Echoes of Aincrad
[This isn't a substantial review of the game; it's an opinion piece. I'm not a (games) journalist, just an enthusiast. I also have yet to finish the game, I'm currently about two thirds through if I had to guess, since I managed to get to the second town in Floor 2 at least.
Also, keep in mind that this post will contain spoilers for the Sword Art Online anime, as well as the games Echoes of Aincrad and maybe Fatal Bullet.
All Screenshots are taken by me in-game.]
These last few weeks I've been playing the new Sword Art Online game Echoes of Aincrad, and if you've stumbled over the Steam or Metacritic reviews you might be wondering: What the heck is going on with this game? Because quite frankly, people either seem to love or hate the game. Me, as a fan of SAO and especially of original Aincrad arc, am having a blast with the game overall, but I am also seeing wasted potential and quite frankly baffling design choices. Still, keep in mind that I'm biased towards liking the game. It's also only the second SAO game I've played, the other one being Fatal Bullet (which I adored despite its flaws as well), simply because I'm not really interested in playing as Kirito, but want to have my own character.
The Premise
This really is one of the strongest parts of the game, and the developers did go to certain lengths to make it shine (although sometimes fumbling over themselves, as we'll see with the companions later). The story follows roughly the same idea as the original anime/light novel arc: You're a player of the new and groundbreaking VRMMO Sword Art Online, which takes place in the floating castle of Aincrad, made up of 100 floors, each connected to the next by a Labyrinth and guarded by a strong floor boss. In Aincrad, only mobs can use magic, players focus on developing their weapon skills (called sword skills, even if you're using a weapon that's not a sword).
But, on day one of the release, something goes wrong: The creator of the game has turned it into an actual death game. Logging out is impossible, and if one dies in the game, the Nervegear (the hardware-headset required to access the game) will send out microwaves and fry the user’s brain, thus killing them in real life as well. The only way to escape, is reaching floor 100 and defeating the floor boss there.
Shortly after starting the real game, we're presented with a ton of NPCs, that sadly don't do anything. But it does look neat.
The Story and Presentation
As stated above, Echoes of Aincrad is one of the few SAO games that actually lets you play your own character inside the story of the game, instead of having you follow Kiritos (more or less) established storyline (the games somewhat follow a slightly different story than the anime/light novels). And for me, this is the worst part of the game. It's not so bad that I would drop it, but for the upcoming DLC at the end of the year, the devs really need to step this part up.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Your character is unnamed and after starting the game, you're dropped into a dungeon in the beta of Sword Art Online (this is also what you can play in the demo, if you're interested), trying to catch up to three friends who are already deeper in the dungeon. In universe, the Beta was much, much smaller with only 1.000 players, compared to the 10.000 on release (yeah, laughable numbers for an MMO, I know), so you're one of 10% here. From here, you meet the actual hero of the story - the person I think we should be playing - Iori. They're a more experienced SAO player who saves us in the beta dungeon; we play alongside them for a while until the beta ends and meet up right at the start of the real game again. They're the first and only companion you can play alongside for the whole game as far as I can tell (some others come and go, some of them to just ... dissapear? Why?).
My problem with that is we barely see our other three friends (I can't remember if we ever meet one of the three in person, and you won't see any of them in the beta again, except as defeated players on the floor) and Iori seems to care much more about them than we do. And everything that happens to us, happens to them as well, so the other NPCs react to their actions and talk to them. But barely to us. Why? Because not only are we nameless, we are also voiceless and our options when asked something are 'Nod' or 'Shake head' in 95% of all cases. Which is significantly worse than in Fatal Bullet, where we're also voiceless, but at least people properly address us regularly and we've got some text options instead of just making faces.
Getting up for yet another day in the death game.
Gameplay
For some reason, a definition of the game that has been thrown around is a SAO 'Soulslike', but I'm not seeing it. While the game does have some mechanics that are typical for that genre, like a bonfire equivalent called safe zones, including refreshing your free healing items there and respawning non-boss monsters, or having a weak and a strong attack, that's just about it. First of all, the game has four different difficulty levels. I'm playing on hard right now (second to highest), and except for some boss fights, the probability of death is still very, very low and most normal enemies go down in 3 hits or less. Second of all, dying doesn't do much if you're not playing the optional death game mode (which deletes your save if you die). There's plenty of safe zones and a map to easily find your way back to where you die (and you can even choose to respawn directly at the boss if you wish) and dying doesn't have any penalties.
Other than that, the gameplay loop will see you accepting quests, warping out into the field, killing monsters and bosses and exploring the surroundings while you fulfill that quest (most quests are pretty much go to X and kill Y). While exploring you can find chests that contain often less than interesting rewards, some contain the coveted blueprints for new armours (the game has a very good transmog system for armour, that really needs to be widened to weapons and shields), some blueprints for weapons (which are good for crafting stuff you use to upgrade your weapons with), some with materials or consumables (rather disappointing) and some simply contain Col, the currency of SAO. Which is useless, because you'll be hoarding the stuff after thirty minutes since there is nothing to spend it on. Luckily, most chests are easy to find, and to me, exploration is more about finding the lore titbits that are hidden all over the maps, while partaking in the very good combat (the best part of the game).
All that said, I haven't used the term 'Loop' here for fun. That's what it literally is, and you're doing that over and over again, because everything else that is in the game, like upgrading your gear and levelling doesn't take a lot of time, and there's absolutely nothing to do inside cities except taking on the occasional side quest. There are no MMO typical crafting skills to level, no housing elements, only short talks with your companions (and they talk at you, not with you, since you don't have a voice), and no other activities. In that regard it's a bit like the Monster Hunter games, where you prepare in town before going out on your hunt. Which brings me to the next part of the game.
Looking back onto the field I've crossed to get to this spot, the world is definitely larger than the small portions we get to play in during the quests make it look like.
Exploration (Or Lack thereof?)
One of the things that has annoyed me the most at the beginning of the game was the strange choice of quest areas. Instead of having large open world bits, every quest has a dedicated area you're walking through, and since there's no climbing or swimming, and falling leads to 'death' (you don't really die, there's a death animation and then you respawn where you fell. Drowning does the same) in some parts of the game the paths you are supposed to take are very narrow and obvious. Some of these quest areas overlap with others, some don't, so there's parts of the game you'll see over and over again, while others you'll only see once, get all the chests, finish the quest and be done with it. But for the most part, exploration progress is saved between these, so if you have a quest in an area, you were in before, you'll be in and out in no time.
But you know what? After nearly 50 hours in now, this is fine to me. It could be better (and I have some ideas below), but it works for the game, and some of the main quest areas are very large. Like, you'll need an hour or two to run all over them to get all chests large. Others, especially for side quests, are small. The annoying part is that you can't revisit any of these areas without restarting a quest, and as soon as you kill the enemy that's at the end you get teleported back home. There's no real free roam, and that's a shame.
The game has a substantial database for information about enemies, weapons, materials and the lore titbits you find, which I find quite fun to look at.
Everything else
There's more that could be said and I'll try to do that in short form here. Combat: Easily the best part of the game. There are six different weapon types in the game (One handed swords, rapiers, daggers, one handed maces/axes, two-handed swords and two-handed maces/axes) and each of them have ten sword skills that make them feel unique, besides the obvious fact that a two-handed sword attack does more damage and is slower than a dagger attack. You can equip three sword skills at a time, which is mostly enough to drain your SP, which you need to execute them and which refreshes by hitting enemies without skills. Attacking, blocking, parrying and sprinting while in combat will drain your stamina though, so you'll need to watch your SP, Stamina and Health during combat. Animations are very good, and some boss kills trigger very satisfying cut scenes.
Companions: Besides advancing the story, every companion has three sword skills they use freely, and you can equip them with better weapons to make them more effective. There are two modes, Free (which will see them run around and attack everything in sight, dealing an okay amount of damage to enemies) and Switch (which you'll know from the Anime/light novel, in which they'll hang back defensively and only attack after you roll away from enemies to recuperate stamina or heal up). Besides that, they come with two Combo skills you can trigger, like healing or AoE damage and they have their own healing items that get refreshed at save points. There's a bunch of well-known companions like Kirito or Asuna (surprise!), but also new characters, half or more of which get sadly snubbed by the story and developers to never be seen again after a while (if not worse). Yeah, I know. Why?!
At least sometimes we're literally the center of the scene.
Enemy Variety: This is one of those topics that gets completely blown out of proportion in my opinion. Yes, you'll be fighting boars nearly throughout the whole game. But not only are they iconic, there's also quite the number of other enemies in the game. Wasp-likes, Spiders (with four legs, so hopefully not as triggering for arachnophobes), Kobolds, Wolves, Bears, Goats, Shrewmen, a plant-based enemy (which I mostly despise), Golems and of course Boars on floor one alone. And all of these have different subtypes, for example there's Kobolds with clubs, with shields, with throwing spears... you get the gist. It just appears to be less because despite the limitations on exploration, the world is large, and you're fighting something approximately every ten seconds. The only point I'll agree with the criticism is with the (mini) bosses. You'll be fighting a certain kobold lord about half a dozen times, which is absolutely laughable. The mini bosses on the maps repeat as well, but those tend to die so fast even on higher difficulties that it doesn't matter too much, really.
Performance/Bugs: Surprisingly, the game runs very well on even low-grade hardware (I ran it on highest model and low texture quality on a 1070, 8th Gen i5 and 16GB Ram with around 40 FPS), and I've yet to hear of any large-scale performance problems or bugs. Personally, the only thing that regularly happens to me is enemies spawning/bugging into the floor or walls and I'm hoping that gets fixed. Other than that, I've only ever seen situations where models bugged out (T-Pose or lying on the floor), and I personally only had a single crash in roughly 40 hours of gametime now, and that right after starting up the game and before loading my save. Graphics: Obviously one must like the anime style, but Aincrad is beautiful, even in 1080p. There's a number of really nice vistas that allow you to see and feel the distance you've walked to get to. Characters and enemies are especially crisp and as said above animations are well done. It obviously won't win any contests compared to games like Cyberpunk or RDR2, but it's good looking nonetheless. Only the cliff faces might need a bit more work in the future.
These killshots for enemies are very satisfying, even if some get a bit repetitive after a while.
What I want to see changed
This is more or less a simple list of things I'd like to see changed sooner rather than later or at least addressed somewhere down the line, for example for the upcoming DLC at the end of the year. But the earlier, the better.
Quality of Life: There's a few annoying things that really needs some change done. For example, you can only level once you're back in town, and there's no weapon swapping in the field as well. Since you'll be levelling out a single weapon type way before the game ends, being able to seamlessly switch between two or even three would make it much easier and seamless. We should also be able to equip 8 pouch items instead of the four currently possible, just to minimise the annoying swapping around to get to items you need for exploration and not for combat.
A character creator 'light' would also be welcome. Just let us change our hair colour, make up and eye colour in towns when we want to. It's attested in the source materials as well, and would give towns something else to go to.
Towns: Speaking of Towns... give us NPCs to talk to! Just random players or game NPCs that tell us about rumours they heard, about life in the town we're in. Just random stuff. Make towns feel lived in, instead of just having people run around in it. Let us listen in to random talks from groups standing around, small events happening in inns or plazas outside of story cutscenes. Mini games to partake in. Things like that.
Exploration: What the game needs is being able to explore what's there easier. We already have a stamina meter, so let us use that for climbing and swimming. Once stamina is empty, we drown/fall off the cliff. Sure, that'll make getting to a few chests easier, but it's already not hard (only annoying), so it really doesn't matter. But it would make traversing the fields easier, especially those that are just long winding roads up mountains and such. And while we're at it, throw in a free roam similar to Fatal Bullet, where we can run around large fields and do several quests in a row without annoyingly having to go back to town after each quest. Since the world is pretty much split into areas between towns, the work is already halfway done.
Skins: This is one of two big things for me, but one that is rather ‘simple’ to introduce and could solve two problems at once. Boring treasure chests and horrible Gil economy. There is already a very nice transmog system as mentioned above, so instead of having money and useless materials inside of chests, have skins in them. Not blueprints for armour (keep those that are in game already!), but just skins that we can use in the transmog system. This won’t break the current balance of the game, won’t need any balancing as well, and a lot of the armour skins could be new takes on already existing ones, or take inspiration from the anime (where’s all the samurai armour Klein and his guild are wearing?). They just need to be distinct enough to not be boring. Additionally, add an NPC in towns that sells clothes skins that people there are wearing. You can sell those for exorbitant prices, like 100.000 Gil per piece, and still, we’d be swimming in money. Then, add a transmog system for weapons and shields as well.
Accessories: Pretty much added on top of the skins I mentioned above. Add in accessories like glasses, brooches (there’s already a story relevant one in there), rings, helmets, circlets, headscarves what have you. Some of these are already in use by NPCs, let us get them as well and add it to the transmog system.
Costume SLots: Have us some different transmogs into costume slots, so we can fast switch between them. And have us use one as a 'city' slot, so that our character immediately switches to comfy clothes (like the town clothes be maybe could buy as skins?) as soon as we enter a town.
Photo Mode: This should be a no brainer. A photo mode with poses, lighting etc. that we can adjust to our liking. As I said, the game is beautiful, and despite a lack of character creation options and the transmog system being unnecessarily tight, it’s fun to take screenshots in game. Lean into it.
Screens liek this would look so much better if we had an actual photo mode.
Character Creation: This one might take a bit of work. But comparing the character creation in Echoes of Aincrad to Fatal Bullet (the two SAO games where we’re fully playing our own character), Echoes absolutely loses. Fatal Bullet had so much more options, so many more sliders and adjustments to be made. It shouldn’t be too much to ask for to copy as much of that over. Especially a HEIGHT slider, that’s missing currently. And if I can be a bit greedy, go ahead and copy a few of those options from Code Vein (part one, never played part two), because that was some insanely nice work in my opinion.
Combat : I need spears in this game. From the whole anime, that’s the only weapon type missing and it’s a damn shame. I’m hoping this one makes it into the first already announced DLC at the end of the year.
Main Character: This is the BIG one. We’re playing our own character, but we’re an absolute side character to Iori. I said that above already, but comparing it to Fatal Bullet, where we’re technically creating TWO characters, both are more meaningful to the story and more involved with people than our character in Echoes of Aincrad. It’s a shame and the main reason why I regularly bite the edge of my table (figuratively, so far).
It's also the hardest to fix, by far. The first step, and absolute least, would be to go ahead and scratch all these Nod and Shake head and whatever else options we have and change them for proper text that fits with what everyone else is saying. The absolute best scenario would be to get some of the voice actors back into the studio and rerecord some of the text lines to accommodate our character and what we’re saying with these new text things. And the best option would obviously be to give our own character a voice themselves. I doubt it’ll happen for the main game and probably not for the upcoming DLC since that’s probably near finished already, but hopefully for the future.
No, I don't want to shake my head damnit!
Pricing: While the game is fun for me, I still think 70$/€ is too much to ask for, but not specifically for Echoes of Aincrad, but pretty much all games. Go down to 60 or even 50 (calling for the price to be 30 like some people do is laughable) and give out digital rewards like special skins or weapons to people who have paid the full price already.
Well, that’s it. There you have it. An opinion piece in an absolutely overlong format like those who’ve read more than one thing from me will or should have expected. And no, I'm not telling you iv you should buy the game or not. If you've read this far, check out the demo if you haven#t already. That's about 80% the same stuff as the main game (and your save carries over), so if you like that one, you will probably like the game as well.
Now, excuse me while I go back to playing the game. I hear there’s some big story revelations coming up that will probably have me foaming by the mouth (and might lead to a second story/spoilers post, who knows).