Echoes of Aincrad

For thirteen years, every mainline Sword Art Online game put you behind Kirito’s eyes. Echoes of Aincrad is the first one to let that go entirely — you build your own avatar from scratch and enter Aincrad as one of the ten thousand players trapped in Kadokawa’s death game, while Kirito, Asuna, and Argo appear as story characters and companions rather than the person you’re controlling. It’s the obvious idea a franchise this long-running should have tried years ago, and the fact that it finally arrived matters more than the game around it entirely deserves.

Critical reception has landed almost exactly where that framing suggests: a “Mixed or Average” 60 on Metacritic, and a similarly split Steam user score. Reviewers largely agree on what works and what doesn’t — the disagreement is over how much the good parts can carry the rest.

What actually works

The combat is the clearest success. Built around a weapon-as-class system in Unreal Engine 5, it rewards learning matchups and positioning rather than just gear-checking numbers, and it holds up over long sessions better than most anime-licensed action RPGs manage. Layered on top is Death Game Mode — a single save file, no respawns, permanent consequences — which is exactly the kind of high-stakes structure the source material’s premise has always deserved and rarely gotten in game form.

The framing device helps too. Casting your character as a closed-beta tester who enters the official launch with foreknowledge of early floors and mechanics is a clever way to justify giving a new protagonist a fighting chance next to a cast the audience already knows survives. The original companions built around that idea are better written and more likeable than the average anime tie-in supporting cast, and the presentation — voice work, music, and the sense of scale climbing Aincrad’s floors — is a clear step up in budget from prior SAO games.

Where it falls apart

The complaint that shows up in nearly every review, positive or negative, is the same one: Echoes of Aincrad stretches an MMORPG-lite structure across a AAA-sized runtime, and the seams show. Exploration is repeatedly described as hollow and padded, side content and dungeons repeat their own ideas too plainly, and the custom-protagonist concept the game is built around often isn’t actually used for anything — the narrative frequently proceeds as if any fixed character could have filled the same role. A handful of reviewers who put sixty-plus hours into it came away describing a game with a genuinely strong foundation buried under bloat that a tighter thirty-hour cut wouldn’t have had.

The PC port drew specific criticism at launch, and Denuvo anti-tamper protection with a limited daily activation count is a real point of friction for some players regardless of performance.

The price is the sticking point

At $69.99 for the base game, $89.99 for Deluxe, and $109.99 for Ultimate — on top of separately sold DLC that adds up to roughly $55 more if bought individually — Echoes of Aincrad is asking full AAA money for an experience critics are describing, at best, as a strong first attempt with real structural problems. That math is a harder sell for a Mixed-to-Mostly-Positive title than it would be for something more confidently reviewed.

Verdict

Echoes of Aincrad gets the one thing right that thirteen years of Sword Art Online games got wrong, and its combat and Death Game Mode are proof the underlying idea has real teeth. But repetitive quest design, padded exploration, and a narrative that doesn’t fully use the custom-protagonist premise it’s built around keep it from closing the gap between its ambition and its execution — and the asking price makes that gap harder to overlook. Longtime fans curious about finally playing as themselves in Aincrad will likely find enough here to be worth it; everyone else should wait for a sale or a patch cycle.