Echoes of Aincrad is finally the beautiful Sword Art Online game we waited for, now we just need to know if it'll be as empty as the others

We have a complicated relationship with Sword Art Online games. On paper, the idea is gold: a license built entirely around the fantasy of the video game you can't log out of, adapted into a video game. In practice, we've chained the Hollows, the Alicizations and other Last Recollections with the same stubborn sense of paying top price for something cheap. And then the Echoes of Aincrad demo arrived, and for the first time in a long while, we put the sarcasm back in the drawer. For the first time, it looks like something.

The context

Echoes of Aincrad is a single-player action-RPG developed by Game Studio Inc. and published by Bandai Namco, expected on 10 July 2026 on PC, with a console release the day before on PS5 and Xbox Series. A demo has been available since mid-June, and its save carries over to the full game, which makes it far more than a shop window: a genuinely playable taster. The pitch takes up the marrow of the saga, the first arc, the one about the floating castle of Aincrad and its thousands of players trapped in a game where dying in-game means dying for real. And for once, the budget seems equal to the ambition.

What we know: it's beautiful, and the combat finally bites

The first thing that jumps out is the visual slap. Aincrad has never been so large or so polished, the environments move from serene plains to oppressive dungeons with real art direction, and on that count alone, it's by far the most beautiful game ever drawn from the license. The feedback from the community that hammered the demo is unanimous on this, and we share the enthusiasm: the world-building does an enormous amount of work, to the point of carrying the first hours on its own.

But the real good surprise is the combat, and it's a word we'd never written calmly about a SAO game. Gone is the feeling of hitting wet cotton that weighed down the previous entries. Here, the blows have weight, the special attacks give off a real OOMPH, and the game dares a detail that changes everything: strike an enemy with a heavy or special attack, and you flat-out sever their limbs. It's brutal, it's exhilarating, and it's precisely what was missing from a saga about swordsmen that had never managed to give edge to its swords. Even the most reluctant players, the ones who swore never to touch another SAO game after being burned, admit this one is finally cut from the right material.

The real-time combat system bets on reflexes, dodges, parries and partner synergy, and it demands genuine learning, so much so that some bosses require understanding their break mechanics before you can grind them down. You feel a depth the previous ones never offered. Add a clever justification for the absence of a character creator in the demo, you play your beta avatar before Kayaba's famous mirror reveals everyone's true face, and you get a game that, for once, has read its own source material.

What worries us: the ghost of the void

And that's where the old fear resurfaces, because a SAO game can be gorgeous and still be a shell. The reproach that comes up most in the demo feedback is emptiness. A superb world, but one that doesn't feel alive: cloned NPCs planted side by side, a central town you cross for no reason since you teleport from merchant to merchant, no other player in sight despite the MMORPG atmosphere the fiction promises. Several testers compare the open zones to a Pokémon Legends Arceus, beautiful stretches of grass where, deep down, there's almost nothing to do. Sublime and deserted, the worst combo for a universe meant to teem with life.

To that background fear add a more concrete charge, that of ambition trimmed back. The rumor stirring the players is that the whole game would cover only two floors of Aincrad, out of the hundred the fiction's castle counts. The defenders retort that these two floors are immense and promise dozens of hours, and that's possible, but for a saga resting on the idea of a dizzying ascent, capping at two landings has a taste of a missed opportunity. We'll take quality over quantity, but the sauce still has to hold over time.

There's finally everything that betrays a game that could have used a few more months. Lip sync slips in the cutscenes, several players report memory leaks and framerate drops, keyboard-and-mouse support is described as catastrophic, and comfort choices grate, no changing your gear mid-mission, mandatory return to town for everything, no pause in a single-player game. Nothing dealbreaking taken alone, but the accumulation, a month before release, gives an impression of beta that the price doesn't forgive.

The promises, and the sinews of war

Because we have to talk money. Echoes of Aincrad sells for seventy euros, full AAA-production price, with on top an expansion planned by year's end and the usual tiered editions we could have done without. At that price, the comparison with a Granblue Fantasy Relink, cited as a model by players for its finish, is cruel: Echoes of Aincrad plays in the same visual court but with clearly inferior polish. Many already announce they'll wait for a sale, and we understand the caution. When a single-player game of uncertain length asks the price of a blockbuster while dragging technical woes, mistrust is healthy.

We're waiting, and for once with hope

Here's our honest position. Echoes of Aincrad is, without argument, the best starting point a Sword Art Online game has had in years. The combat is finally good, the world is finally beautiful, and the team finally looks like it understood what makes this license appealing rather than spitting out a cut-price version of it. That alone, after the desert crossing the previous ones were, deserves for us to lower our guard and believe a little.

But hope isn't a blank check. The curse of SAO games was never the lack of ideas, it's the emptiness and the lack of finish, and the demo lets both be seen still lurking. It'll all come down to the full game's ability to fill its immense sets, to give life to its Aincrad and to fix that beta feel before 10 July. If it manages, we'll finally be holding the great Sword Art Online game we've waited ten years for. If it fails, it'll be the most beautiful of missed appointments. We're crossing our fingers, sword drawn.

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Preview based on the PC demo.

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