| Echoes of Aincrad: Sword Art Online | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Echoes of Aincrad follows the story of Sword Art Online through the perspective of a unique set of protagonists. Learn more about what the game did well, where it failed, and our review of the game.
Overview
What is Echoes of Aincrad?
Echoes of Aincrad follows the story of Sword Art Online’s beta and days after its official release through the perspective of a unique cast of characters from the original series. Despite that, cameo appearances by established characters such as Argo, Kirito, and Asuna are integrated into both the scenarios, as well as certain parts of the gameplay itself.
It is a Soulslike where players are able to use a variety of weapons, attributes, and special skills to match their playstyles as they grow stronger and take on harder challenges. NPC companions will also ally themselves with the protagonist, each with their own set of unique abilities.
Echoes of Aincrad features:
⚫︎ Co-op partners from the existing cast of Sword Art Online, as well as new ones
⚫︎ Weapon mastery systems
⚫︎ Soulslike core gameplay mechanics
⚫︎ Semi-open world design
⚫︎ Combination and support skills from partners
⚫︎ Hidden dungeons
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Echoes of Aincrad’s gameplay and story.
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| $69.99 Standard Edition |
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| $89.99 Deluxe Edition |
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| $109.99 Ultimate Edition |
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Echoes of Aincrad Review: How to Make Sword Art Online Feel Dead
Yet Another Questionable SAO Game
Making a Sword Art Online game—and, by extension, the world it's set in—isn't actually that difficult, I believe. After all, you can just go to any SAO community (just don’t go to Reddit) and check the comments for a design document. Making one that captures why people fell in love with it in the first place, however, is.
That's because SAO’s, and effectively Echoes of Aincrad’s greatest strength was never the world itself. It was how the characters interacted with it. Every floor, town, guild, and game mechanic wasn't merely worldbuilding, but also had an active hand in developing its cast and their evolving perceptions around survival, death, happiness, and companionship. Rather than existing beside the story, Aincrad was an active part of it.
This game gets surprisingly, even agonizingly close to capturing that feeling. The opening stretch alone already communicates some promise; the combat system is great, the cast bounces naturally off the painful realities of the world, and Aincrad itself often feels authentic. However, its main issue is unfortunately major enough that it actively sabotages everything around it.
By the Time You Find a Story, the Refund Period Is Over
Ironically, one of Echoes of Aincrad's biggest strengths is also one that many players may never reach. Featuring mostly original characters such as Iori and some returning ones like Kirito, the plot itself is surprisingly engaging. At the very least, it's compelling enough to make you want to see where it goes, particularly because of the discussions its lore is bound to spark.
Basically, Echoes of Aincrad tells the story of Iori and our protagonist, who is perhaps the most self-insert self-insert I’ve ever self-inserted myself into, thanks to their dialogue being entirely limited to nodding or shaking their head. Together, they find themselves burdened by a unique quest that, if failed, threatens the entirety of Aincrad long before the main series’ party even makes it to the top floor.
This alone should be enough to make you want to stay, especially if you’ve seen SAO before all this. I mean, woah, something like this was happening while Kirito and Asuna were hitting the Tower? Cool, right? Unfortunately, you won’t actually realize that until after you sink several hours into this game. And that’s because, for some reason, the game decided it was a great idea to make the prologue so ungodly long that by the time you actually get to the part that matters, Steam’s refund period will have long expired.
Why does this matter? The issue isn't merely that the prologue is long. It's that the game spends those opening hours asking you to invest in routine quests and introductions before giving you a compelling reason to care. The result is an opening that feels less like building tension and more like waiting for the story to begin.
Switch Mode Makes Single-Enemy Fights Painfully Easy
Echoes of Aincrad’s combat is sort of like what you get if you take Tales of Berseria’s core system and then slap a bunch of Soulslike mechanics on it to control the pace. Basically, you run around trying not to get hit, take some cheap shots in while the enemy is distracted or is vulnerable, and sprinkle in a skill or two when you have a chance. But while that may seem straightforward enough, having a stamina bar that dictates your ability to attack, guard, and dodge roll forces you to pace yourself steadily and do some real-time resource management similar to when playing Soulslikes.
The result is decently challenging and actually rather enjoyable, especially considering that the game almost requires you to use every single mechanic, particularly during boss fights. This is further reinforced by how responsive the controls are, making sure that your actions are always reciprocated immediately by your character. Plus, the progression system is very well-designed, essentially forcing you to grow with the challenge thanks to its weapon master system and early game scarcity on upgrade materials. It means every escalating difficulty with boss fights feels like a reward for your commitment and effort.
That seems to be the intent, anyways. But in practice, it’s quite different. That’s because your characters’ default attack order, the Switch Mode, makes it way too easy to breathe.
The premise is simple: when you’re taking defensive actions, your companion(s) become aggressive; and when you go on the attack, they step back and recover their stamina. On paper, this creates a natural rhythm where the party rotates between attacking and covering one another. The reality, however, is that it means enemies constantly have another target to focus on. Instead of forcing you to manage stamina under pressure, the system frequently hands you opportunities to disengage, recover, and re-enter the fight at your own pace.
But while it’s straightforward enough, the aggro management that results from it gives you so much allowance for error that it’s almost impossible to die unless you try to match the enemy’s attacks head on. In fact, even after three dozen hours of playing, I’ve only died more than once against the same enemy a handful of times—and almost all of those were because I failed to do crowd control and got mobbed to death.
It’s disappointing because it undermines the premise the game is trying to sell. The game wants you to fear every encounter, but instead you learn that every single-enemy encounter has a massive safety net.
AI Makes Mob Fights a Massive Pain
On the other hand, it’s a different story altogether once we get into multi-enemy encounters. There’s a lot of these, by the way, since the massive aggro radius of enemies and their abundance on the overworld means almost every encounter is one. Oh, and you’re not even safe during boss fights since an overwhelming majority of them can summon trash mobs.
To understand why this becomes such a problem, it helps to look at how well-designed Soulslikes typically handle groups of enemies. That is, they deliberately change their behavior depending on how many enemies are engaged with you at once. Basically, only a limited number of enemies are allowed
to attack at once while the rest circle, intimidate, and pressure you while they wait their turn. This gives you enough leeway to fight back while still feeling a real difficulty spike in the encounter.
Echoes of Aincrad’s AI don’t act this way. Regardless of how many of them are in the field, they always act like they’re the only one fighting. So you will often end up in a situation where a handful of them charge at you and overlap their attacks, essentially creating a wide and continuous string of persistent hitboxes.
Like there was one time I had to fight an elite enemy whose main attack involved bouncing around the place for several seconds, all the while a handful of trash mobs aggroed onto me at the same time. The latter are easy enough to deal with since they die from two normal attacks, sure, but I had to waste too much time waiting for a safe window to attack because by the time the elite stopped bouncing, the other mobs had already begun attacking again. The encounter itself wasn’t difficult at all, but just the experience was so irritating that I almost closed the game right then and there.
As a result, rather than testing your skill in timing or reading enemy attacks, these encounters simply test your patience. You’re forced to kite enemies around while waiting for any sort of opportunity to retaliate (unless you’re okay with facetanking a hit or two). This is a genre that’s supposed to revolve around tense, skill-driven combat, but instead it regularly devolves into a drawn-out war of attrition, where victory comes less from mastering the fight and more from hoping the enemies finally give you a chance to stab their eyes out.
Honestly, it's incredibly telling that one of the most desirable upgrades I found isn't one that makes you better at combat, but one that lets me run away from it faster.
The Overworld Experience Drags Everything Around It Down
Everything discussed so far—from the story taking several hours to get going to the frustrations of the enemy AI—might sound like isolated criticisms. They aren't. That's because there's very little narrative content during that stretch for the story, while the problematic AI wouldn't be nearly as damning if you didn't have to fight so many enemies. Instead, you'll spend about 90% of your time trudging through one of the emptiest recreations of an MMO overworld I've seen this year.
This exploration is the bane of Echoes of Aincrad’s existence. And that’s because for the relatively massive size of its maps, its objectives and save points are spaced leagues apart. Plus, there are so many enemies along the way that getting to every objective becomes a gauntlet in itself. It doesn't help that they seem to foam at the mouth the moment they spot your silhouette half a map away. Oh, and have I mentioned that almost every enemy outruns you and only breaks aggro after probably half a minute of chasing you around?
Yes, there are also other things to do in any area, of course. There are hidden dungeons to discover, rare items to farm, materials to collect, and so on. Unfortunately, they do little to break up the slog, especially since the majority of treasure chests contain items you can just buy or craft anyway. Plus, the game's generous drop rates and Soulslike scaling mean you'll rarely feel compelled to seek them out until much later, leaving the bulk of exploration to consist of little more than running between objectives.
There aren’t even any non-essential “player characters” to be seen on the field. How could they immerse us in the MMORPG feel without those?
It’s so sloppily designed that it actively undermines everything that interacts with it. For example, despite its genuinely fun combat mechanics, you have to fight so many trash mobs going from point A to point B that the AI becomes a specter that’ll haunt you throughout the experience. The audiovisuals take a hit, too; environments that initially do a good job selling Aincrad's scale gradually lose their charm after hours of running across the same winding paths and landmarks until they're remembered less as locations and more like obstacles with color and texture.
Worst of all, though, is how it forces the story’s pace to become absolutely glacial. Like, even when you see one of your companions in danger within shouting distance of where you are, just the knowledge that there’s still a winding path filled with enemies between you and them just kills all the suspense—and if this was reality, probably your friend, too.
Is Echoes of Aincrad Worth It?
Wait for a big sale, even if you’re a big SAO fan
Regardless of how much you're willing to tolerate a parallel Sword Art Online story set in a dead recreation of its world, it's difficult to recommend Echoes of Aincrad at its current asking price. Its exploration system is so poorly designed that it actively poisons the strengths of everything around it. That's simply too large a caveat.
At a cent short of seventy dollars, you could instead buy three copies of Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, keep one for yourself, give the other two to friends, and still have ten dollars left over to, I don’t know, buy some snacks with.
Sure, Echoes of Aincrad isn't completely devoid of merit. There's a good combat system, a satisfying enough RPG progression, and an intriguing story buried underneath all the slog. But until its price better reflects the experience it actually delivers, it's difficult to recommend outside of a deep sale.
Game8 Reviews
