend you do this BEFORE 100 HNM’s, hollow missions and implement trophies.

I’ll talk about this one briefly, but there is an in-depth guide on steam about leveling, so If you want to know more, I recommend reading it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2986575100

I leveled up all the way to level 200 on the same spot:
Multiplayer -> Solo -> Selvendys Forest -> Love is Light: DEATH GAME
(You can actually pick any mission in any area. It’s only important that its on the “death game” difficulty)

You want to always take a partner and 3 other party members from the NPC. You can also pick up a role there. I recommend using Debuffer or Buffer role.

Go to Beedance Sprawl

You will be fighting bees. There are 5 types of bees in this area:
-Yellow
-Red
-Blue
-Black
-Mini Boss

You should get nearly the same amount of exp for each bee.

The only ones you want to fight are Yellow and maybe Red. Yellow are “normal”. They have low defense and low attack. You can also try to kill Red bees, but they pack a punch. I don’t recommend killing Blue bees, as they have a lot of defense and will take more time to kill. Black and Miniboss bees are outside the circular route, and there is no point in killing stronger enemies.

This is the route of the area.

Bees there have levels above 200, so they will evade most of your attacks.
You need 2 battle skills in order to make this grind any efficient:
1. Perfect Style – grants 100% acc so you can kill any bees easily.
2. Nullify Defense – attacks ignore defense, so you basically deal tons of dmg even if you miss most of your hits.

The best way to use them is to activate one first, wait until it ends, and then use the other one. You can also use ACC potions and other battle skills.

I used this spot to grind all the way to level 200, but that may not be the most efficient way.

“In a multiplayer game, defeat at least 100 HNM creatures.”

One thing that I was not sure about when attempting this achievement was whether there was any cooldown for HNM’s. There is none (at least on Steam version). I’m pretty sure you don’t need Area Rank 3 to get HNM missions in multi, but if you are missing them, just level up the Area Rank by completing Hollow Missions. All HNM missions are Rank 3 missions. You want to beat the weakest HNM 100 times in the “Lust of the Young Kobold Lord” mission in Selvendys Forest. If you are at level 200 already, the boss shouldn’t be much of a problem.

100 implementations out of 114 are required for achievement.

It’s best to do implementations in multiplayer, as you don’t lose progress when you die. You can also choose any mission without waiting for it to spawn again.

Remember that you can only complete Implementation when you are in a Hollow Mission.
If you have no idea why your implementation is not progressing, check it’s mission rank or enemy level requirements.

SWORD SKILL TEST
Easy Exploit here – just spam Exact Onslaught (Q stun skill) from the battle skills screen. There is no cooldown for this skill.

EXACT STEP AWAY / PARRIES
Its quite easy to do it with bees.

INFLICT DARKNESS
Use spear’s skill “Fatal Thrust”

REDUCE PARAMETERS
Spear’s skills

INFLICT BLEED
Katana’s skills

RECEIVE BLEED
I believe that once you get bleed once, you need to cleanse it and get it again to progress implementations. Stacking bleed wont do. This Implementation is easily done on “The Soulless Reaper” mission (Diogger Skycaves area boss). He does his bleed-inflicting attack when he’s very low.

RECEIVE POISON
You can get poisoned on “Black-Winged Assailants”(Selvendys Forest) mission by the mantis-looking dragonflies.

RECEIVE PARAMETER DEBUFF
You can do it on the Selvendys Forest rank3 mission. The Kobold often debuffs you. It’s efficient to do this while grinding for “This game is not fun” achievement.

COUNTER
There are battle skills that give you counter buffs. Some require a shield.

AUTO, EXTRA AND CRIT ATTACKS
A lot of battle skills grant you buffs for attack speed, extra attack chance or crit rate. Dual wielding or using a rapier would be the most efficient way.

———————————————————————————————————————————-
14 implementations I decided to skip:

“Complete Hollow Missions”
You need to complete around 120 HM’s to get this one.

You can do missions both in Singleplayer(SP) and Multiplayer(MP). I HIGHLY recommend doing this in MP one by one from the list in order. You can skip some missions. Write down every mission you complete.

This is how noted my completed missions:

Where numbers stand for missions in order on the Multiplayer HM select screen.

I did most of the HM’s in singleplayer when clearing the game and doing other achievements. You can save a lot of time if you write down all the missions you complete while playing throughout the game.

“Upgrade weapons 200 times”

Leave this one as the last trophy you get. The more you upgrade the same stat on a weapon, the more it will cost you to upgrade it further. The first upgrade costs only 2 ore so just switch it after every enhance.

Making this guide took longer than I expected. Probably because I’m lazy AF.
I’m open to any criticism – this is my second guide, and I’m still learning.