Hello everyone! I'm new to Reddit and wanted to share my thoughts on this game, as I know it might not be for everyone. Also, just a quick heads-up: I'm Italian, so my English might sound a bit off or unnatural to many of you, but please bear with me! Even though the topic might not appeal to everyone, it is particularly close to my heart as a Sword Art Online fan, so I still wanted to share my analysis of Echoes of Aincrad with you—or rather, a vent about what it could have been.
Let’s clear one thing up right away: nobody was expecting the ultimate MMORPG (I don't think we'll ever see that), and plus, the premises of the original story are hard to fit into a single-player game. But from my point of view, the final game shows how many interesting ideas were held back by development choices that I find unforgivably lazy. I want to clarify that these are just my own deductions and a purely personal opinion.
Watch out, because there will be some spoilers below regarding the story, gameplay, and how quests work.
I'll start by saying that the main plot, for the first ten hours, moves at an excruciatingly slow pace. It doesn't convey the anxiety and tension of being trapped in a death game at all. Fortunately, the narrative finally kicks into gear later on and delivers a few moments more in line with the original work, which gives you a glimmer of hope... too bad that right after, the game trips over its own structural flaws again.
There are only two explorable floors. Two floors in a Sword Art Online game. Obviously, recreating all one hundred floors would never have been possible unless the game was a live service, which would have been an entirely utopian and economically unsustainable option. However, creating just a few more floors by taking advantage of, say, time skips would have helped the progression and the sense of advancement immensely, even at the cost of making the two existing ones smaller.
This rigidity, in my opinion, is fully evident in the level design. On the first floor, walking through massive areas while fighting nothing but wolves, boars, kobolds, insects, and Nepenthes (I hate them) along with all their variants makes the whole experience boring to death. I assume they recycled only these enemy types to pretend to be faithful to the lore of the first floor, but in practice, it’s a choice that kills exploration. The absurd thing is that when you finally reach the second floor, new enemies are introduced—some of which are really annoying and truly unbalanced—but despite the novelty, you still find yourself surrounded by those damn boars you've been demolishing continuously for the previous 20 hours.
It's a real shame, because from an artistic standpoint, certain points of interest and specific zones are really well done and visually appealing. There are some very beautiful views that truly make you say "wow, I'm inside Aincrad," but despite the initial impact, they turn out to be completely useless in terms of gameplay. Don't get me wrong, the text notes you find scattered around are nice because they add interesting details and lore, but on their own, they absolutely don't justify how empty these areas are.
Dear developer, you created a beautiful point of interest, like a ruined tower on a plateau? Then put a unique mini-boss there, maybe a bit tougher than usual, which drops a unique item or weapon once defeated! This wouldn't have been enough to completely fix the repetitiveness, but at least it would have been a way to show me that exploring thoroughly leads to surprises, incentivizing me to search every inch of the map.
I would have preferred a thousand times a smaller map packed with actual activities, rather than these empty roads where I felt like the vast majority of these beautiful backdrops served only to hide chests in absurd ways. And even here, not all chests have useless loot: when luck is on your side and you find the blueprint for an overpowered piece of armor, you're happy and you feel rewarded, of course! The painful part is that most of the time they contain random, filler items that can easily be obtained in other ways, placed there clearly just to stretch the game time.
The exact same frustration can be found in the dungeon design, which I found large, but uselessly so. Take the "Cave of Tears" as an example, which is the first real dungeon on the first floor: you end up going there for three different side quests. The problem is that the structure is so repetitive and always the same that running through it over and over becomes incredibly tedious. Plus, I find the artistic choices of the dungeons really questionable, as it feels like you're walking around the exact same corridor the whole time, without any real variety.
Another aspect that heavily weighs down the variety of the action is the total lack of unique skills, such as camouflage or stealth abilities, which would have surely allowed players to approach the gameplay in different ways. Stealth in this game practically doesn't exist: the enemies have an absurd field of view and aggro onto you from a mile away. This combination systematically forces you to confront and kill them every single time, unless you want to engage in an exhausting escape while being chased across half the map. The absence of alternative approaches or mechanics to bypass combat does nothing but further flatten the rhythm, forcing the player into the single funnel of continuous and unavoidable melee combat.
There is also a lack of attention to detail that would have made all the difference in terms of the game world. A prime example? Cooking. How do you not include a cooking system in the inns?! In the original story, food is fundamental; the author built a lot of situations around it. Inserting a mechanic with recipes to discover or rare ingredients that unlock unique buffs and advanced stats once tasted would have added excellent characterization to the gameplay, as well as giving value to the players' routines on the floors. These are those small, non-essential things that truly reveal the heart behind a work.
The combat system, from my point of view, is simple and, on a strictly personal level, it works within its limits. Sure, hacking away at the umpteenth boar of the day is repetitive, and it almost makes you smile that the only visual "satisfaction" is that slow-motion scene where the monster gets sliced in two when you finish it off.
But aside from this basic dynamic, the real disaster, in my opinion, is how they structured the missions and the important fights. The side quests are carbon copies of one another: you accept the job, you fight in a fenced area, you pick up the item, and you bring it back. The end. It’s a shame, because some start with intriguing narrative premises, seeming like interesting side missions with a story to tell, only to systematically boil down to the exact same flat ending that completely ruins them.
As for the rewards, at least it can be said that completionism is rewarded with concrete elements, given that some sidequests drop permanent items that are extremely useful for quality of life (like extra healing slots for the whole game) or permanent cosmetic changes for clothes; even unlocking the item that allows you to upgrade sword skills is hidden behind one of these side missions.
But then you clash with the game design again when you face the bosses: locking every mini-boss in a separate arena, always interrupted by the exact same cutscene instead of leaving it free on the map to exploit those splendid points of interest I mentioned earlier, seemed like an absurd choice to me.
Almost every major encounter boils down to you locked in a tiny space with a recycled boss, which usually just uses variants of the usual base enemies, continuously summoning two incredibly annoying allies over and over. The screen becomes total chaos, you lose all freedom of movement, you get tossed from one corner to the other, and goodbye strategy. It’s just frustrating.
All these problems and anomalies become a total nightmare if you try to play on "Very Hard" difficulty with the Permadeath mode active.
Personally, I won't do it, because just thinking about it makes me frustrated on behalf of anyone who tries. In itself, a high challenge is fine and I approve of it, because it forces you to carefully plan your setup in terms of weapons, armor, and items to select ad hoc before setting out.
The problem is that I noticed completely broken and unfair difficulty spikes with certain bosses. You go from zones that you clear without any issues to side missions where you get beaten to a pulp in tiny arenas, finding yourself facing, for example, a giant boar boss flanked by two other annoying boars: you get smashed from side to side, you don't even realize what is hitting you, and you find yourself in situations of total stunlock without being able to do absolutely anything. In a run where if you lose your life your save file of hours and hours is deleted, seeing everything collapse because of a boss that is completely unbalanced compared to the 28 you met before really makes you lose the desire to play.
At the end of the day, the experience is also held back by the total lack of a cooperative mode. It's useless to fantasize about an SAO-themed MMORPG, I repeat, but I think a co-op mode for two or three players would have certainly made everything more interesting, perhaps offering a more creative approach and breaking up the monotony a bit.
The game ultimately stops halfway: the excellent artistic framework is unfortunately not enough to save mechanics that I find decisively too rigid and repetitive. We'll see if the developers fix things with some patches, though honestly, I have my very strong doubts.
Forgive me if I seemed a bit too impulsive in my judgments or if the tones turned out harsh; there is probably someone out there who is loving this game. But since SAO is a theme very close to my heart, I particularly wanted to speak my mind, hoping that maybe someone else thinks like me regarding the wasted potential of this title. :D
