For anyone picking up Sword Art Online: Echoes of Aincrad, you’ll find a souls-like JRPG awaiting you. It’s following gameplay styles of MMOs, thanks to the anime, and with it, comes a class combat system to define your build. You’ll find there’s many different weapon types, which will define how you play the game. Everything you can do in combat is determined by the weapon you wield, making your choice of weapon one of the most important decisions you will make. Here is every weapon type available in Echoes of Aincrad and what you need to know about each one.
All Echoes of Aincrad weapon types
Below is a list and explanation on all the weapon types, at least based on the confirmed weapon types in the demon, alongside Bandai Namco blogs.
Sword and Shield
The starting weapon and the most balanced option available. The sword and shield combination gives you both offensive and defensive tools, and you can unequip the shield whenever you want for faster, riskier attacks. If you are new to the game or unsure where to start, this is the natural choice since you begin the demo with it already in hand.
Two-Handed Axe
A slower, more aggressive weapon that trades speed for area-of-effect attacks. If you mistimed swings leave you open to counter attacks, so it rewards patience and positioning over button mashing. Cannot be paired with a shield.
Dagger
Light and fast, daggers hit frequently but deal lower average damage per hit and have shorter reach than most other weapons. The standout feature is the ability to throw blades for ranged attacks, making daggers more versatile than their size suggests. Cannot be paired with a shield.
Rapier
A graceful weapon with long reach that excels at chaining attacks together and countering enemies. The rapier can be used with a shield, making it one of the more flexible options in the game for players who want reach and defence simultaneously.
Two-Handed Sword
The heavy hitter of the lineup, with the ability to charge up attacks for significantly increased damage. The two-handed sword changes your dodge into a roll rather than a sidestep, so movement patterns will feel different. Cannot be used with a shield.
Mace
The other shield-compatible weapon alongside the sword and rapier. Maces specialise in breaking through enemy defences to stagger or knock enemies down, making them particularly effective against heavily armoured foes or enemies that tend to block.
How weapons work in Echoes of Aincrad
Echoes of Aincrad is a classless MMO-like game. Instead of creating a character with class, you will instead use a weapon based system, where you’ll gain expertise with the weapons you use. The more you fight with a weapon type, the more Weapon EXP you earn and the more weapon skills you will unlock. You can have up to three Sword Skills equipped at any one time, so there is room to customize your loadout even within a single weapon type.
Weapons can also be upgraded at the Smithy found in most cities and villages. You can combine weapons of the same type to pool up to four EX-Mods on a single weapon. These bonuses add things like reduced stamina cost or improved attack damage. Weapon level can also be raised by spending specific materials, increasing base damage independent of your Sword Skill proficiency.
You can only swap weapon types between quests when you are back in the Town of Beginnings, so choosing what to bring into a dungeon matters.
When you go on missions and dungeons, you can bring with you companions, who have their own fighting styles. Odds on you’ll find various combos and playstyles that way to help define how you want to play. Or, manage your party.
There’s likely other features to come with the full game too, especially based on the Sword Art Online anime too. Though, we’ll have to wait and see how that works with the full release.
Authored by
Craig Robinson
Craig Robinson is an experienced gaming and esports writer with nearly a decade of coverage experience since 2015. With a background in software engineering, he combines his journalistic expertise with a strong understanding of technical SEO and web development fundamentals. He’s passionate about covering MMO games, competitive esports, and crafting guides that help players get the most out of their favorite titles.
He's been writing about gaming and esports for over 10 years, which started as for fun project during university. He has since developed his skill set, contributing to newsrooms coverage of key games and event, and blending evergreen content strategy and a solid grasp of content marketing fundamentals. His work has appeared in Esports News UK, Gamer Guides, theEscpaist, and VideoGamer, and he now contributes to Gamehub's review team. When he’s not writing, Craig can usually be found running, at the gym, or tinkering with coding projects to keep his GitHub active.
