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The first episode of the 2012 anime adaptation of Reki Kawahara’s novel series Sword Art Online ends with Kirito killing a level two boar, an action only achieved by pushing through the terror coursing through his body. The knowledge that any enemy, even one as weak as this, now has the ability to kill him makes even the mundane experience of grinding for EXP a life-changing event for the young boy.
In Bandai Namco’s 2026 Action RPG, Echoes of Aincrad, the player will have killed nearly a hundred boars before they even get to create their character. This is natural; they were fodder enemies in the original story and have been faithfully adapted as such here. However, this strange difference between how the same beast is treated between this game and the source material raises an important question: Is it impossible to actually make a Sword Art Online video game?
There have been nine console video games based on the Sword Art Online story, spanning multiple genres as they adapt various parts of the light novel series or tell original stories. All of these games were met with mixed reception upon release, and Echoes of Aincrad is no different, currently sitting at a 5.4 rating on Metacritic.
Despite there being so many video games based on Sword Art Online, one of the most common complaints when discussing them online is how none of them actually feel like Sword Art Online. Instead, all of these games are just typical anime tie-in games centered around fan service, like getting to fight alongside or play as your favorite characters from the light novels.
Picking up and playing most of the Bandai Namco-published Sword Art Online video games won’t put the player into a desperate struggle where they need to stress about the life-or-death situation that they’re stuck in; instead, they’ll be treated to a light-hearted experience all about seeing their friends again. Less of a death-game scenario and more like running into acquaintances at a coffee shop.
When it comes to adapting the emotions that the characters of Sword Art Online felt as they traversed through the game, I think Echoes of Aincrad’s approach of being a Souls-like with a perma-death mode where opening a treasure chest has a chance of randomly spawning a Golem that’s twenty levels higher than you is probably the best compromise that could be made between Sword Art Online as a story and Sword Art Online as a video game.
And in that lies the issue. Sword Art Online was never written as a story about a cool video game that you should want to play; the light novels were focused entirely around the characters’ personal journeys and feelings; the video game was always just the set dressing that would facilitate those emotions.
Anyone who has read Reki Kawahara’s books can tell that the man hasn’t played many MMO RPGs, or at the very least only has a basic understanding of them. The book’s opening description of Sword Art Online as a highly popular game, despite only 10,000 copies being sold in-story, is a canary in the coal mine for the complete misunderstanding of online video games that follows.
Sword Art Online is described as an MMO where enemies never respawn, quests can only be completed by one player before vanishing forever, and every player is the same class aside from a single unique skill that only they have. These issues, any one of which would be seen as unacceptable in a real MMO, are only the tip of the iceberg for how incompatible Sword Art Online is with real video game design.
These books are LitRPG written by a man who cares much more about literature than RPGs, and unlike many people who criticize Sword Art Online, I think that’s fine! Sword Art Online isn’t about a video game. It’s about the emotions of the characters dealing with a life-or-death situation; it’s about romance between two teens stuck in a bad situation; it’s about how being the only guy in the world with two swords makes you really, really cool.
Any of these themes would simply get bogged down by pointless exposition if the light novels needed to stop in their tracks to explain how the game’s systems work or try to obey a realistic format for how games are designed. The Sword Art Online novels ignoring what many people would call basic game design logic, have helped it be a story that’s remained culturally relevant for a decade while many other LitRPGs from the 2010s have faded away into obscurity.
But that also makes Bandai Namco’s constant attempts to make video games based on the IP a no-win situation. If one were to attempt to make a video game based on the in-universe Sword Art Online, they would need to change how the game works until it was unrecognizable from what was described, or they would need to purposely make a game that was built on bad design decisions.
Sword Art Online receiving normal anime tie-in RPGs, Third-Person Shooters, and Souls-likes might seem disappointing for those craving an actual Sword Art Online MMO, but at the end of the day, this is a compromise that needs to be made if one were to actually want to turn the in-universe game into a real game.
Echoes of Aincrad is a game with many issues that probably deserves the mixed reception it’s currently facing, but the game not actually playing like the in-universe Sword Art Online is not among these issues.
Imagine a scenario where you’re fighting a boss in this game where, instead of being able to heal yourself by simply pushing the potion button, you instead needed to scroll through multiple menus of items in order to find your potions, all while the boss continues to attack you. That is the kind of game design that an accurate adaptation of Sword Art Online would result in.
So instead of any attempt to actually do that, Sword Art Online’s foray into real video games has ignored that concept altogether. Instead of taking a risk that is almost guaranteed to make gamers angry and fail, Bandai Namco has delivered fans of the series the typical foray of tie-in anime games. Games like Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment and Sword Art Online: Last Recollection can be best described as safe plays.
Killing a boar in these games might not mean nearly as much as Kirito killing that boar at the start of the story did, but that’s the sacrifice you need to make when the player needs to actually think about fighting and gaining EXP instead of being able to cut to being on a different floor weeks later.
The various Sword Art Online video games many not be able to capture the emotions that characters felt when playing through Sword Art Online themselves, but sometimes it’s better to just give fans a short romp where they can see Kirito and gang again than to risk so much trying to create the video game that kills you from famed novel “Do not create the video game that kills you”.
