Early last month, we were able to play Bandai’s new RPG and, as you may or may not know, it is Sword Art Online: Echoes of Aincrad and, as someone who was a fan of the anime (especially the first season), I was legitimately happy with how I was able to experience what many consider to be the best arc of the anime but from a different perspective. Here are my Sword Art Online: Echoes of Aincrad first impressions based on the 90-minute preview we got to play.
As usual, let me begin with the setting up a bit of context. I watched the first 2 seasons of SAO and I absolutely LOVED Season 1. This was primarily because of how interesting I found the premise of what the first season was built on: if you die in the game, you die in real life. It was the story of how a whole community of gamers got trapped inside a VRMMORPG called Sword Art Online because of the machinations of the game’s creator Akihiko Kayaba taking away their ability to log out of the game. To be able to escape, Kayaba tells them that they need to conquer all 100 floors of the dungeon called Aincrad. What follows is a whole story about how people reacted to this new reality where some preyed on others as they refused to believe that death was indeed permanent while others banded together to beat Aincrad with as little deaths as possible. This was the context that made fans all over the world tune in as this season’s story unfolded and became beloved to many.
Back to Bandai’s new RPG Echoes of Aincrad, you get to relive that experience but NOT as Kirito. You play as one of the people who became trapped in the game and while yes, you may not be Kirito, you are now given the chance to carve out your own path in this iconic period of the anime which also lets you experience the various aspects of this VRMMORPG world that were shown in the anime as well as parts that were not.
So now that we’ve covered premise and story, let’s talk gameplay. Echoes of Aincrad, at its core, is an action RPG with an active battle system. Based on the parts we experienced, it seems to be a 2 person party system similar to what Code Vein has where you have an ally with you to assist you in battle. If you’re looking for a point of comparison, the gameplay has a lot of Souls-like elements to it but is one that leans on the more action-y parts as you’re not exactly faced with amazingly high difficulty enemies and you need to learn attack patterns and such or get heavily punished. You can be a bit more spammy in terms of your attacks when it comes to this one.
The souls-like elements you WILL recognize, however, are the stat allocations you do when you level, a stamina meter that dictates how much you can attack before needing to back off, “bonfire” types of checkpoints that allow you to heal while respawning fallen enemies, and weapon types that mostly determines your skills and attack styles. All in all, it’s a game that possesses Souls-like elements without the amazingly high skill checks when it comes to enemy difficulty.
In terms of my impressions, I honestly loved the fact that we were able to get to experience such an iconic era of the anime. It honestly made me smile as I was able to walk around the Town of Beginnings as I leveled up and prepped for my missions. For fans, I think this will hit an amazing point of nostalgia as you get to explore the various nooks and crannies of the SAO world while having the chance to run into the main characters of the anime and maybe even team-up with them. Heck, even the aesthic of the game’s UI and even the audio design was so familiar to what you would’ve seen in the anime.
The world of the game is nice but the actual gameplay though has both its own hits where it shines and misses that can still hopefully be tweaked by the time the game fully comes out. Exploration-wise, the game does have a lot to offer in terms of having a lot of things to discover in the world around you as there are multiple points of interests in the map which can contain secrets and treasure. Combat feels okay but, when I was playing, I did run into an issue where the stamina meter felt a little bit too restrictive and throttled a lot of my attack sequences. Stamina also became an issue as you technically couldn’t run from mobs around the overworld as the monsters tended to hunt you down aggressively while at the same time, your stamina drains because you’re close to a monster). In effect, this did hamper the overworld exploration.
I was intrigued by the fact that the game does have a dodge and parry mechanic where doing either gives you a prompt to activate a powerful and satisfying counterattack. With the preview I played though, it did seem that dodging was a lot easier to pull off as parry windows did seem to be a tad too strict. This led to me being able to dodge attacks a lot more consistently and reliably than I could parry despite how much I tried to learn the timings.
Leveling is quite clever in this game as there are breakpoints when it comes to Stat Points. When you reach those breakpoints, you are given some nice additional perks like faster attacks, better dodging windows, etc.
What I really am looking forward to are the stories and experiences the game can give you in terms of SAO lore. Like I said, Season 1 is so iconic and beloved that I think that the game has an amazing opportunity to give fans a chance to experience the world that Kirito and Asuna spent so much time in where they not only battled for their lives but they also lived, enjoyed, and grew as people. It would be amazing to explore the various political viewpoints and moral dillemas that the game’s setting allows where you can deal with players who are desperate to escape this world and then see the complete opposite where there are people who don’t want to ever leave because they’re finally in a world where they can be a more awesome version of themselves. I honestly believe that this game’s success can really hinge on how much of the SAO experience can it give to the players and fans of the anime. And on that note, I can’t wait to see more of what this game can offer… and hopefully, they can fix some of the hiccups with of combat.