Sword Art Online is one of the most famous MMORPGs in the world. Played entirely in virtual reality, its goal is to clear the 100 floors of the tower of Aincrad, a metal castle that looms on the horizon no matter from what point in the world it’s seen. No one has ever managed to do it, but there are many legends about it. The problem is that if you want to do it, the game has been closed since 2022 after a dramatic system failure that left more than 300 players trapped inside it with no possibility of returning to the physical world.
Of course, this didn’t happen in our world. But it’s the premise of Sword Art Online, one of the most popular light novels of the 2000s which, even today, continues to amass tremendous popularity and which is now getting a new video game adaptation: Echoes of Aincrad. But what explains such longevity and popularity? That’s what we want to clarify. Because no franchise survives two and a half decades without bringing something to the table.
A franchise that put a new spin on isekai
Although today isekai, the idea of a person going to another world and acquiring inhuman powers, is tremendously common, at the start of the 00s it wasn’t. And in 2002, at the time the first volume of Sword Art Online was published, it was seen as an original and very interesting twist for one very simple reason: because it was.
This work by Reki Kawahara, under the pseudonym Fumio Kunori, proposed an idea that wasn’t being explored then, what if you could embody the protagonist of your favorite video game? And what if you could not only embody him, but were forced to do it to survive, because if you failed you’d die trying. With a combination of science fiction, fantasy, and drama, he managed to write a self-published novel on the Internet that managed to captivate the public because it captured the feeling of the moment perfectly. It was something hundreds of thousands of people dreamed about.
After all, we’re talking about 2002. Not only was it the biggest boom moment for JRPGs, but also for MMORPGs. The idea of character customization, improved graphics —which at the time were perceived as a leap almost to hyperrealism, ridiculous as that may seem to us now— and playing with friends and strangers over the Internet, especially in Japan’s case (much more advanced in that sense), made that mindset easier. Kawahara simply knew how to translate it into fictional terms.
That’s what made Sword Art Online work. Not that it was a brilliant work, but that it captured the zeitgeist. The spirit of the moment. Everyone dreamed of what it would be like to live in Azeroth or Vana’diel or Ragnarök and he knew how to dramatize it in an interesting and addictive way.
How to keep a successful franchise alive
But besides that, another thing it has known how to do is keep the franchise alive by renewing it constantly over time. The number of spinoffs he has gone on making, adapting to the times, especially considering the change in Japanese audiences’ interests, shows Kawahara’s intelligence and perspective. When he saw that Japanese audiences were gradually becoming more and more interested in FPSs, first-person shooters, he began to focus his stories more on that genre, giving rise to stories like Sword Art Online: Phantom Bullet. Giving his franchise longevity.
Although it’s not just that. It’s also the fact that it has been adapted and shaped in countless ways over time. Anime adaptations, films, and video games have kept its popularity from waning and carried it to new generations. Thus managing to stay relevant even when it no longer should necessarily have the same impact among new generations.
Hence the point of this Echoes of Aincrad. That, quietly and without anyone expecting it, it can become one of the year’s big phenomena: it’s in the top 40 in wishlist activity and top 15 on the top sellers lists, according to steamdb. Which means it may have a much more spectacular launch than most people are imagining. Especially, expecting that a game based on an anime license that’s already almost 25 years old won’t make that much noise anymore.
But Sword Art Online still has a lot of pull. For good reasons. And Echoes of Aincrad, which comes out on July 10 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC can prove it.
