Echoes of Aincrad is the latest video game taking place in the Sword Art Online universe. As the lack of “SAO” in the title implies, it is a spin-off story focusing on another party during the events of the anime’s first season. The protagonist leading the action this time is a player-created character that stumbles upon a mysterious quest no one else has ever heard of. Echoes of Aincrad uses a variation of the soulslike formula along with a fresh start in an established universe in an attempt to draw in a new crowd, but does it succeed?
Unfortunately, after spending over 60 hours with the game, I found Echoes of Aincrad to be a game with the bones of a great action RPG constantly dragged down by bloated exploration, stiff writing, and a rough PC port.
Is Echoes of Aincrad a Good Entry Point Into SAO?
As someone who never really cared much for Sword Art Online, I feel like I’m part of the target audience for this game. Using the same setting with a different perspective is a tried-and-true formula to expand on a universe’s lore while serving as a good starting point for newcomers. Despite that, I feel like Echoes of Aincrad failed to welcome new players into a world they might only know superficially. The overall narrative structure feels off in a way that kept me from fully buying into the premise.
I really liked the low-fantasy aspect of it. Sure, the game sometimes breaks that promise with bulls that can chuck Sonic Booms at you just because they have curved horns. However, I think this setting works more often than it doesn’t. Playing through this game made me realize how many “sword & sorcery” games staunchly refuse to drop the latter. When it comes to the world of Aincrad, this was the most memorable part of the experience for me.
Everything else seems at odds with itself. Sword Art Online is one of those “game within a game” stories. Something gaming already did with .hack, and anime still pursues with titles like Shangri La Frontier. I’m a sucker for these settings, doubly so when they get overtly meta like Inscryption. Sadly, Echoes of Aincrad didn’t do much to convince me that SAO‘s universe is more interesting than its peers.
Maybe it’s something that other SAO stories did better, but for Echoes of Aincrad, the underlying plot never fully clicked for me, especially as a newcomer. The story kicks off from the game’s “beta” and lingers for too long in it without laying any groundwork for the series-defining twist. Once the title drops and it’s announced that players are now stuck inside an MMO, it feels as if the game just dusts its hands and calls it a job done. No further exposition or explanation awaits.
To someone with little knowledge of the series, the game fails to even begin tackling the “whats,” “whys,” and “hows” that are expected from every story. Echoes of Aincrad just vaguely gestures towards a gamer version of Stephen King’s Under the Dome novel and expects you to not question it any further. Adding insult to injury, the game is also filled with lore tidbits about a world two steps removed from the player. I found it difficult to connect with anything that happened throughout the game because of these circumstances.
Non-Playable… Players?
Compounding the issue is that dialogue often feels too stiff. I’ve found it funny to think that most characters in the game sound more like an NPC than the pawns of Dragon’s Dogma. Walking throughout the map will burn sentences like “a wolf-type enemy” into your memory just like “wolves hunt in packs”. This would be just a nitpick if it were restricted only to gameplay segments, but this persists even in cutscenes. The game can’t decide if the players should sound like they’re roleplaying or if they’re firmly rooted in talking as they would “IRL”.
Echoes of Aincrad might also be the shining example of how not to use the silent protagonist trope. It’s clear that the game is intended as a character-driven story; Aincrad itself isn’t real, so you’re not really incentivized to think about it as a real place. You do, however, feel the players’ struggle to make sense of a complicated situation. How characters can move forward, how they perceive others, how they perceive themselves, and many more dilemmas and tensions that may arise from such a stressful situation.
Even if the game isn’t trying to be a choice-heavy game like The Witcher series, it could take a page from Metaphor: ReFantazio and at least try to make your character a part of the conversation instead of a magical 8-ball everyone decides to follow for no good reason. As a narrative experience, Echoes of Aincrad struggles in nearly every area needed to make this premise work. There might be something to salvage for established fans of Sword Art Online, but it simply doesn’t even try to draw new players in or make them care about anything in this universe.
An Interesting (And Flawed) Gameplay System
At its core, Echoes of Aincrad has a really fun gameplay loop. The ‘soulslike’ tag attached to it feels like a serious mischaracterization, though. It can cause players who like the genre to be sorely disappointed or to have some players skip it altogether despite being something they would enjoy. While there are some hallmarks you would recognize as “souls-like”, I wouldn’t say it fits their core philosophy. The one-sentence pitch I would give is that “this is the most turn-based action RPG I’ve ever seen”.
Let me unpack that into something a little more descriptive. Two main pillars are dictating your success in this game: preparation and resource management. While it is built like a soulslike and you can theoretically skill your way through battle, it’s just not very good at doing that. Between inconsistencies in its own set of mechanics, ambiguous animations, or simply the formulaic boss design, Echoes of Aincrad is very disappointing when approached like a traditional soulslike.
On the other hand, learning to abuse its systems can get you an easy path forward with only the most basic mechanical skills. For example: You’re always accompanied by an AI companion, and you’ll need to manage their “concentration” meter. Ordering them to fight aggressively (Free Mode) makes them much more useful in battle, but it drains concentration quickly and can get them killed. To recover, you need to go back to Switch Mode, where they’ll wait behind you until a successful dodge and only then proceed to attack and draw the aggro to themselves.
This is only one of several systems in place, but I was surprised how much the team was able to squeeze out of a simple concept. Switch Mode feels weird at first, but it’s incredibly powerful when you’re controlling the battlefield. On the other hand, if you’re ambushed or surrounded, you won’t be able to tag your partner in. Going to Free Mode allows the two of you to split the aggro and keep things manageable. The game’s combat is at its best when you’re micromanaging these aspects to shift things in your favor.
Echoes of Aincrad has varying degrees of success when it comes to balancing these mechanics in a way that is interesting and fun to play, but it works more often than it doesn’t. Approaching the title like a traditional action RPG might yield mixed results, but trying to learn the mechanics to “cheat” in your favor feels exactly like a turn-based JRPG. The careful preparation and theory-crafting that is necessary to defeat a particularly challenging enemy is a lot of fun.
Between collecting weapons, allocating stat points, finding synergies between gear effects, and learning to use items effectively, I found a uniquely compelling gameplay loop. Despite not being a fan of grindy RPGs, I couldn’t help but greatly enjoy collecting tons of weapons in an attempt to perfect a weapon into a one-hit-kill wonder. The buffs are very noticeable, and the abilities at your disposal can be really powerful; combining them in a way that doesn’t even allow the boss to swing at you was very fun.
Poor Performance And Other Disappointments
Poorly implemented systems can lead to interesting emerging gameplay and unique ways to entertain yourself, but Echoes of Aincrad breaks in several non-enjoyable ways as well. The PC port, in particular, feels shockingly rough for a AAA title. The mouse just emulates an analog stick (something not even the FFVII Remake ports got wrong). The default bindings are all over the place, and there are several actions that you can’t split into different buttons because they’re the same button on the controller. The game very often stutters and drops frames when it doesn’t crash altogether. So on and so forth.
After 20-ish hours messing with settings in the game, I just threw in the towel. I put all of the graphic sliders at the minimum because I can deal with an ugly game, but I can’t deal with an unresponsive mess. My rig can play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and other recent RPGs with minimal stutters, but it crashes constantly with Echoes of Aincrad at similar settings. Something that feels even worse considering that Echoes looks straight-up worse than Rebirth even on similar settings. It is hard to justify why this port runs so poorly when it’s not visually demanding.
It’s not just performance woes as well. Some design decisions are questionable at best and infuriating at worst. Like the fact that the game allows you to respec your stat points at any time but doesn’t offer any loadouts for you to manage different builds. You’re even encouraged to try different approaches since you can’t control which weapon type will currently be the strongest you possess, and yet you’re expected to manually reallocate these points every time. I wanted to switch between DEX and AGI builds as the situation demanded it, but I ended up powering through with whatever I had at the time because there was no easy way to switch between them.
Still, the lack of loadouts may just be a small grievance when it comes to equipment, but it is really annoying when it comes to items. This is a game that requires you to come prepared. You’ll need explosives and firebombs to unlock certain paths, extra healing items if your build has no way of recovering HP outside of the main potion, and maybe some damage-dealing mines if you’re trying out an INT build. You’ll find out that overworld exploration could always use a few Gold Crystals in hand, but they’re useless in dungeons. Good luck tweaking that every time you accept a mission.
A Padded Out Overworld
Speaking of the overworld, almost everything around it feels like busywork meant to inflate hours as “content”. This is easily my biggest grievance with Echoes of Aincrad. When the game is centered on combat arenas with tight corridors, it can be really fun. On the overworld, however, almost everything you do feels like a waste of time. At first it was merely unremarkable, but ultimately, it became numbing.
The level design is where my patience really started to wear thin. Very often you’ll see a chest or rest area just a few steps away, but you’ll be required to take a scenic route that very often isn’t clear that it’ll even lead you there. Compounding the issue is the game’s map, which is very often wrong or just incomplete. It took me 60 hours to finish the game, doing (almost) every side content it has to offer, and it feels like over half of that time was spent just sprinting from point A to point B. By the end of the game, I no longer switched from AGI builds. Not because they were good or even because they matched my playstyle, simply because AGI is the stat that governs move speed.
The game also has a very uneven difficulty curve. I went with “normal” difficulty, as I assume it’s the default most players will pick. I’ve found it to be very underwhelming. The few times I died while exploring were out of stubbornness to not use a healing item or because I straight up stopped paying attention to what was happening. This is doubly funny when your first companion states that “games nowadays are afraid to challenge newbies” within the first hours of playing. Something that has become my favorite instance of lampshading in gaming.
While walking in the overworld, the game feels like a Musou title with sparse enemies. You just walk and mash attacks, occasionally checking the map to see where you need to go to progress. However, whenever you get to a story boss or an optional gold gate, you better brace yourself for a battle that will one-shot you with a move that covers the entire arena. You need to keep your equipment in top shape to deal with tough encounters, but doing so will trivialize everything else.
For most players, I would either recommend turning on permadeath mode on normal (and don’t neglect VIT when approaching bosses) or at least hard mode. I wasn’t able to play a lot in hard mode to test if the game feels better against mobs, but if you’re the kind of player that finds musou games boring, it’s almost mandatory to do so. On the other hand, it might just add even more busywork on top of everything the overworld already demands.
Echoes of Aincrad Struggles to Justify Its Price and Runtime
Despite all of the frustrations, I had fun playing Echoes of Aincrad. Games can be broken and still leave me overall positive about it. Sometimes ambition can be both a blessing and a curse, but for this game it’s ambition itself that seems to be missing. This is not a case of a game trying to do too much and falling short; it’s a game that does a small portion of its content really competently and wraps that core with tons of filler.
I have a hard time classifying games that can be both fun and broken. It’s up to each player how much each part of the equation matters. Whichever way you would favor, what feels obvious is that Echoes of Aincrad does not benefit from being stretched into a AAA-sized experience. Exploring Aincrad actively devalues the experience when the overworld doesn’t offer anything particularly noteworthy. This is a title that could make use of the “less is more” philosophy, because otherwise it demands more time and money than it is worth.
Disclaimer: Bandai Namco provided a PC (Steam) copy of Echoes of Aincrad for review purposes.
