Review: Synduality Echo of Ada Has a Magus Focus at Launch

I have long been interested in Synduality: Echo of Ada ever since Bandai Namco first revealed it around the 2022 Tokyo Game Show. The premise of exploring a world inside a mech while being accompanied by a customizable waifu (or husbando) sounds very appealing to me. However, I ended up having to readjust my expectations after learning that the title would appear as an online-exclusive game.

The general gist of this game's flow is that you are a Drifter who has to gather materials while piloting a mech unit called Cradle Coffin on the ground. You will also be accompanied by an AI consort called Magus, whose appearance you can customize to your liking.

When you just start the game, you will get to create your first Magus. While you can adjust their face details and body part lengths with sliders, I noticed that dragging the bars with a mouse lets me adjust with closer precision compared to a gamepad.

One of the most important items to gather during your outings will be the AO (Amorphous Orange) Crystals, which you will sell to earn money. These crystals are originally from outcrops that occasionally spawn at specific locations. But drilling through the outcrops to break them will take some time, and it will also generate noise that attracts monsters called Enders that attack any Cradle they come across.

The world of Synduality also has toxic rain that is hazardous to humans and their Cradles, the latter of which will have actual damage after the weather resistance layer is already depleted. The same rain will temporarily strengthen the Enders as well. However, it will also increase the grade of the harvestable AO Crystals, which generate more money when sold. And as some of the late-game missions will require you to get high-grade crystals, it will gradually force you to take higher risks for not only better rewards but also further progressions.

Your Magus will play a lot of roles during your exploration sessions. Besides scanning containers for important items, they can detect any Ender or Cradle from a distance. And for the latter, they can also determine whether they are hostile bandits and bounty targets or potential friendlies.

I said "potential" just now because, as the game's tutorials taught us, we are supposed not to blindly trust every player on the field. While some players can invite you to form a co-op party, several others may threaten you to surrender your loot to them.

There are even some players who are striving to join the dark side and become a bounty target by deliberately destroying another player's unit. This is partially because there is an entirely different mission line by joining the dark side. However, they must clear the first few missions in a map specifically geared to host fellow trigger-happy players before they can return to the initial map as a real menace.

Although from what I've seen on the public leaderboards, I find it a bit weird that there is a value ceiling for the bounty target players (600,000 as of the launch season) while there is none for the bounty-hunting members of the Association. On one side, I do acknowledge the need to balance the bounty values when they are destroyed. But on the other, I feel like there should be another way to properly show the bounty targets' rankings outside of the aforementioned values.

After gathering enough items, you must head toward an available Return Elevator to retain both your Cradle and loot. If your Cradle is destroyed before you can return, you will lose not only all the loot but also your unit parts. However, you can purchase insurance for your Cradle's parts and weapons so that you can claim some funds as compensation when you lose them in the following session.

Once you have made a successful, safe return, your Magus will give you a debriefing rundown of your activities in the last session. Other than showing the routes and items taken, it also reveals details on the bandits and other players you have encountered. This feature looked cool the first few times, but it ended up feeling tedious after a long while due to the repetitive lines, especially the ones for first-time discoveries. So I eventually just opted to fast-forward or sometimes even skip the scene altogether.

The first-time encounters I mentioned just now, however, will be actually important for subsequent outings. Your Magus will record the sightings in their database. The next time you open your map, you can check the locations of the items that become relevant to your newer missions, and you can even place your own Objective Point marker to set a waypoint towards those locations.

My gripe with this feature, though, is that I can only check the map during a sortie. Even though the Magus will put you at a starting point where you can accomplish your mission objectives more easily, I would've preferred more if I could study the map and the recorded locations at a calmer place like the Base so that I could plan my routes better.

Speaking of the player's Base, it is shaping up to be one of the biggest motivations in this game. You initially start with a run-down building, but you can gradually renovate it with the materials you have collected from your sorties.

Renovating the Base's foundations and upgrading its facilities will bring many improvements to the gameplay experience. You can get not only feature improvements like larger inventory limits, daily bonuses, and cheaper repair costs. You can also notice how your Magus interacts in a more leisurely manner with all the high-quality facilities.

After completing several missions in the online mode, you can unlock a new line of missions issued by the Amasia Collapse Investigation Committee. These are single-player missions that will differ in a big way from the primary extraction shooter mode, as they will pit you in unique maps with a fixed gear loadout. That means you will have to complete the missions by precisely utilizing the limited amount of ammunition and items that can also drop from destroyed enemies.

Instead of AO Crystals, the scan mode in these missions will let you locate record logs which, if successfully obtained, will let you watch audio and/or video records of past events that also help explain the game's world setting. The exclusive and limited resources given in these solo missions make them even more challenging, though I hope there could be a mode in the missions where we can bring our own loadouts from the main mode.

One particular thing I noticed with Synduality: Echo of Ada is that the game has very demanding requirements for playing with maximum graphics settings. Even on a regular (non-Pro) PS5, the "Prioritize Graphics" option will make it unable to maintain a decent frame rate. That means those who play on the older console will have to settle with "Prioritize Performance," although I didn't notice any significant graphical downgrades in the console.

I also managed to join the open network test on PC back then, but my now-substandard i9-10900 processor also struggled with "Prioritize Graphics," so I had to choose the performance option, which also ended up making the Magus model look very blurry. The full release thankfully has more detailed graphical settings, so I can set the model detail setting to High while retaining other options to maintain a somewhat more stable frame rate.

One thing that might draw away the more casual players other than the loot and gear perma-loss, though, is that since Synduality: Echo of Ada is being made as an online-exclusive live service game, it has daily and weekly missions which, when completed, will contribute more experience points than most regular outings. These points will be gathered to unlock exclusive level rewards in the Drifter Pass, which will be reset when a season has run its course for about three months.

This game also has a premium currency called Syn Coins, which are mostly obtained through microtransactions. But even though the game has a Shop menu, it does not have any Gacha or Lootbox purchases.

A majority of the entries in the menu consist of access to additional Magus and sets of outfits and accessories for them, so most of them are only for Magus cosmetics. Other than that, you can also spend the Syn Coins to purchase level boosts for the Drifter Pass, which also include the Deluxe and Ultimate Drifter Passes with additional exclusive bonuses.

But even though you can have multiple Magi in your roster, I find it rather odd that we cannot make them interact with each other. Only the Magus you have selected as your current main partner appears in all the main menu scenes, and the rest are nowhere to be seen at all. I understand some players want to focus on their primary waifu or husbando, but I think it wouldn't hurt at all if there is an option toggle to enable interactions between multiple Magi.

The other thing I find very lackluster as of the game's launch pertains to the color customization. The only things with changeable colors here are the Magus' hair, skin, and facial features like eyes and lips. Despite having an abundance of outfits and accessories, none of the wardrobe items are colorable, so it ends up limiting the fashion sense.

But the one thing I find the most disappointing from my playthrough of the game is the complete lack of opportunities to customize and take great care of the Cradle Coffins. There is already the inability to color the mech parts, just like the aforementioned Magus wardrobes. And there are also the exclusive stat buffs that only apply when all parts of the Cradle come from the same series.

However, the development team is somehow trying to inject some realism more than necessary by making the mech parts and weapons eventually wear out beyond any further possible repairs, and your only plausible options at that time would be to either sell them or insure and abandon them to recoup some funds. Coming off from games like Gundam Breaker, Megaton Musashi, and Front Mission, such a feature goes completely the opposite way from my expectations.

Synduality: Echo of Ada has the potential to become a fun mech-based exploration third-person shooter game with a waifu/husbando companion. But while I wanted to recommend it to my fellow mecha-loving friends, I really cannot at the moment due to the lack of personalization features in that aspect. On the contrary, the spotlight is more focused on customization for the humanoid Magus consort so that you can watch your ideal AI waifu or husbando interacting with you.

As Bandai Namco launched this title as a live service game, the company will regularly update it with new maps and features, which may or may not address the concerns I have written in this review. But at the same time, being a live service game with time-limited content means that players will have to commit a good portion of their time to this game. And I also feel more guarded than I should because I haven't even seen more assurance on features outside the single-player missions being retained when the game inevitably goes offline either.

Synduality: Echo of Ada is available worldwide on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC.

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