I'm enjoying Echoes of Aincrad. I'll minimize spoilers for those who aren't familiar with SAO.
[h3] Story [/h3]
It's set during the Aincrad Arc so you come across familiar faces and you play a unique character in the story. What's cool is you're a player from the Beta which is a nuance for the story. You get some idea of how SAO was during the Beta which is glossed over in the anime. But for the main story, 10k players are stuck in a VRMMO, and in order to escape the game, all 100 floors of Aincrad have to be completed. From my understanding, Echoes of Aincrad covers the first 2 floors. As a nuance for those unfamiliar with SAO, the anime and original light novels skip a lot of floors. For example, after the first floor boss is cleared, the anime and light novels skip like 40 floors. So far, I believe up to the 8th or 9th floor is written with details, but through the SAO Progressive novels.
[h3] Gameplay and Mechanics [/h3]
I think there's some confusion...Echoes of Aincrad wasn't marketed as an open world game. It's an action/adventure game. Also, if you're familiar with the light novels, it gives a bit of perspective of how the world works. When you perform a quest, you're inserted into an instance of that quest with your party. Therefore, only your party is on the map during that quest. Think of it this way....imagine having to perform a quest with thousands of other players in a shared instance. It would be chaos and mass waiting. Lastly, you're limited to a certain area of the map during a quest.
In regards to the fighting, it's pretty standard. There's light attacks, strong attacks and abilities that are unique to each weapon class. As for the weapon classes, there's swords, rapiers, dagger, axes/blunt, two handed swords/axes/blunts/scythes. Each weapon class has 10 abilities, with 3 allowed to be used at a time. There's a dodge and block mechanic.
[h3] Gripes [/h3]
There's a couple gripes I do have with the game.
- Quests follow a similar flow; there's no real variety. Deploy to a map, fight monsters, explore, fight the boss. It does get tedious.
- No option to turn off auto climbing when sprinting. It's an annoying feature to have your character auto climb a small rock when battling a monster. I prefer having this kind of option off, and using the jump button to do it myself. FYI - auto climbing only occurs during spriting.
- If there's steep terrain, your character slides. However, I've slid on almost level looking terrain. It's very annoying, especially during a fight.
- Partner doesn't draw aggro enough. When you get to the second floor, there's a spine dog monster that can pin you to the ground and chew on you. Your partner can shorten the pin down by attacking the spine dog monster but there's plenty of times when the partner does nothing...even when there's no other monsters around. It's downright frustrating. Also, your partner isn't aggressive enough in general.
- When falling down while sprinting, your character perform a roll. No matter the height, you will always roll. It's a weird and somewhat annoying mechanic. It's initially cool, but becomes an incredibly frustrating mechanic.
- Can't restock items at a checkpoint. It's a weird feature and I'm not sure why it isn't allowed. You'll have to "pause" the quest and return to a town. There's no penalty for "pausing" a quest so it doesn't really make sense why you can't restock items at a checkpoint.
[h3] Conclusion [/h3]
As a fan of SAO, I think this is the closest and best experience to the original SAO anime and light novel to date. I especially like the game because it's not from the perspective of Kirito. There are some annoying gripes, but I think a patch would be able to fix them. With that being said, I'd definitely recommend the game to SAO fans. For gamers looking for an action/adventure game, I think it's great, too.
