Kirito: "It's the least helpful quest log entry ever. Not even a hint!"

There's so much to say about this game. I could write a book about the flaws/issues as well as advantages and wouldn't even be scratching the surface. Therefore it's going to be one of my longer reviews. The good news: Despite all flaws I had a great time here. Good enough to consider buying another title of the SAO series.
But let's start from the beginning...

++ Game World: First of all, the world of Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization feels alive. There's so much commotion, both in town and on the field. You'll see players interacting with each other as well as whole groups fighting monsters, asking for help or providing it.
++ Dating sim: Date everyone you want to date, regardless of age and gender. You can flirt to your heart's content and even unlock "pillow talk" with special CGs for most main characters.
- dating sim has a few translation issues and other bugs that may lead to mistakes and frustration.
++ Battle system: attacks, jump attacks, dash attacks, blocks, evasion, sword skills, abilities, linked attacks, "switch". The battle system is very dynamic and satisfying
- "Good job"-Issue: Praising your friends during combat is one of the most effective ways to increase affection, but there's many problems with how it's implemented. More on this later, in the detailed part.
~ Lore: The story of the game is non-canon, which means that sometimes it refers to events that didn't happen or happened in a different way or time during the anime series.
~ Main Story: It's barely there, for most of the time. You roam around pretty much lost and try to find/trigger something that will make the story progress, often not knowing where or what to look for. Towards the end it gets better though.
+ Sidequests: more of kinetic novels rather than sidequests. You mainly click your way through dialogue to see a CG - which in many cases is just an excuse for fanservice and situations that could easily be interpreted as "ambiguous" *wink, wink*
- Tutorial: While the ingame tutorials do a great job in explaining the very complex game mechanics, they come too late. Even though you can access said mechanics from the beginning, it may take up to 20 hours to trigger a tutorial that will help you make sense of them - which can be equaly confusing and frustrating for new players.
~ Difficulty: The game is rather easy. It may be a bit challenging if you don't invest time in crafting and upgrading stuff. Otherwise most of the enemies won't be much of a threat, not even high level optional bosses (HNMs).
-- Lazy/bad translation: Typos, missing letters/words or inaccurate translations will happen. Not all the time, but frequent enough to remind you that they exist. For some reason sometimes the translators just made up stuff that wasn't nearly close to what the characters said. Two examples:
Kirito: "Uah!" (surprised sound). Text: "Sweet mother of gaming"
Asuna: "Uh... arigatou" Text: "Heh... You are really sweet, you know that?"

That by far the most annoying part of the game. First you have to raise the relationship to level 4 for weapons and 5 for armor in order to be able to gift them one item at a time which they'll equip. You can have 3 team members and each of them has 5 equipable slots, so that's 15 interactions just to equip them. Keeping the stuff up to date and replacing it makes everything even more painful, because you can't check on their equipment unless you made your way through the "gift" process. For me that meant that I had to write down each of their weapons/gear and the item attributes, so that I didn't have to go through the whole procedure each time, just to compare items.
By the way, you can only gift them items in town. No problem, right? Except for the fact that you can only have one character following you in town at a time. In order to check on another, you'll have to locate him/her, go to the location and talk to them. IF they are in town. Because sometimes their location will be "unknown" and you will have to try again at a later time.

"Ma...ma ma...mate, kudasai!" (Silica)
The dating sim can be one of the most joyful parts of the game, with all the great animations and voiced lines. They tell you something and you have to react in a "proper" way to increase the affection. But sometimes the translation is so off that you'll hit the wrong reaction or don't know how to react. So it's mainly trial and error.
Between the talk sequences you have the chance to get "closer" and trigger various actions of increasing intimacy, all the while keeping track of how they feel about it and how comforable they are with the distance. Now there's two issues with that.
1. Reactions: Their lines to a proper action are either poorly translated or plain too random, because sometimes they'll tell you stuff like "come closer" even though their comfort indicator (heart) shows that you can't afford to move closer without risking to make them unhappy.
2. Timing: The regular chat part and the "getting closer" part take place simultaneously. That's bad, because while you read through one line, in the background they may have started talking about another and expect a reaction from you. If you don't react (because you couldn't see it), they'll be unhappy about it.

During fights your friends will occasionally trigger an emotion. If you praise them, you can raise the stats for said emotion, which alters the behavior of the character and also increases their affection. The problems however are:
1. Praise delay: It doesn't trigger the moment you hit it. By the time it triggers the character may have stopped feeling that way or changed the emotion, which very well can lead to increasing unwanted traits instead of the ones you wanted.
2. Praise interrupt: You can praise them in the middle of combat, even during a 10+ hit combo. No problem with that. But if you happen to open a chest before you get their reaction to the praise, it will instantly interrupt/cancel the praise, which leads to 3.
3. Praise cooldown: There's a quite some time before the game lets you praise a character again, so if you missed a wanted trait or had the praise interrupted, you will have to wait before you can try again.