The Sword Art Online saga goes back to the beginning with Echoes of Aincrad — a retelling of the property's original storyline from the fresh perspective of your own custom protagonist.

It feels like a reset for the series' game-related efforts, and on paper, it's a fairly ambitious undertaking. Clearly backed with a (reltaively) bigger budget and a reworked approach to gameplay and general tone, Echoes of Aincrad should breathe new life into the franchise.

Unfortunately, this action RPG struggles to sell itself at almost every opportunity. The bones of a good — perhaps even great — Sword Art Online title are in place throughout, but they're just never properly built upon.

It's a shame, because Echoes of Aincrad understands the emotional tension and underlying sense of dread that's key to the source material. And in that atmospheric sense, it's a notable improvement over previous games.

Trapped within a virtual reality MMORPG by its mentally unhinged developer, you and thousands of other players are forced to survive in a (rather generic) fantasy world. The only means of escape is to beat the game — but that's much easier said than done when in-game death equates to death in the real world.

And so begins the property's iconic 'Death Game' arc. But again, instead of seeing everything unfold from the eyes of established characters like series protagonist Kirito, you play as your own hero — starting out from the bottom and questing to get stronger.

The plot actually kicks off with the Sword Art Online beta test, which is essentially a three-hour prologue that introduces gameplay systems and the title's overall structure.

It's a sign of things to come in terms of storytelling. Echoes of Aincrad is robust but very methodical in its approach, adopting a slow pace in a bid to portray the kind of in-game grind that your hero and their allies are going through.

Indeed, once you're past the prologue, it takes hours for the narrative to really go anywhere. A selection of dull quests will test the patience of some players, but I think there's just enough intrigue sprinkled across the character-driven cutscenes.

The real problem is that the game's quest design, which stands between you and the aforementioned story content, borders on being extremely boring. Echoes of Aincrad isn't fully open world, but each quest plops you into a sizeable environment that's part of a larger, interconnected map.

Aside from being home to repetitive enemy types, these locations are disappointingly empty. You spend most of your time simply sprinting towards objective markers, because there's just nothing to discover beyond treasure chests that, much more often than not, contain the most paltry of rewards.

As you traverse these locales, you'll come across designated safe areas, where you can rest and regain your health. And upon defeat in battle, they act as checkpoints.

This is important because no one really wants to say it, but Echoes of Aincrad is basically a Souls-like. A pretty accessible Souls-like complete with an easy difficulty setting, but a Souls-like nonetheless.

Respawning enemies, bosses locked behind the equivalent of fog gates, and a combat system that hinges on targeting singular foes while dodge rolling to avoid damage. It's all here, including the need to familiarise yourself with erratic enemy attack patterns.

But this is ultimately FromSoftware's blueprint on a budget. In particular, the combat system is undermined by a range of issues, preventing the core gameplay loop from ever truly clicking.

Overall, there's a weightlessness to the whole thing. Regardless of your equipped weapon type, it feels like you're swinging against air. There's so little hitstop to the animations, and it's somehow even worse for the opponent.

If your foe's attack connects, you either ragdoll across the arena or you don't even flinch. There's no in-between. There were fights where I genuinely didn't realise I was taking damage because the feedback was nonexistent.

Combat has cool bells and whistles; special Sword Skills actually have impact, and coordinating attacks with your ever-present, AI-controlled companion stops the system from feeling completely unfinished. But the fundamentals let it all down.

This is especially true of battles where you engage multiple enemies at once. In typical Souls-like fashion, you're encouraged to tackle foes individually so that you're not overwhelmed, but way too often, bosses will summon underlings and force you to fight against frankly unfair odds within enclosed arenas.

The mechanics just aren't present to allow for this kind of chaos. Enemy attacks can already be difficult to identify due to a general lack of animation quality, and so having to deal with these inconsistencies in addition to off-screen assaults is maddening.

To be fair, your NPC allies are at least competent, drawing the ire of foes when commanded and holding their own when the going gets tough. As alluded, their assistance is one of the only things that's stopping the action from devolving into a sh*tshow.

I suppose it also helps that progression is well worked and pretty addictive. Loot is plentiful, with fallen enemies regularly dropping weapons with randomised perks.

When you head back to town, you can use unwanted blades to boost the base stats of your favourite armament, or transfer their perks in a bid to create the perfect weapon. It sounds a bit basic, but I'll admit that I got hooked on the process, together with levelling up and distributing skill points across my character.

If you can get stuck into that grindy side of the experience, I'd dare say that Echoes of Aincrad almost comes back around to being a decent dungeon crawler. But you'll still have to stomach messy combat and missing quality of life elements.

For example, there's no way to pause the game, even during its lengthy dialogue scenes. What's more, saving and quitting during a quest resets your progress in said quest. You'll need to skip through cutscenes and you lose all of your gathered loot, although bizarrely, you retain discovered safe areas.

This can become a problem when much longer quests task you with trekking across huge swathes of mostly barren wilderness. Once you set out, you're locked in until the end (outside of putting your PS5 into Rest Mode).

Before I wrap up, I should note that there's an unlockable difficulty setting suitably named Death Game Mode, in which defeat is permanent. A nice idea, but slogging through the incredibly slow opening hours of the adventure with no safety net in place honestly sounds like torture.