When Bandai Namco announced it was working on a new Sword Art Online game, people noticed. In a twist, Echoes of Aincrad revealed that you could create your own custom character rather than play as an established character from the anime.
It was a smart decision as custom characters are generally a great way to capture my attention. And it did just that after sitting down to play the latest Sword Art Online for a handful of hours last month.
However, despite spending three hours with the demo, I wasn’t convinced this was the game to bring newcomers in, even though it offered welcoming mechanics. There wasn’t enough onboarding to bring players up to speed, and the open hubs were bland, with limited enemy choices and crushing difficulty meant to deter players.
Is there enough here, though, to sit down and see this game through to the end? I’ve struggled with this notion after spending the last week with a full build of Echoes of Aincrad, and while I recognize that it has some great moments, the underlying frame just doesn’t have enough to support the vision the series requires to be a must-play.
Sword Art Online’s latest game, Echoes of Aincrad, feels light on offerings
The gist of Echoes of Aincrad is familiar to anyone who’s seen the anime or read the manga or is a wayward fan of the .hack series. Echoes of Aincrad traps your character and thousands of others in the game world, which just came out of a beta period to test how the servers fared with players. Instead of being the hero destined to save the world, you’re just another player caught in the chaos, left to find a way to survive after you learn that logging out doesn’t work.
The biggest departure for the series may not sit well with those looking to play as Kirito, as I said earlier, having a custom character works for this game. These days, many anime titles assume you’re familiar with their stories and characters, which can alienate new players who may not know what they’re getting into. Echoes of Aincrad does a decent job of getting you into the action pretty quickly once you’ve made a character, and it’s all the better for it, since I don’t need to know so much out of the gate. However, things tend to slow down during the prologue and don’t let up until later.
Even the story struggles to do anything truly unique, as it blends new content with the first season of Sword Art Online. Despite some familiar faces from the show appearing in-game, there are very few memorable story beats that make this game something great, and because your character is custom-made, you’re along for the ride, only with very little backstory to fill in why you’re there in the first place. You basically exist to complete quests and move the plot forward so others can have their moment.
Echoes of Aincrad’s world become boring fast
Instead of an open world, you frequent hub areas that serve as the connections between areas. Leaving the Town of Beginnings takes you into a forest hub area with Safe Areas to discover. These are like bonfires in FromSoftware’s games and are also rest spots in addition to teleport beacons.
It is important to search these spots to help unfog the map, which also hides various kinds of treasure chests you need to find. Safe Areas also prevent enemies from attacking you. When you rest and recover HP in a Safe Area, enemies nearby will respawn, so there is a trade-off between resting and risking an attack. Each Safe Area is easy to spot thanks to the distinct blue beam of light that shoots into the sky, a visual marker that guides players through Aincrad’s open‑zone layout.
However, my major concern when previewing this game last month was that there wasn’t much to do in these areas. Sure, treasure is always nice, but there’s very little to do off the beaten path. I got lost several times while exploring, but that never led to any cool discoveries. It doesn’t help that many levels also feel the same, so you’re moving from one linear map to another while fighting an assortment of same-y enemies that do not do enough to keep players invested.
And the first several hours take forever to get things moving, which I have to say really isn’t the best way to get players invested. Then, when you finally do get moving, the gameplay loop doesn’t do enough to keep you pressing onward. I had to force myself to log back in and play some nights because I hit a point where the swamps, forests, and grasslands all blurred together. The entire first floor of Echoes of Aincrad is mostly a mix and remix of those three biomes. To add insult to injury, the treasure chests you see on the map are the only thing worth searching for, and while they have items you’ll want, it sucks knowing there is so little else to experience.
Biomes Blend Together
There’s also the fact that your character rarely feels like they have anything to do. You head out, grab a few quests, complete those, gain your rewards, return to town to upgrade and level up, then head back out into the world to find the next chain of quests that task you with killing enemies, finding items, and so on. This trend continues right through to the end of credits, and to be honest, it’s mostly fine, but I want more than that.
Levelling your character is important, and each time you level up, you earn points to increase your attributes. Of course, initially, you can allocate points to growing stronger at the inn. To even level up or change weapons, you need to travel back to town and into your room to allocate points, equip new gear, and basically fine-tune your build. It becomes cumbersome when you get some new items that could make a difference, but now suddenly you need to find a Safe Area to travel back to change, then head back to where you were before.
Combat might be where I can see those two minds at work: it’s Soulslike, with health and stamina required to strike enemies, and it’s serviceable but fails to really stand out. You and your partner have skills that are important when taking on bosses, and you can dodge and guard, but that’s about it. There’s a lack of variety in combat here that doesn’t sit right with me.
There’s a good bit of weapon variety to choose from, and I did enjoy being able to use a weapon as much or as little as I like, but you’re rewarded for weapon use in Echoes of Aincrad. Whether I’m using a sword and shield or a two-handed axe, the game has you levelling up your weapons and customizing them even further. Loot is doled out frequently, with the blacksmith repurposing weapons to level up the ones you want to bring forward.
It’s a fun system that lets you pick the weapons you want to use, then use other, lesser weapons as fodder to level your primary weapons to carry over passive stats. The downside is, of course, that later levels make continual upgrades less necessary than I would’ve liked. Between the weapon’s stats and abilities, they end up feeling the same, and it makes swapping less important.
Ultimately, Echoes of Aincrad might be the first game in the series to feature a custom character, but it fails to do anything with that system. Combat is what stands out the most because exploration is bland and forgettable, which is a shame because I absolutely love the idea of being trapped in an MMO, but not one that rarely tries to stand out and usher in a memorable world.
Verdict
Echoes of Aincrad fails to leave a lasting impression, but for the hours you put into this Sword Art Online adventure, it satisfies the need for more games like this one. However, it’s bogged down by areas that are a chore to explore, and there’s not enough content to justify making the world’s hubs big, since there’s not enough to do in each one. With that in mind, there’s a whole list of things wrong, but also, the bones of this game move the needle forward, even if it isn’t by much.
[The publisher provided a copy of the game for review purposes.]
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
