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11 Illfang the Kobold Lord is the Floor 1 boss of Echoes of Aincrad, confirmed in the free demo as the guardian at the top of the first floor's labyrinth. He is also the Floor 1 boss in the original Sword Art Online story that the game retells, where he serves as the gatekeeper between Floor 1 and Floor 2. The game follows that opening arc closely. This page describes what the demo shows of the encounter and notes which surrounding story details carry over from the source material.
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33 Role in the Game
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55 The Fight in the Demo
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77 The free demo ends its run with the Illfang encounter, so the broad shape of the fight is now confirmed rather than inferred. Illfang fights through multiple phases and swaps weapons as his health drops, forcing the player to re-read his patterns each time he changes stance. In the demo build he wields a curved talwar rather than the katana associated with the source material. A separate Sentry Golem is fought earlier as a lead-in encounter, giving players a lower-stakes boss before the floor boss itself.
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99 Because a boss battle cannot be exited once it starts, the fight commits the player from the opening hit. Reading Illfang's tells and answering them with timed guards, dodges, and the counter that follows a clean block matters as much as raw damage, and coordinating position swaps with the AI partner through the Switch System keeps pressure off whichever of you is more exposed.
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1111 As the first floor boss, Illfang is the campaign's first wall-check on the player's mastery of the combat fundamentals: stamina management, sword skill slotting, timed blocks, and timed dodges all come together in the fight.
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1313 The Raid Gate Between Floor 1 and Floor 2
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1515 Illfang is the raid boss that sits at the top of the Floor 1 labyrinth. Clearing him is the gate that opens the path up through the castle of Aincrad: once his HP bar empties, the staircase to Floor 2 unlocks and, by extension, the rest of the floors above. Until that fight is over, every trapped player is pinned to the starting floor with no way forward.
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1717 Because Echoes of Aincrad only covers the first two floors, the Illfang raid is both the campaign's first major escalation and the closest thing the game has to a halfway-point spike. Everything the protagonist has been learning about the combat system up to that moment, stamina discipline, Sword Skill slotting, Switch Mode reads, and partner management, is supposed to get stress-tested by a boss that was built to punish ordinary trapped players in the death game.
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1919 The Raid Meeting and Diavel
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2121 Just as in the source material, a meeting is organised by Diavel to discuss forming a raid team to take Illfang down. The protagonist and their companions are invited to this meeting alongside the rest of the frontline players gathered in the Town of Beginnings area. The meeting sets up the plan, assigns roles, and is the in-world reason the party ends up pushing into the labyrinth with the other clearers at all.
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2323 From that meeting onward the pace of the story shifts. The roughly month-long stretch the party spent weighing their options in the Floor 1 Town of Beginnings gives way to an active push toward the top of the labyrinth, with Illfang as the objective. Iori, Wyzeman, Argo and Zash are all present for that shift as the protagonist's active partners.
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2525 Raid Battles as a Format
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2727 Raid battles are expected to be the largest battle format in the game. Regular play is built around one player plus a partner. During certain story segments, guest characters step into the fight and the party expands to three. In large-scale battles more guest characters still are said to join on top of that, though the developers have not shared exact numbers for how many combatants a raid group actually fields.
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2929 Where Illfang fits in that framework, whether the full raid roster is shown on screen, whether it is abstracted through named guest slots, or whether parts of the fight are handled through cutscene, has not been confirmed. What is confirmed is that raids are the scale above the usual player-plus-partner loop, and that the Illfang fight belongs in that scale.
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3131 Is the Protagonist on the Frontline for the Fight?
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3333 Direct participation in the first-floor raid has not yet been confirmed. Based on the trailer and the demo footage, there is an opening for the protagonist to be present for at least part of the fight, alongside their partner and the rest of the raid group. The party is clearly preparing for the raid in the material shown so far.
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3535 The other plausible outcome is that the story separates the protagonist from the raid group at some point and has Illfang's defeat arrive secondhand through the survivors' accounts. Under that framing the raid would happen off-screen, or be shown in a cutscene with the protagonist absent, and the payoff would be the party's reaction to what they hear afterwards. Either possibility lines up with the footage released so far; the developers have not closed the question.
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3737 The Kobold Dungeon and the Tall Kobold Fight
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3939 The trailers include a kobold-themed dungeon and a fight against a tall kobold on what looks like an isolated platform. With the demo now confirming Illfang as the Floor 1 boss, that isolated-platform fight reads as the Illfang encounter itself rather than a separate lower-ranked kobold boss. The surrounding dungeon shares enemies with the broader kobold family that also includes Kobold Sentinels and Ruin Kobold Troopers.
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4141 Much of the on-screen kobold material comes from the beta-era segments that the demo is set during, which is why the isolated-platform fight against a tall kobold stands out as the clearest look at the floor boss. The rest of the kobold enemies in the labyrinth belong to the broader kobold family rather than sharing Illfang's own moveset.
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4343 Fallout and the Kirito Question
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4545 Part of the resentment that runs through the story is tied to how Kirito handled the Illfang raid in the source material. From the perspective of ordinary trapped players he withheld useful information as an experienced beta tester, and his conduct during and around the Floor 1 boss fight is one of the concrete reasons that view of him takes hold in the early floors.
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4747 How Echoes of Aincrad presents the aftermath of this particular raid is therefore key to how the protagonist and their companions end up viewing Kirito. If the party fights alongside him and watches his choices in person, their opinion is formed one way. If they hear about it secondhand from survivors, their opinion is shaped by whoever is telling the story and how that survivor frames his role. Either route feeds directly into the grounded, resentment-coloured take on Kirito that the developers have said this game leans into.
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49+Three Encounters, Not One
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51+Illfang is fought more than once, and the versions differ enough that treating them as a single fight leads to bad expectations.
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53+EncounterWhenFormPrologueDuring the closed-beta section, in the High Elven RuinsSummoned as a trap. Fought solo with a single partner, well before the raid.Floor 1 raidAt the top of the Labyrinth, after the Tolbana strategy meetingA large-scale raid. The boss cannot be approached directly; your role is to clear the adds it spawns.Labyrinth revisitOn a later ascent, behind a gate in an apparently empty boss arenaA dungeon version, weaker than the raid form but fought alone and flanked by Elite Kobolds.
54+Phase Structure
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56+The fight runs in three phases across every version, and the transitions are driven by a heavy attack landed once the health bar empties rather than by the bar emptying on its own.
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58+PhaseBehaviourApproachOneFights behind a shield and summons additional kobolds once its health drops far enough.Guard damage first. Holding heavy attack unleashes a Crush Attack, and the guard break it causes is the real damage window.TwoDiscards the shield and switches to a longsword. In the dungeon version it glows green and leaps for a heavy overhead.The same read as phase one without the guard, so ordinary punishes work again. Watch for the leap tell.ThreeFights from the ground, crawling and thrashing. More aggressive in the dungeon version, tackling repeatedly.Clear the summoned kobolds first, then punish during the pauses after its thrashing sequences.
59+Defeating it in the prologue awards a keepsake item that becomes significant much later in the campaign. See Boss Battles for how the fight sits alongside the game's other boss classes.