Is It Like Zelda? Open World & Exploration
Is Echoes of Aincrad like Zelda, and is it open world? Not a fully seamless open world like Breath of the Wild — but it shares the same open exploration and mini-map point-of-interest pinning across the two floors of Aincrad. What the comparison gets right, and where it differs.
Not quite — Echoes of Aincrad isn't a fully seamless open world like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it earns the comparison for how it plays. You explore large, open areas across the two floors of Aincrad in this release, and, just like Breath of the Wild, you pin points of interest on your map and set your own route to them. Add an anime-inspired world of “beauty and danger” and the resemblance is real — even if the structure is more focused, built around a town hub and the quest areas you travel out to rather than one giant continuous map.
Is Echoes of Aincrad open world?
Not in the fully seamless sense. Bandai Namco has never marketed it as an open world, and hands-on previews stop short of calling it one. Instead you're based in a town hub — the Town of Beginnings — and head out into sizeable, freely explorable areas and fields to take on quests, bosses and side content. This release covers only Floors 1 and 2 of Aincrad's 100-floor tower (a deliberate scope the developers confirmed), so it's focused rather than sprawling — think open explorable zones, not one continuous persistent world.
Why it draws the Breath of the Wild comparison
The exploration feel is the reason. Preview coverage singled out “the more open approach… and the way you can highlight points of interest on your mini-map” as reminiscent of Breath of the Wild — you drop your own markers and choose how you get there, rather than following a hard objective line. Our own Map & Markers database catalogues 2,690 points of interest across 176 named areas, so that pin-and-explore loop is very much the shape of the game.
An anime-inspired world of beauty and danger
The other half of the comparison is the look. Echoes of Aincrad renders Aincrad as a vibrant, anime-styled world — the kind of aesthetic previews grouped with Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact. If it was the painterly, wander-and-take-it-in atmosphere that hooked you in those games, the floating castle of Aincrad is built to scratch the same itch, with landmarks and vistas worth detouring for.
Where it's very different from Zelda
This is still a Sword Art Online action RPG, not a physics sandbox. Combat runs on Sword Skills — timed, SP-cost special attacks tied to weapon proficiency — instead of Zelda's improvised, breakable-weapon experimentation. You're not alone either: an AI partner (one of 22 companions) fights beside you, something Link never had. And there's no climb-anything, glide-anywhere traversal — you explore on foot through designed areas, not a freeform terrain sandbox.
Should Breath of the Wild fans play it?
If what you loved was open exploration, marking your own points of interest and soaking in an anime-flavoured world, Echoes of Aincrad delivers a focused version of that — with SAO's story and sword-skill combat on top. Just set expectations: it's two floors of curated, explorable areas rather than an endless open map, and the systems are RPG-deep rather than emergent-physics playful. Go in for the SAO fantasy with Zelda-like exploration, not for a one-to-one Breath of the Wild clone.
The pin-and-explore map
The mini-map that draws the Breath of the Wild comparison is the same one behind our Map & Markers database — 2,690 points of interest across 176 named areas, from dungeons and field bosses to treasure and waypoints. Browse where you'll actually be exploring, then read the beginner walkthrough for the route through it all.
Want the rest of the picture? See how many floors of Aincrad you climb, meet the AI partners who fight beside you, or learn how Sword Skills drive the combat.