Echoes of Aincrad

i wish it had online play maybe that will come later down the road

流程很無趣

I’ll start with the few positive things this game has: Good art direction. Good optimization. And that’s pretty much it. Almost everything else is wrong. ## Boring Combat The first two or three hours are actually decent because you’re still unlocking weapon skills and learning the mechanics. But once you unlock your three skills, the combat becomes incredibly repetitive. You can’t combine attacks and skills like in SAO: Hollow Realization. There are basically no real combos. You just have a light attack and a heavy attack. The only variation is pressing heavy attack before the final light attack, which triggers a slow animation where you can’t move or do anything. The parry system is also terrible. Enemy attack patterns feel strange, and there’s no satisfying weapon contact like in Sekiro or similar games. When you successfully parry, the enemy doesn’t lose posture, get stunned, or become vulnerable in any meaningful way. Instead, a button appears on the screen, and you have to press it to trigger a cinematic where your companion attacks the enemy. It isn’t an in-game animation that flows naturally with the combat. The game literally pauses, changes the camera, plays the same cinematic, and then continues. It looks cool the first few times. After seeing the exact same animation over and over again, it becomes annoying and makes me avoid parrying entirely. Dodging is fine. Nothing special, but it works. ## “Skills” This is where you would expect cool animations, effects, build variety, and combat depth. Bandai Namco somehow managed to completely ♥♥♥♥ it up. First of all, you can only equip three weapon skills. There are no extra skills, battle skills, buffs, or any of the other systems we have seen in the anime and previous SAO games. At least with the one-handed sword, the skills don’t have interesting effects or interactions. In Hollow Realization, you could combine skills to maximize damage, interrupt enemies, and create an actual build. Here, you just press one of three buttons whenever the cooldown finishes. Then you have the two companion skills, which are basically cinematics with cooldowns. You can be in the middle of a boss fight, about to get hit, press your companion’s skill, and suddenly the camera changes. You watch your companion do their attack, and when the cinematic ends, the fight continues with you standing safely away from danger. It feels less like a combat mechanic and more like a reset button. Some cinematics are shorter and some are longer, but they all completely destroy the flow of the fight. Your companions don’t even feel like actual party members. They are basically two extra skill buttons with legs. They barely take damage, they don’t need to be managed, and most of the time their health bars are completely full. ## “Exploration” Calling this exploration is honestly a scam. There is no real exploration. You accept a quest in town, the game teleports you to the assigned area, and then you walk almost completely straight until you reach the objective. Sometimes you move slightly to the left or right to open a chest, and that is apparently what Bandai Namco considers “exploring the vast world of Aincrad.” There are no interesting paths, secrets, hidden locations, dangerous areas, or reasons to look around. It’s basically a collection of linear corridors pretending to be an open world. ## Loot The loot system barely exists. Most chests give you consumables that you can already buy in town or a tiny amount of gold. There is almost no unique equipment, no exciting rare drops, and nothing that makes you feel rewarded for exploring or defeating a boss. You kill a boss, open the final reward, and receive another useless item that you could have bought from a shop. There is no excitement. No moment where you see a drop and think, “♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I finally got it.” The game simply has nothing meaningful to offer as a reward. ## The Game Itself The game is massively overpriced. The mode that many people actually want to play, Death Game Mode, is locked behind either completing the entire game or paying extra money. And even after unlocking it, you have to create a second save file. Personally, I prefer playing with one save because I’ve accidentally messed up games before by having multiple saves. Death Game Mode also starts from the tutorial, which is incredibly boring. So, to play what is supposed to be the most interesting mode, you either have to complete more than 50 hours of the normal game or pay around $20 extra and replay several hours of tutorials. There is barely any story either. It is mostly recycled SAO material, while your custom character stands silently in the background listening to companions talk about random nonsense. Your character doesn’t feel involved. You don’t feel like an important part of the story. You are simply there to watch everyone else talk. I’m a huge fan of this franchise, and that is exactly why this game disappointed me so much. I genuinely feel juked and scammed. They promised an ambitious SAO experience and delivered something that feels like a small indie project while charging the price of a AAA game. Honestly, if you want to play an SAO game, just buy Hollow Realization instead. It costs around $60 less, has better combat, better skills, more build variety, more exploration, better loot, and will probably give you many more hours of actual fun than Echoes of Aincrad.