Echoes of Aincrad: Sword Art Online Review – A Souls-Like That Wastes Its Own Potential

Echoes of Aincrad is a fresh retelling of Sword Art Online's original Death Game arc, swapping out series hero Kirito for a custom protagonist and promising a bigger-budget, reworked take on the franchise. On paper it sounds like exactly the reset the series needed. In practice, it stumbles at nearly every turn.

The game opens with a three-hour beta-test prologue that doubles as a tutorial, and the slow, methodical pacing never really lets up after that. The story takes hours to gain momentum, and the quest design standing between you and the narrative beats borders on tedious — large but empty environments where you sprint between objective markers, with treasure chests that almost never contain anything worth finding. Enemy variety is thin, and the interconnected map, while sizeable, feels hollow. That said, the game does capture the emotional tension and underlying dread that define the source material better than previous SAO titles, and the character-driven cutscenes carry just enough intrigue to keep things moving. The review also flags something the marketing doesn't shout about: Echoes of Aincrad is, functionally, a Souls-like — complete with safe-area checkpoints and death mechanics that mirror the genre, albeit in a more accessible form.

Sword Art Online as a game franchise has had a rocky history. Bandai Namco has published multiple entries — the Hollow series, Fatal Bullet, Alicization Lycoris — with varying degrees of success, none of them breaking through as a must-play action RPG. Echoes of Aincrad appears to be the most deliberate attempt yet to course-correct, with a higher production budget and a structural overhaul. The choice to use a custom hero rather than Kirito is a meaningful creative decision that opens the story to players less familiar with the anime, and the atmospheric improvements are real. The problem is that good atmosphere alone can't carry a game when the core gameplay loop — the questing, the exploration, the combat variety — doesn't hold up its end of the deal.

The verdict from Push Square is clear: the bones of a genuinely good SAO game are here, but they're never properly built upon. Fans of the series will find enough to appreciate, but anyone hoping this is the entry that finally delivers on the franchise's potential will likely come away frustrated.