Echoes of Aincrad PS5 Review – Echoes of Aincrad is another attempt by Bandai Namco to breathe fresh air into the Sword Art Online franchise. This time, stepping away from the Manga and anime cast of Kirito and Asuna, and putting you in the shoes of your own character as you try to survive in Aincrad. Unfortunately, the results are a mixed bag.
Echoes of Aincrad PS5 Review
A Story That Runs Parallel To Sword Art Online
The story takes place before the events of Sword Art Online, with your protagonist participating in the beta. You begin the game with a set character, learn the game’s mechanics, and complete a variety of quests. The beta portion of the story is quite long, lasting about four to five hours.
It’s not until the game’s official launch that you find out you are trapped in the game world and must finish it to escape. It’s here that you can finally create your own character.
The character creator is fairly bare-bones, with few options. You can still make a unique character, but it’s a little annoying to add details like the shape of your nose and mouth because the game’s lighting against the anime textures during the character creator makes it hard to see what the changes look like.
A Familiar Story With A New Cast
Once the events and the announcement of your new life in the game world begin, you set off to finish the game and escape. It’s the same concept as Kirirto’s story, just more derivative. You make new friends as you progress and even encounter characters from the source material whom you can invite to help you in your quest.
Unfortunately, it all takes a long time to get going. You spend a lot of time in the early stages of the game doing simple things like looking for a sword that gives you an advantage early in your journey, and then deciding to join a raid that a random stranger invites you to.
This, unfortunately, is the majority of the game. For the first twenty or so hours, the story doesn’t really go anywhere, and the amount of backtracking you do for baffling reasons is quite annoying.
Many of the main story missions send you into a dungeon to force you to return to town the moment you find it, without even having you explore it. It almost feels like I’m playing a scout for everyone else instead of the main protagonist in my own story.
Strong Combat When You Aren’t Taking Everything Down With Ease
Combat is where the game truly shines—taking elements of hardcore RPGs like FromSoftware’s Souls formula. You have two health vials, and defeated enemies respawn when you find and rest at a safe zone.
In combat, you have access to three skills that use a Skill Point bar that refills when you defeat enemies. You can also use two other skills to direct your teammate to use a support skill or a tag-team combo. You can’t really control anyone other than your main hero, which is a shame, as your teammates don’t really add much to help you out on their own.
Outside of your standard attacks and skill use, you need to watch your stamina, which drains quickly if you aren’t careful, and beware of enemy attacks. The game tells you enemies are dangerous and teaches you how to parry attacks, which is useful because if you parry an attack, you can command your partner to counter with a follow-up attack.
Plenty Of Weapons And Skill To Play With
You can choose one of six weapons, each offering unique skills to unlock and use. Some weapons let you block and parry attacks, while others force you to dodge. That is nice because if you perform a perfect dodge, you can use the counter follow-up attack, as you can with a shield.
You level up and distribute attribute points as you see fit, and the more you put into an attribute, the more passive abilities it unlocks, such as increasing the window for parrying and dodging, or increasing your critical chance and damage.
They teach you all these mechanics, but in all honesty, you can ignore most of them if you’re playing anything except the games Death Game Mode. The game just isn’t that hard. Even playing on standard normal difficulty, I never had any problems defeating anything.
The Boar Hunting Simulator
This is also one of the game’s biggest drawbacks: almost 90% of enemies you encounter can be killed with a single strike. Aside from bosses that take longer to defeat, nothing else poses a challenge.
Bosses are the only fun I had defeating, as they posed a challenge and forced me to use all my abilities and skills. These bosses also have stages that reset after you cut off a limb or destroy a piece of armor, along with part of the boss. You also get a pretty cool cutscene when you defeat bosses, showing you cutting them in half or decapitating them.
As you explore the world, you encounter many enemies, but they pose no danger. What’s worse is the lack of variety among enemies. Boars are your main enemy. For almost 30 hours, you face boars and more boars. It’s like I was playing a boar hunting simulator.
Fight Everything As You Can’t Escape Anything
You later encounter wolves, bees, and Cobalts. These are the variety of enemies you face for almost the entire game. It’s lazy and taxing. Even the game’s bosses are just variations of these enemies—a Lighting Element Bore, a Fire Element Bore, A Poison Attribute Bee, and so on.
Once you defeat these bosses, they start to appear as Elite Monsters in the field that you can face off against. I say can, but really, you don’t have a choice. Enemies chase you forever. They never stop. Most of the time, your teammates won’t defeat them, even though a single hit stops them.
This became an annoyance you can’t escape; it’s easier to defeat everything that spots you than to try to run past it. What makes this worse is that your teammate will sometimes go out and engage enemies on their own while you’re trying to reach the next quest marker.
Exploration Locked To Quests
The world is also not as open as you may think. Maps are locked, and you’re only allowed to explore the areas leading to the quest marker. If you try to go off the beaten path to explore, the game stops you and tells you that you’re leaving the quest area.
The areas you get to explore are barren and full of nothing interesting. There are hundreds of gathering points for materials and some chests, but even the chests don’t really offer many rewards. Most chests contain only currency, but some provide blueprints for new weapons and armor.
Unfortunately, these chests are revealed on the map the moment you rest at a safe zone. Some even appear that you can’t even acquire because the game won’t let you go to the area as part of the quest you’re undertaking. This takes away the reward of exploring this world on your own and finding chests and secrets.
A Lifeless World In And Out Of Town
Outside of towns, you won’t encounter other players or NPCs. For a simulated MMO, you would think you would see other players trying to survive or face off against enemies, but there is nothing. Even in towns with plenty of NPCs and characters, you can’t interact with any of them; they simpy walk by and look like they’re having the time of their lives, even though their death is constantly looming around the corner.
Towns are where you can glamorize your character, allowing you to equip whatever armor you want while using another’s look. Equipping weapons and upgrading your character can also only be done in town.
Crafting And Leveling Up Are Locked To Towns and Inns
You’ll pick up a lot of loot on your travels and level up multiple times, but you can’t equip or distribute points until you return to your room at the Inn. It’s really annoying, but then again, the game isn’t so difficult that you have to return often.
The Blacksmith is the most important person in town, and you’ll spend the most time there. Crafting new weapons and armor from blueprints you discover, and upgrading and synthesizing.
Synthesizing weapons lets you transfer passive attributes from other weapons to the one you’re using. Once you do this, the weapon you take these attributes from is destroyed, so be careful if it’s a weapon you want to keep.
Varied Locations To Explore Held Back By Copy/Paste Dungeons
There are a variety of locations, and for the most part, they are pretty. Lush grasslands, Castle Keeps, Swamps, and forests are just some of the environments you’ll come across. Unfortunately, the dungeons themselves are terrible. They are repetitive in design, and the developers don’t even try to hide their laziness.
You’ll enter a dungeon with multiple paths to reach the next stage. The layout of the second floor of the dungeon is identical to the last floor, down to the Treasure Chest locations.
Character models look great, and the effects when you cut off pieces of enemies’ bodies or finish them off are also visually impressive. Instead of blood, a bunch of lava-looking liquid spews everywhere before the enemies break up into polygons and disappear.
The sound design is also decent, with meaty, weighty attacks, and the voice acting is actually pretty good. Unfortunately, the soundtrack is underused. There are a lot of stretches of time when you don’t hear any music at all, and it only really kicks in during boss fights.
Echoes of Aincrad should have been a defining title for the Sword Art Online gaming franchise, but in the end, it feels like another quick cash grab. The game feels unfinished with so much emptiness and lack of depth. There are things to enjoy in Echoes of Aincard, but they are few and far between.
Echoes of Aincrad releases on July 9, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, and PC.
Review code kindly provided by PR.