Echoes of Aincrad Review – Sword Art Offline

Though it boasts a good deal of creative ideas and a fresh take on the Sword Art Online narrative, Echoes of Aincrad is unfortunately held back by surprisingly outdated mechanics and a repetitive gameplay loop. There’s certainly care and consideration put into this one, and it’s more enjoyable than past Sword Art Online games, but it’s not enough to make this game stand out for any but the most hardcore series fans.

I was optimistic about Echoes of Aincrad when I previewed it last month, as it seemed like a novel take on Sword Art Online’s oft-told story, with sharper gameplay than past games in the series. While I was right about these things, a number of peculiar design choices and the extremely repetitive nature of the game drag it down from what it could be, leaving it to settle into a rougher time than anticipated.

Echoes of Aincrad’s gameplay is weightier than previous Sword Art Online games, with each attack feeling heavy and impactful. You’ve got light and heavy attacks with which to take on enemies, as well as special attacks specific to each weapon type. There are various swords, axes, and the like to mess with, so you can try out multiple gameplay types. Slashing through foes is surprisingly visceral, with most enemies getting bisected by your strong attacks – a feature that adds to the “life or death” tone of the plot. 

The issues begin here, though, as actually experimenting with different weapons is a challenge. You can only swap weapons when visiting your chest at a town’s inn, and you can only really leave town when doing a quest, so you have to go through several screens and loads in order to use a different weapon. There are a lot of moments like this throughout Echoes of Aincrad, where (what I assume is) immersion in the concept of Sword Art Online overrules convenient game design.

Being unable to pause the game, even during cutscenes, is another such example of this. I get that it’s emulating the idea of being trapped in an online game, but as this is an offline RPG, it just seems like a needless frustration. Similarly, you can’t take on Main Quests and Side Quests simultaneously, as leaving a town for one of them counts as its own instance/mission. Like with weapon swapping, this eats up way more time than necessary and comes off as a design choice from at least a couple of console generations back. Individually, these confusing choices aren’t a huge deal, but there are so many of these that they begin to build up and really inhibit the experience, which is a true shame.

Finally, the mission structure itself becomes repetitive extremely quickly. Pretty much every mission has you accept it at the center of whatever town you’re in, then run from there to a second location across the map whilst battling only a few variations of foes, then, upon reaching your destination, fight a boss version of a common enemy. Though leveling up your weapon skills and character can be satisfying, it’s easy to get tired of fighting the same enemies and similar bosses over and over. Since the game is mainly set on the first couple of levels of Aincrad, it narratively makes sense for there to only be so many enemy and boss types, but this doesn’t alleviate the monotony of having so few variants.

Echoes of Aincrad emulates the anime’s visual style well.

The story is indeed the highlight of Echoes of Aincrad, as it’s a genuinely intriguing take on the first arc of Sword Art Online. Experiencing the narrative from the game’s beta to being trapped in the death game is particularly interesting from the perspective of a group of average players. Seeing this regular group of friends come to terms with their situation and try to survive is thrilling, since there’s no real plot armor for any of them. Additionally, meeting Kirito as an unrelated character makes him seem less like a flawless messiah figure than he is in the anime. I’ve never really been fond of him, but this game is the most I’ve enjoyed his character.

The visual style of Echoes of Aincrad is excellent, looking exactly like the anime. The new characters stand out as distinct, and the environments are colorful and give off a proper fantasy vibe. The cubic digital effects that appear when things spawn or despawn are a fun way to hammer home the “game-within-a-game” feeling, and the ridiculous spatter of orange blood adds real flashiness to the combat. The voice acting is solid as well, giving an appropriate amount of weight to the more emotionally intense scenes throughout.