Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to learn more about Bandai Namco’s newly announced RPG, Echoes of Aincrad, set in the Sword Art Online universe. It’s been a while since that franchise received a new game, and Echoes of Aincrad is clearly aiming for a quality return. What did I learn during this preview? Let’s jump in!
Create your own adventure
First things first, this game takes place during the first arc of Sword Art Online, and while you’ll run into familiar characters from the anime, you won’t play as one. Instead, you are a new player who has to survive in the harsh world of Sword Art Online, where dying in the game means dying in real life, just as in the iconic anime. Shifting away from controlling famous protagonists sounds small, but it’s actually a pretty big deal. It’s clear that Bandai Namco wants to give the players more ownership of their adventure and decisions, and letting them control a completely new character really makes sense. But enough about that, what’s the actual gameplay like?
Well, I saw 15 minutes worth of gameplay where we started our quest by accessing the Main Terminal in the town. Every quest will start this way, and thanks to the quest logbook, you can easily keep track of what you are doing. Once you select the quest, you can also select a partner character from the different characters you’ve met during your adventure. For this quest, we selected Lori, a skilled swordfighter. Once selected, you’ll get teleported to the quest area where you’ll need to clear the objective in order to advance. The objective of the demonstrated quest was pretty simple: we had to return notes to a merchant we had met earlier.
Exploration and combat
Once we entered the quest, we were dropped in a small open-world where we could explore and combat our way through the demo, ending in a spectacular boss fight. The more open approach to these sections and the way you can highlight points of interest on your mini-map reminded me a bit of games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and that’s certainly not bad. Enemies are roaming freely on the map, and when you approach them, they’ll attack. We saw low-level and high-level enemies, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. We couldn’t play the demo ourselves, so it’s hard to get a true feeling of the combat, but it looked like a great action RPG where you deal blows and have to defend yourself against stronger attacks. Your partner will assist you in combat, and you can give them orders to attack, make decisions on their own, or play more on the defense. It really alters the flow of combat, and it’s good to see that your partner isn’t just dead weight. At certain moments, we also saw powerful duo-attacks that can be activated when certain meters are full. Nothing groundbreaking, but it looks pretty fun to say the least.
Besides combat, the game will also allow for exploration. During the demo, we found several treasure chests and other points of interest. By pinning them on our mini-map, they were easy to find but still worth your trouble, as some contained legendary and rare equipment. Exploring and looking around is certainly advised if you want to upgrade your gear or if you want to find upgrades that can certainly help your quest. Of course, 15 minutes isn’t much to showcase how big the world will be or how many secrets are hidden, but it looks pretty decent at this point, if you ask me.
To conclude the demo, we got to see an impressive boss fight where our protagonists had to defeat multiple strong enemies at once. It’s here where all mechanics came together, stringing combos together, dodging attacks, and using your partner’s abilities are all part of the game, and like any other good action RPG, defeating the boss does look thrilling and worth your time. Since it’s an off-hands presentation, it’s harder to talk about the level of difficulty, but I would say it’s hard but fair.
Early conclusion:
Echoes of Aincrad is shaping up to become another fun action RPG set in the Sword Art Online universe. It gives you more freedom to create your character and explore quests in the well-known universe. It’s a bit too soon to say for sure, but after the demo, this one is certainly on my radar.
