I have to admit that I have maybe been too hard on Sword Art Online. In the 2010s, I was still finishing up college; I had only just recently gotten back into anime, and fancied myself quite the S.A.O. hater. Back then, it was easy to dunk on the series' obvious power-fantasy shtick and its harem-anime trappings for being shallow and juvenile. Now, in 2026, I wish I could go back in time and shake Little(r) James by the shoulders and scream, “You fool! You have no idea what kinds of isekai are waiting for you in the Dark Ages that are to come!”

The point is, I've honestly been thinking about diving back into the world of Sword Art Online for a while now to give it another chance, and Echoes of Aincrad seemed like the perfect opportunity to do just that. It is, after all, designed to be perfectly accessible even for folks that wouldn't know their Kiritos from their Kagomes, with the customizable player character experiencing the inciting events of S.A.O. in real time right alongside the anime's main characters. While you and your crew of friends do eventually cross paths with major and minor players from the anime, Echoes of Aincrad is meant to be an epic adventure all your own.

I don't want to oversell the narrative quality of this adventure too much. It takes a very long time to get going - it was over five hours until I finished the prologue and got to properly customize my character, and the actual plot of the quest didn't begin to take shape until I was nearly halfway through the lengthy campaign. The game's side-quests don't do much to capitalize on the massive storytelling potential of this series' whole setup, either. Instead of exploring all of the unseen and potentially fascinating corners of Aincrad that are being occupied by tens of thousands of traumatized hostages, almost all of the side-quests are your garden-variety “Go here and kill a boss or pick up some obscure item” MMO filler.

The supporting characters that join your silent protagonist in their quest to survive Aincrad are all likeable enough, especially Iori, though the game's stiff character animations and mostly flat cutscenes don't do them many favors. It's a shame that we're once again stuck with a silent self-insert protagonist whose only modes of communication are the occasional nod or shrug. When it comes to games that take place within a made-up MMO, like the titles in the .hack franchise, I think the stories almost always benefit from making the party of gamers feel like real companions. This is hard to do when you have a protagonist who is physically incapable of contributing to any aspect of the story that doesn't involve fighting. So, while the story of Echoes of Aincrad never irritated or angered me, it largely failed to provide much more than mildly engaging context for the quests I was constantly running. It's a perfectly serviceable remix of the original Sword Art Online events that takes too long to establish a meaningful reason for why this particular hero's adventure is worth following over The Other Guy's.

What I have to give Echoes of Aincrad credit for, though, is that it really does nail the “epic” part of the “epic adventure” assignment, at least when it comes to the presentation of Aincrad itself. I've checked out some of the older Sword Art Online games before, and while they were doing their best on older hardware and limited budgets, Echoes of Aincrad is the first time I've been truly impressed by Aincrad as a world. The game-within-a-game has been brought to life with gorgeously detailed and huge maps in Unreal Engine 5. While I have seen reports of some unstable performance and poor optimization on the PC build of the game, it ran more-or-less flawlessly on my base PlayStation 5. The vistas of Aincrad's various zones were nothing if not beautiful to look at as I wandered through them, and some of the dungeons impress with their creative theming and wild layouts. Given the improved lighting and more densely decorated environments that you get on Quality Mode, that is how I opted to play most of the time, but folks who want even smoother frame rates can opt for the Performance Mode option instead.

Though the world of Aincrad famously contains 100 vast “floors” of many different zones and biomes, Echoes of Aincrad contains your player and their party's adventures to just the first two. This isn't much of a problem, though, because players will have plenty of hills, forests, savannahs, and dungeons to explore over their dozens of hours with the game. All the while, Echoes of Aincrad manages to give its world a lush degree of detail and atmosphere that gives the entire Sword Art Online setting much more personality than I initially gave it credit for. This is by no means a production on the level of Elden Rings Lands Between or Final Fantasy XIV's Eorzea, but for the first time Aincrad feels like the kind of vast fantasy video-game dreamscape that it was always meant to be.

There is a downside to the impressive hugeness of Echoes of Aincrad's maps. I'm not so much complaining about the fact that the game isn't a bona fide open world like most MMORPGs are; Bandai Namco has opted for a Monster Hunters-esque format of chunking out various segments of each floor across the game's various Primary and Side Quests, which I think makes for a solidly paced campaign. No, the problem is that the size of the maps and the linear mission structures feel at odds with each other when it comes to actually exploring and traversing them. In short, there are only three things you will ever be doing on any given map: You will running around huge swathes of land to unlock checkpoints that reveal more of the map or the occasional collectible; you will take the occasional detour to hunt down treasure chests; and you will fight many, many monsters in between the beginning of the quest and the objective marker on the other side of the map.

We'll get to the combat in a minute, but one of the aspects of Echoes of Aincrad that is most obviously in need of improvement is the fact that the game feels so big but so empty. You never run into any NPCs (either of the in-universe or literal variety) who are getting up to their own quests, there is not much in the way of puzzles or other minigames to break up the routine, and your party companions don't have much to say beyond the usual barks of support and tactical advice. To be clear, I don't think the maps or the non-combat gameplay loop is bad, but it is single-minded and bare-bones to a degree that will likely turn a lot of players off after more than a few hours. I myself often needed to have a podcast or audiobook at the ready to help kill time while I spent obsessively seeking out all of the game's treasure chests and doubling back across zones to complete side quests. Personally, I found the experience to be cozy in its own right, but I acknowledge that you shouldn't have to bring your own supplementary materials to help stay entertained when you're already supposed to be having fun playing the video game.

That said, I really did have a good time with the meat of Echoes of Aincrad's content, which is its combat. What we have here is a pretty fluid and satisfying take on the very trendy “Soulslite” approach to ARPG design that has taken the industry by storm these last few years. Most of you will know the drill by now: Attacks and special moves are mapped to the shoulder buttons, and combat emphasizes encounters with oversized bosses and mobs of minions that you must parry, dodge, and smash your way through to survive. There are a variety of weapons to specialize in, from swords and daggers to greatswords and giant hammers. Each of them plays differently and scales up based on different stat level-ups, and you can also improve the weapon levels by fusing and dismantling the hundreds of item pickups that you'll be Hoovering up as you progress through the maps for each mission. While the game could stand to use more enemy and boss types to bolster its roster of baddies, the core gameplay loop of slicing-and-dicing your way through the digital hordes to get new gear and crafting materials is very fun.

For anyone who sees the “Soulslite” descriptor and worries that Sword Art Online is trying to make you suffer for your entertainment, worry not. The game has a variety of difficulty levels that you can scale up if you want more of a challenge and better loot, but the Normal gameplay experience is very smooth going. The game doesn't punish death with any loss of experience or anything, either, so more casual gamers should have no problem getting a kick out of killing many thousands of enemies across the first two floors of the game.

If anything, the game is a little too forgiving in most respects, especially if you are a completionist that goes for all of the treasure chests and bonus mini-boss fights in each quest. It wasn't long before I had more Col (aka money) than I could ever hope to spend until the very late stages of the end- and postgame. I rarely needed to actually craft anything, since I could just buy every item I could want without recourse and have gold to spare. Eventually I had to crank up the difficulty, too, because my powerful gear and overleveled stats made the Normal-level enemies such pushovers. That's what difficulty options and gear incentives are for, I suppose.

At the end of the day, while Echoes of Aincrad was an easy game for me to play and enjoy, it is a difficult product to recommend without including some major caveats. The improved visuals, ambitious scope, and entertaining combat were enough to keep me engaged throughout my 30+ hours of play, but I couldn't help but be constantly distracted by all of the elements that made me think, “Man, I hope we get another one of these to iron out some of the kinks.” If the next Sword Art Online game can put some more effort into crafting a stronger narrative and fleshing out its massive world with more meaningful activities and side-content, it could stand a chance of competing with the industry big boys. For now, though, Echoes of Aincrad remains an admirable rough draft of a game that will need another round of polish and edits to stand out.

---

Disclosure: Bandai Namco Filmworks Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings Inc., is a non-controlling, minority shareholder in Anime News Network Inc.