Trapped in Aincrad, Bored After Twenty Hours

Echoes of Aincrad is the first Sword Art Online game that doesn't put you in Kirito's shoes. Instead, you create your own character and experience the events of Aincrad from their perspective. I was never a particularly devoted fan of the series, so I came into this one curious whether it's a good entry point. After more than forty hours, I can say the core idea works really well. Combat finally has the weight previous entries were missing, and the deadly trap atmosphere can pull in even someone who only knows Aincrad from the anime.

The problem is that everything happening between the good moments stretches on far longer than it should. The mission structure gets predictable fast, and your own character rarely affects what happens. I also ran into a handful of frustrating design decisions, like not being able to pause the game at all. It gives the impression that immersion was prioritized over player comfort. Echoes of Aincrad is likable in flashes, but that's probably not enough to earn it a good score.

Every hit has a satisfying weight that previous entries lacked. The class system tied to specific weapons means a one-handed sword plays completely differently from a halberd or daggers, and parrying boss attacks takes real timing rather than reflexively mashing a button at the right moment. The floor boss fights, where I had to read attack patterns spread across several phases, were easily the best moments in the whole game.

What's frustrating is that switching weapons means heading back to your chest at the town inn, since you can't do it out in the field or even at a save point mid-run. Given that characters in the anime swap gear on the fly constantly, that restriction in an offline game feels completely unnecessary. On top of that, you can't pause at all, not even during cutscenes, which was probably meant to symbolize being trapped in the game world but just ends up as an unnecessary inconvenience.

The game opens with a several-hour beta stage where I learn the mechanics, build relationships with other players, and take part in early boss fights before anything turns dangerous. That calm setup pays off later, because when the voice announces that every player is trapped and dying in Aincrad means dying for real, the contrast lands precisely because everything before it looked like a normal, friendly MMO.

Meeting Kirito and Asuna as supporting characters instead of playing as them also works better than I expected. Kirito stops being the infallible hero from the screen and becomes someone I watch from the sidelines, which makes him feel more human than he does in the anime. It's one of the few moments where making the protagonist your own actually changes how the familiar story lands, instead of just being a cosmetic swap of character models.

The quest structure gets predictable fast: enter an instance, clear a wave of enemies, grab an item or escort someone, head back to town for the reward. After a dozen or so hours I started recognizing the pattern well enough that I stopped reading quest descriptions, since I already knew what to expect. The game isn't truly open world, just a set of separate, closed-off areas linked by a map, which only underlines how repetitive the exploration structure really is.

It doesn't help that you can't run a main and a side quest at the same time, since leaving town for either one counts as its own separate instance. The result is that instead of naturally stumbling onto side content along the way, I have to deliberately plan separate trips just to check off a quest I'd have handled in passing in any other game.

Being able to build my own character sounded like the most exciting part of the whole concept, but in practice my hero rarely has any real say in how events play out. Dialogue is limited to choosing the order in which I respond to the same three lines, and the story unfolds exactly the same way no matter what I pick. The game didn't need a branching choice system on the level of The Witcher, but even a little more acknowledgment that I'm playing as a character I actually built, not a passive observer, would have made a real difference.

The supporting cast, meanwhile, sticks to pretty classic anime archetypes, which will probably feel like a welcome return to familiar faces for longtime fans of the series, but for someone without that attachment, it doesn't add much beyond what I've already seen in dozens of other anime RPGs.

Finishing the main story took me around twenty-eight hours, but in that time I only visited the first two floors of Aincrad. That's a reasonable call if the goal is to keep my character's story personal and focused while the wider series plot runs in the background, but at seventy dollars it's hard not to feel shortchanged, especially knowing the anime itself has a hundred floors.

Death Game Mode, a setting that raises the difficulty and tightens resource management, genuinely adds tension the standard playthrough was missing, but in the base edition it only unlocks after a while, while Deluxe and Ultimate owners get it from the start. It's a strange decision that locks the game's most interesting mode behind a more expensive edition instead of making it available to everyone from the start.

Echoes of Aincrad has the best combat the series has ever had, and the moment the beta turns into a deadly trap still lands even for someone with no attachment to the series. The problem is that between those high points sits a lot of repetitive mission structure, unnecessary restrictions like no pause button or town-only weapon swapping, and a story that never quite figures out what to do with the custom hero it gave me.

For series fans who have been waiting for a game that lets them live through being trapped in Aincrad themselves, I'd recommend this without much hesitation, since the atmosphere and attention to detail carry it a long way. For everyone else, I'd wait for a sale or try the free demo before committing to full price for a game that only has two of its eventual hundred floors.