Hoping Bamco Paid Enako, Kajita, Yasumoto And Tsuna Nekota Big Gundam Bucks For Appearing On The Echoes of Aincrad SAO Reveal

Bandai Namco, on March 4 2026, teased a new RPG announcement for March 6, on YouTube. The teaser thumbnails for the Japanese and Western trailers were different, but I didn't expect the reveal trailers themselves would be completely different as well.

The english reveal trailer looked like some gritty version of Sword Art Online, no charisma, no soul, no aura like the cool kids say nowadays.

But IN JAPAN, when the countdown to the teaser ended, Bandai Namco prepared a mock documentary talking about the Sword Art Online incident as if it truly happened in our world. The trailer even starts with a warning that it is pure fiction.

It begins in a fictional 2026, where Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality are extremely developed, bringing up how society mustn't forget the incident that struck the launch of the first VRMMO: the SAO incident four years prior in 2022.

The documentary then features several mock interview excerpts, most notably with the braids girl from the thumbnail, who turns out to be a survivor of the event and one of the game's main characters.

As a side note I immediately burst out laughing when the trailer actually showed Tales of ARISE footage, as my online French friends were all joking about "what if they reveal Tales of Sword Art Online".

Tales of Series 30th Anniversary Creators Talk Translation & Commentary (Sample)

Sample of our translation + analysis of the Tales of 30th Anniversary Creators Talk video released on December 15 2025, with Anabuki Kenji, Iwamoto Minoru, Tanaka Yoshimasa, Uematsu Hiroki, Kagawa Hirokazu, Tomizawa Yusuke. Available for tier 2 Ko-fi subs.

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Two faces I immediately recognized in the mock documentary are Enako and Mafia Kajita

Enako is the one of the most prolific cosplayers in Japan. She's an extremely respectable and amazing otaku lady who regularly appears on live streams and events. She streams on Twitch and YT as well.

The shot in the trailer features Enako in her usual room setup, so it feels like it really is from one of her streams. Though it's missing her trademark gigantic Blue Eyes White Dragon poster at her left. Seeing that's a Konami proeprty lol, Bandai Namco couldn't let it appear. People in the chat often ask her how she obtained it, thinking it's some kind of rare merch. So she always explain you can actually easily buy one of these big posters at official Japanese Yugioh merch stores.

I really appreciate Enako as she regularly talks about how being a female pro cosplayer isn't some kind of easy job, contrary to what misogynists would think. I also believe she is one of the inspirations for some of the characters in Nigo Jigen no Ririsa, which is one of my favorite post-2020 romantic comedies, with actual romance, actual comedy, and some real good discussion on otaku culture and the entertainment industries in Japan.

Mafia Kajita is originally a games journalist working for Japanese gaming site 4Gamer, but he's most notably known as a radio and live stream MC. In the early 2010s he used to be on Sugita Tomokazu and Nakamura Yuuichi's seiyuu radio shows and has been friends with them since. Nowadays, every big Chinese and Korean sociage: Azur Lane, Nikke, etc, regularly hires Kajita to MC their anniversary live streams. He's also doing weekly videos and live streams with Nakamura Yuuichi and mangaka Bkub on the YouTube channel Wasyagana TV.

Note that the person discussing with Kajita on the left is Yasumoto Hiroki, a seiyuu I really appreciate. He voices Egil in Sword Art Online.

Japanese Gaming Sites Aren’t Spared From SEO Enshittification

Sadly, some Japanese gaming sites these last few years adopted the same SEO baiting methods which were prominent in English games media in the early 2020s.

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If you're an Atlus or Yoko Taro fan, you've probably already seen these two, as Yasumoto also voices Grimoire Weiss and the narrator in the first Voices of Cards game. Meanwhile, Mafia Kajita has been on Atlus streams and shows for nearly 20 years now, it's always him or Matsuzawa Neki, another prolific MC, taking care of Atlus showcases.

Another personality on the trailer is Tsuna Nekota, a VTuber affiliated with VSPO. Not gonna lie and act like a specialist: I have never heard of her before. I'm not a big fan of VTubers for a bunch of reasons too long to explain. Long story short it's too time consuming and I already listen to a lot of regular Japanese streamers. When it comes to corpo VTubers, I only listen a little to:

• Kaela because she's the coolest SpiceAndWolf Life, has a Suzupin design, and even likes Captain Tsubasa.
• Ibrahim because he's called Ibrahim.
• Tsukino Mito because of her hilarious NTR vid (loud volume warning).

I listen a bit more to a few indie/retro-focused ones like:

• ShioriPon the real surgeon
• Meika Yurippe whom I discovered via her Nikke x Evangelion streams with Miyamura Yuko (Asuka)
• Umagoya Neruko, who focuses on old games
• Kyabanee and Kokebunny on the Game ni Koi Suru Joshi Channel - a duo who let's plays 80s and 90s games, often commentating and ad-libbing as if they're the game's characters' themselves. They're among the funniest streamers I know. I don't think they consider themselves VTubers technically, and are more like "traditional" Niconico-like streamers who'd never show their faces. The ancestors of VTubers really. One of the funniest things I've seen in 2025 was part of their Resident Evil 2 streams, at around 9:00:53, with Kyabanee (left) imitating a sports commentator, commenting Kokebunny (right, the one playing on that stream) insisting on taking on a zombie, knife-only, and how she goes "I don't know which one is the zombie anymore".

The Aikatsu Academy girls are cool too especially Mieru always streaming ADV games.

Honestly I'm pretty excited for this new SAO game. I assume the twintails braid lady is some kind of Heroine as we end up making our own protagonist. She mentions in the mock Skype interview that in SAO she always had "that person" at her side. I assume she's talking about the character we create as a player, and the key visual features a pretty girly/female default design. So if you make a girl protagonist you can make it so the story has some yuri undertones.

I actually like SAO despite its flaws and despite being an anime boomer who likes 80s anime and was already a young adult when first reading the SAO web novels in ~2010 after being introduced to it thanks to an anime blog. I miss anime blogs. Hence why I keep writing like I'm on one.

Overall the Japanese trailer features several outdoor environments, and makes the game looks much more appealing than the gritty English trailer. It also teases at the end that a promotional anime will be released for the game.

It's kinda funny / sad that in 1447 we're still getting strident examples of "Kirby is angry on the USA boxart and smiling on the Japanese one". Vision of Mana's boxart was like that too (I need to play that).

The steam page for Echoes of Aincrad was opened btw. The game is scheduled to launch on July 10, 2026.

Last but not least, remember that Bandai Namco is also publishing Fate/Extra Record, which is supposed to launch sometime in 2026... I assume late 2026, especially to not clash with this new RPG? Thought they target pretty different audiences I guess. Fate/Extra Record is a visual novel with a Slay The Spire-like RPG on top. Echoes of Aincrad is a multiplayer action RPG.

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