Echoes of Aincrad: Sword Art Online PS5 Review

Gameplay

Graphics

Audio

Value

Summary: Echoes of Aincrad is a solid albeit middling new entry that adds some enjoyable elements to the franchise. However, many of its gameplay mechanics make the game more frustrating and tedious, ultimately hindering the overall experience.

3.5

Imperfect Aincrad

Echoes of Aincrad: Sword Art Online is the latest installment in Bandai Namco’s long line of games based on the light novel and anime series. This time, the game puts players in Aincrad, where they follow events set before and during the anime’s first season and the series’ first arc. The game’s narrative is incredibly engaging for the most part, and the gameplay is incredibly fluid, fun, and intuitive. However, some annoying features and aspects hinder the full experience.

Unlike most Sword Art Online games, Echoes of Aincrad follows you and your character, who’s a beta tester for the early version of the titular game Sword Art Online. You meet other characters who are gleefully enjoying and taking on the challenges of the game with other beta testers.

While you encounter several elements seen in the series like Player Killers and even news of Kirito, the prologue is mostly uneventful. However, with the introduction of Game Master, who forces real-world deaths into the game, the narrative fully kicks off, and your player, along with their friends, must find ways to get stronger and challenge several floors to escape their new predicament while avoiding the many dangers and hurdles along the way.

The game’s narrative provides a new refreshing angle to the series as it is set before and during the events of the anime’s first season but follows a new character and their companions. It serves as a side story to Kirito’s events. As such, players who are familiar with the series will learn more about Aincrad and feel like they’re a part of the world.

They even meet the anime’s characters and get to see the events of the first season unfold through their character. You also see several elements and references from the series in the game that make sense since you’re playing a video game, from simple things like the UI to narrative elements and more. The narrative development is also compelling, as these new perspectives and characters are unique and engaging.

It’s a shame, however, that Aincrad is not very engaging outside of quests, as despite being an open-world game, the environments are dull, the NPCs are slow, generic, and unimpressive, and there isn’t much to do outside just playing the story quests, as even the side quests are unimpressive.

Gameplay-wise, Echoes of Aincrad is fantastic. Gameplay is done through third-person action combat where players can use several types of weapons, combat arts and skills, have AI partners to back them up, and more. Combat is fast and fluid, and fun. Using weapons and the several weapon arts you unlock as you progress the game are incredibly intuitive, flashy, fun, and not too complicated. The best part of combat are the boss fights, many of which are surprisingly fun.

While bosses start out as easy cannon fodder, as players progress, they’ll encounter tougher bosses that require different ways of defeating them. Most boss fights will require players to cut off limbs, and every boss has several phases, with each phase seeing a switch in their fighting style, and they get tougher and more unpredictable as the fight progresses. Lastly, the background music heard during the boss fights sounds epic for most fights.

That said, several parts of gameplay are tedious and borderline irritating. For one, traversing several of the open world areas and dungeons can be a nightmare, as some areas are just inaccessible while others can only be reached through specific pathways. It doesn’t help that the minimap makes it hard to find where to go because it’s so minimized, forcing most players to open the full map to check where they’re going. Players also cannot teleport off the map and can only teleport from specific rest points, which adds to the tedium.

What’s worse is that you can’t make jumps to areas to skip all the walking and running, as if you fall even one foot, your character will faint, and you’ll be teleported back to the ledge you fell from. Traversal aside, the game also doesn’t let players swap out weapons and armor on the fly, as they’ll have to go all the way back to the town to do so. This means they can’t test out weapons they get until the next quest, which is incredibly annoying.

Echoes of Aincrad also features soulslike elements like dodge rolls, specific areas for teleportation, and how resting forces enemies in the area to respawn. However, almost every other element is not soulslike, which is annoying, as it feels like the game included these Soulslike elements for convenience rather than relevance. Lastly, the game also has awful enemy variety, as most enemies you encounter are just slight variations of the enemies you’ve already encountered several times. All these hassles devalue the game by making the gameplay experience unnecessarily tedious.

Visually, the game excels with its environmental backgrounds and art direction. The colors are vibrant, the visual effects are striking, and the character and monster designs are unique. However, while some character models are decent, others, especially those for many monsters, look really bad due to the game’s generic-looking 3D CGI aesthetic. Despite this, the game runs smoothly on PlayStation 5 in both Performance and Quality modes.

Final Thoughts?

Overall, Echoes of Aincrad is a solid albeit middling new entry that adds some enjoyable elements to the franchise. However, many of its gameplay mechanics make the game more frustrating and tedious, ultimately hindering the overall experience.

About the Author

Abdul Saad Abdul Saad is an avid gamer and computer geek. He's been writing for four years on news, reviews, previews, and more on multiple gaming sites. When he isn't writing or playing the latest JRPG, he can be found coding games of his own or tinkering with something electrical.

Echoes of Aincrad: Sword Art Online PS5 Review