Echoes of Aincrad launches as the first Sword Art Online game where you aren't Kirito

Echoes of Aincrad is out today on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, and Bandai Namco built it around a premise the series has never tried: you are not Kirito. You make your own avatar, a nobody beta tester who logs in and finds the exit gone along with everyone else. The $69.99 action RPG went live to reviews that spent all week arguing with each other.

You are a random player, and that changes the mood

Seven SAO games in, the pitch has always been "play as the guy from the show." Developer GameStudio Inc. threw that out. You pick a face, a weapon, and a fighting style, then you climb Aincrad as one more trapped player who never asked to be a hero.

That one decision does more for the tone than any cutscene. The reporting out of the review builds keeps landing on the same word: dread. NPC party members mutter about panic attacks. People freeze up in hallways. The death game finally feels like a death game instead of a backdrop for a power fantasy, and there is a permanent permadeath mode for anyone who wants the premise taken literally.

What you actually get on day one

Here is the part worth reading before you spend the money. The full tower is not open at launch. You get the first two floors, played through instanced, quest-gated areas rather than one seamless world. The maps look great and run out fast. If you went in expecting a wandering open-world MMO, that is not what shipped today.

Combat is the piece most reviewers agree on. It is real-time and timing-heavy: light and heavy attacks, stamina you have to watch, and a perfect parry or dodge that sets up a shared counter with your partner. Six weapon types push you toward different builds, and the whole thing borrows enough from soulslike pacing that it can feel like one if you play defensively. An AI companion fights alongside you and fills a support role, though the dialogue loop starts repeating itself faster than anyone would like.

The reviews are genuinely split

This is not a case of critics landing in a tidy consensus. It sits around 60 on Metacritic across eight outlets, in the 30th percentile on OpenCritic, and at roughly 67 percent positive across the first 156 Steam user reviews.

The headlines tell the story on their own. Push Square went with "Squandered Potential at Every Turn." Final Weapon called it "Wide as an Ocean, Deep as a Puddle." Tech Times framed it as repetition grinding down what it considered the best design the series has managed. And more than one reviewer still came away calling it the best Sword Art Online game to date, mostly on the strength of the atmosphere, the original-protagonist angle, and the handful of boss fights that click.

The common complaints rhyme: dull, repetitive quests, exploration with nothing in it, and a structure that reaches for MMORPG feel without the depth to back it. The praise rhymes too, and it is almost always about mood and combat rather than content.

Who this is for

If you have followed the Aincrad arc since the beginning and you have wanted a game that treats the trapped-in-a-death-game idea seriously, there is real reason to look. If you want a full open world or a deep quest design, the two floors available today are going to feel thin. A demo with carry-over progress is on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, which for a $70 game is the smartest way to find out which camp you land in before you commit.