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"This, might be a game,
but it isn't meant to be played."
-Kayaba Akihito
So, hello people of "The Wired", my name is Quan, and to celebrate my return from hiatus(sorry about that but serious crap has been happening in my life recently), I thought I'd review something that people might actually care about. So, buckle in for my review of Sword Art Online. Let's begin.
So, just in case you have never heard of this show(which is very unlikely but whatever), let me give you give you the basic rundown. Sword Art Online is a 25 episode anime TV series based off the light novels by Reki Kawahara that aired in between July 8th to December 23rd of 2012, and as previously mentioned, attracted a lot of hype when it first came out(due to a certain premise which drew in a certain demographic, but I'll talk about that later), which of course meant it received an enormous amount of back-lash from critics and haters alike during its latter half and after it had finished, some of this criticism justified and some not.
SAO was brought to us by those lovely folks at A1 Pictures, who have brought plenty of crap and good stuff over the years. They have plenty of stuff I like: Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, Shinsekai Yori, Nanana's Buried Treasure, Your Lie In April, and Saekono for example. But then again, on the other hand they have crap like Aldnoah.zero, Gunslinger Stratos, and well... Sword Art Online. It was directed by Tomohiko Itou, who has done lots of storyboards and miscellaneous jobs for many great and well known anime(Death Note, Monster and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time), but as for actual directing jobs, Sword Art Online and its sequel remain one of his solitary works. And that... is quite evident, as it turns out, but he did Gin No Saji as well.. so, that's something. The writer was Alex Van David, who mostly has done ADR direction for a variety of shows, but also handled the script partly on shows like Madoka Magica and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which kind of boggles my mind actually, because he did something as crap as this... okay, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
Story
It's the year 2022, and virtual-reality video-games have finally become attainable by the use of technology, allowing players to actually jump into the virtual world and control their in game avatars as if they were their own bodies. In this new genre, the world is eagerly awaiting the release of the virtual reality MMORG: Sword Art Online, a game designed by genius programmer Kayaba Akihito that promises full immersion into a fantasy world of swords, dungeons, monsters and adventure. And on November 6th, 2022 Sword Art Online goes live to the public, and the 10,000 lucky people who were able to get one of the first copies log into the game to find an experience that surpasses even their wildest dreams: a fully functioning fantasy world where anything is possible. It's a wonderful day for everyone, but for no one more than our main character Kirito, a reclusive 14yr old teenager who has always used video-games to escape his bleak life, and being able to nearly disappear into a whole other reality is pretty much equivalent to a wish come true for him. Though maybe he shouldn't have wished for it too hard...
After the initial euphoria, the players of Sword Art Online discover what they assume to be a launch-day glitch, as the button to log out of the game appears to be missing from their menus. Nothing to worry about of course, the programmers will sort it out soon, but still, it's rather worrying, because as it stands, with their real-life bodies currently paralyzed by the technology that allowed them to jump into the virtual world in the first place: Nervgear, there is currently no way for Kirito and the rest of the 10,000 players to log out of Sword Art Online. But suddenly, SAO's creator Kayaba Akihito appears before them, and tells them that this is in fact not a glitch, but rather a "feature" of the game. That this is an intended aspect of the game. And now, with their real-life bodies frozen and their consciousnesses completely cut off from the outside world, Kayaba informs the players that there is now only one way to escape the game: clear all 100 levels of Aincrad, the floating castle in which the world of SAO resides in, and make it to the final floor to defeat the final boss in order to return to the real world. And if that didn't sound impossible enough, Kayaba tells the players that there is one more aspect of the game that he conveniently forgot to leave off the box: that the moment that the player's HP reaches 0, the Nervgear on the heads of their real-life bodies will activate, and do to their brains what a microwave does to an egg. In other words, in a brand new near impossible virtual reality fantasy game that nobody really knows how to play, they need to clear it, and if any of the 10,000 players die in the game along the way, they die for real. Good luck.
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| Kayaba Akihito dropping by to inform the players that there is bad news and there's worse news. |
Now I know what you're thinking: "that sounds freakin' awesome." And yes, yes it does, the premise is likely the reason SAO was so popular before it had even aired its first episode, and why it kept that popularity: by attracting a whole new demographic of gamers to anime, gamers which not only were biased right away because of the subject matter, but also since Sword Art Online is a rather excellent gate-way anime. That's because for all the faults I'm about to list off in the upcoming paragraphs, SAO is at the best of times a very fun anime. Exploring the aspects of the virtual world is fascinating, particular when it comes down to the boss battles that Kirito and the rest of the players have to face at the end of each floor, which ignite a sense of excitement due to the great animation, and also a sense of nostaglia for that kid inside you who loved those kind of things so much. It's similar to anime like Guilty Crown in that way I suppose; if you ignore the flaws and watch strictly for entertainment purposes, Sword Art Online is easy to watch and easy to like. That's not my problem with it. My problem is that if you look past the "fun-factor", and look at the story and characters... well, I wouldn't say it's a travesty, but... well yeah, it's a travesty.
It's actually amazing how many things Sword Art Online does wrong. Oh, it opens well enough, the first two episodes introduce the world and get you excited for what's to come. The delivery of the revelation about the true nature of the game by Kayaba Akihito is well done, and the second episode makes the stakes of the game quite real by fast-forwarding a month into the game and revealing that 2,000 people have already died. The first and second episodes also introduce the supporting cast well, by introducing Kirito's comic-relief friend Klein by mixing it with exposition, and the love interest: Asuna, who makes a bad-ass first impression by being cold with everyone, really being good at the game despite being a complete newcomer to virtual-reality MMORPGs, and slashing the sh*t out of the game's first boss with Kirito in an awesome and wonderfully animated sequence that made me think, "hey, I'll think I'll like this girl." But here come the problems, and my, there is a long line of them.
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| And here's Asuna's first act of bad-assness. Enjoy it while you can, there won't be many more. |
After episode 2, and especially after episode 3, the pacing takes a dramatic change, as Sword Art Online changes from focusing on the charge to beat the bosses and clear the game, to Kirito messing around in the lower floors of Sword Art Online with a bunch of boring, pointless, and freakin' terrible side-stories. Every episode, we see Kirito happen upon some random girl, and solve her problems due to how incredibly over-powered he is compared to everyone else(more on that later), and then said girl will usually fall in love with Kirito for no explainable reason, which makes the whole thing ever harder to take seriously. See, SAO wants to be a tense story of survival in an unknown virtual world, but by switching the focus from actually trying to clear the game to "random adventures with Kirito and co.", all that tension dissipates as quickly as the first two episodes built it up, especially when paired with how easily Kirito solves most of the issues of these episodes. It doesn't help that any character we meet during this span is completely and utterly one-dimensional and practically irrelevant to the rest of the story, and yes, they're all just stereotypes to help building Kirito's harem, though one wonders why we need a harem in the first place in your fantasy action series when we already have a romantic subplot. What's the point of giving these characters an episode and feelings for Kirito if they won't do anything substantial in the story again ever?! *sigh*. I would say that you could just cut episodes 3-7 from the story and be done with it, but that's not quite true. Episode 3 is actually not that bad. It's not well written, but the consequences of the end of this episode actually almost make you feel like Sword Art Online is a game you can actually die in, where death is always just around the corner and how hard losing somebody is, not just a backdrop of the setting forgotten in all the fluff. And episode 5, for how pointless it is, does provide some building of the chemistry between our two main characters, but that is nearly inconsequential in the avalanche of issues with these episodes.
For once, this truly appalling structure of the series is not the fault of Reki Kawahara, but rather the way that A1 Pictures chose to adapt his light novels. See, the original SAO light novel told the "Aincrad arc" beginning to end, while the second novel of the series is a collection of side stories about what happened in between the many time-skips of the story, and it's these side stories, for the most part, that encompass episodes 3-7. I can see the reason why they chose to adapt it this way, but come on, did anyone see that this means that we literally forgot about the story for 5 episodes?! And seeing that the "Aincrad Arc" is only 14 episodes long, 12 if you leave out the introduction, that means that you've rendered nearly half of your show completely separated from building on the narrative. That's...not a good idea, guys.
Fortunately for my patience, the problems aren't over yet. Once the plot does finally decide to stick its head out, it's still flawed as all hell. It's hard to care about characters you don't have any attachment to and feel invincible, and that makes the drama and stakes the second half of the anime tries to raise feel laughable, and once deus ex machina logic is introduced for the sake of a happy ending, suspicion of disbelief is destroyed. The biggest shame about all of this is that, with only a couple of changes, I may have been able to like this series beyond just simple entertainment. If the plot had been more focused on the charge up all 100 floors of Aincrad, I feel it would have improved the story significantly. We would have had a clear goal, Kirito and Asuna would have been able to build their relationship steadily, and whatever game mechanics that A1 Pictures wanted to show off could have been discovered as the players worked their way through the game discovering new things. But nothing that could made this story work is focused on. Instead of the raw, exciting and tense charge through the game and boss battles, we get inconsequential side-stories that have nothing to do with anything. Instead of interesting game mechanics that would make this virtual world come alive, Sword Art Online game's fundamental design doesn't even make that much sense on a variety of "game-play" aspects. Instead of focusing on the politics and culture of 10,000 people suddenly trapped in a video-game and how that effects their moral compasses, we get Kirito strutting around foraging for bullsh*t. And that pains me deeply. But not as much as this next part.
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| Oh, go away Suguha, nobody likes you. |
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| The end of their world. |
The one thing I will give Sword Art Online credit for contextually is that is actually manages to end all right. Deus ex machina aside, the ending of both arcs are rather satisfying, especially the first, which not only pulled a twist that was surprising, actually well built up, and kind of cool, but also provided the only interesting thematic and character element the show had to offer, and it's a pretty damn good one, I just wish it wasn't surrounded by all this crap. Reki Kawahara obviously had a goal in mind, but he really lacks the skill as a writer to bring anything interesting to the table. And if you think I'm going a little hard on Reki Kawahara and not hard enough on the people who actually brought this story from a novel to an anime, give me some time. I'll explain everything, and by then, I think you'll understand the problem at the heart of SAO.
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| From left to right: Asada(S2), Suguha, Kirito, Klein, Asuna, Lisbeth, Silica, Agil. |
Characters
But before that, we need to talk about characters, and since nobody else really matters besides Kirito and Asuna, let's just discuss them, shall we? Our lead first.
But before that, we need to talk about characters, and since nobody else really matters besides Kirito and Asuna, let's just discuss them, shall we? Our lead first.
I'll get right into it, Kirito is possibly one of the blandest and boring protagonists I have come across. He's established as a socially reclusive teenager, but that trait disappears the moment it's introduced. He's supposedly some sort of bad-ass with a dark side, but he's actually has the same "nice-guy" personality as any bland rom/com protagonist out there. "So," you might ask, "what exactly is Kirito's role in the narrative then?" Well, I'll tell you. Quite simply, Kirito is whatever the plot needs him to be. It's the reason he's stronger than everyone else in the game, Kawahara admitted in interviews that he wanted to write SAO's story to be about one of the stronger players in the game, but since he undoubtedly has no idea how players become strong in MMORGs, Kirito inherits the trait for no reason. His actions contradict themselves to serve the plot so much that it becomes and harder to think of him as a character rather than just a plot device, and you know what, by the time he is breaking the very laws of the virtual world he lives in for no reason other than "because he's Kirito", I'm beginning to think that is exactly what he is. He's a solution for every problem that comes up in the story, and when your main character is only that, well... you've failed.
Asuna, on the other hand, fairs better. As a fighter, she's a bad-ass, and as a character, she's mostly just a tsundere, but actually has reasons for it, which is appreciated. And while she is undoubtedly one of the strongest players in the game, she can't do impossible things like Kirito can(well, for the most part). But what's kind of inexcusable is how the story itself treats Asuna. She's established as a bad-ass in the first two episodes, but as the story goes on, her roles in events become more and more minuscule compared to Kirito as she relies on him. Now, it could be argued that this is because of her growing relationship with Kirito(which is decently handled for the most part), because after all, with love comes dependence. But it's not as simple as that. By the end of the Aincrad arc", Asuna literally can't do anything without Kirito's help, despite her status as a player, despite logic, she suddenly becomes helpless at the most crucial of times, and it's always up to Kirito to swoop in and save everyone. And that pisses me off. But that's nothing compared to her role in the second half of the anime, or to be more precise, how she literally turns into a plot-device. Oh, I don't feel like ranting about that right now. "Fairy Dance" is crap, let's move on.
While he only appears for a grand total of like, 10 minutes in the entire show, I still find Kayaba Akihito to be by far the most interesting and well developed character in the show. Obviously, I can't talk about his reasoning for trapping 10,000 people in a game and getting many of them killed, but I'd like to say that unlike many people, I don't believe it's a cop-out. I find it rather fascinating, actually, which leads him to be one of my favorite villains(believe it or not), and the whole reason I'm continuing to read the SAO light novels is pretty much because I hope that he'll turn up again and we can get some proper back-story.
Asuna, on the other hand, fairs better. As a fighter, she's a bad-ass, and as a character, she's mostly just a tsundere, but actually has reasons for it, which is appreciated. And while she is undoubtedly one of the strongest players in the game, she can't do impossible things like Kirito can(well, for the most part). But what's kind of inexcusable is how the story itself treats Asuna. She's established as a bad-ass in the first two episodes, but as the story goes on, her roles in events become more and more minuscule compared to Kirito as she relies on him. Now, it could be argued that this is because of her growing relationship with Kirito(which is decently handled for the most part), because after all, with love comes dependence. But it's not as simple as that. By the end of the Aincrad arc", Asuna literally can't do anything without Kirito's help, despite her status as a player, despite logic, she suddenly becomes helpless at the most crucial of times, and it's always up to Kirito to swoop in and save everyone. And that pisses me off. But that's nothing compared to her role in the second half of the anime, or to be more precise, how she literally turns into a plot-device. Oh, I don't feel like ranting about that right now. "Fairy Dance" is crap, let's move on.
While he only appears for a grand total of like, 10 minutes in the entire show, I still find Kayaba Akihito to be by far the most interesting and well developed character in the show. Obviously, I can't talk about his reasoning for trapping 10,000 people in a game and getting many of them killed, but I'd like to say that unlike many people, I don't believe it's a cop-out. I find it rather fascinating, actually, which leads him to be one of my favorite villains(believe it or not), and the whole reason I'm continuing to read the SAO light novels is pretty much because I hope that he'll turn up again and we can get some proper back-story.
So, with all these problems, surely there is a silver lining to it all? Well, never fear, for A1 Pictures rose from their throne of completely unrelated anime series and lack of identity to proclaimed: "hey, look at these pretty colors."
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| A snapshot of the beautiful scenary of SAO. |
Sword Art Online is probably the best looking show I've seen from studio A1 Pictures, with the possible exception of Anohana. The animation is superb, with vibrant colors and truly gorgeous backgrounds that really bring the whole world to life. I like the variety of settings too, that come with the many floors of Aincrad, from a snowy wasteland to a floor completely covered in flowers, Sword Art Online looks amazing whatever way you look at it. The three boss battles we get to see are the peak of animation however, as what the action of the anime lacks in choreography, it makes up for in pure animation power, so even if the movements of the characters during battles are very simple, the animation alone makes it exciting and fun. But not all the action is bad in terms of choreography however. There is one particular duel during the latter half on the "Aincrad arc" that is my personal favorite in the show, and hell there's even one in the "Fairy Dance" arc that is rather epic, as much as it hurts me to admit that part of the anime exists.
Yuki Kajiura is a name I hope you're familiar with, because she is one of the best composers in the industry today. Sure, her music is samey occasionally(okay, a lot), however, the music she has produced for Sword Art Online is still well above average. It's not her best by any means, that honor is still held in the hands of Madoka Magica in my opinion, but this soundtrack is still great to listen to in the midst of an action scene, if not by itself. OP's and ED's are pretty good too, the first opening: "Crossing Fields" is exciting and catchy, while I consider the second ED: "Overfly" an actually quite beautiful song that takes on a whole new meaning once you know the lyrics. Above average in the music department, ultimately.
"Crossing Fields"
"Main Theme"
"Overfly"
Verdict
So, who do I blame for Sword Art Online completely tarnishing it's potential, ultimately becoming an anime that is entertaining but not good? Well, I blame A1 Pictures for their poor choices in adapting the light novels. I blame Tomohiko Itou for not having the foresight to stop these issues and take full control of creative license to craft Sword Art Online into the good anime that it could have been. But most of all, I blame Reki Kawahara. See, this is why Sword Art Online is the way it is. The original light novel was written by Kawahara when he was 15 as a submission for a contest, but ultimately never submitted the story due to him going over the word limit, and ultimately launched the story online where it gained its popularity and turned into a light novel series, and eventually an anime. The reason SAO skips around in time so much, and why the ending of the first arc is so sudden is because Kawahara must have realized he was approaching the word limit for the contest and had to end it quickly. The reason why Kirito is so inexplicably over-powered and the game does not make sense on a fundamental level is because Kawahara wanted to write a story about a high-level player, but did not the research real MMORGs to see how people become strong, or how these games actually work. The reason all the other female characters in the show fall for Kirito is because Kawahara has openly said in interviews that he doesn't know how to write female characters any other way. The reason why Kawahara hasn't fixed plot-holes and contrivances in the story that he himself has admitted, is because he clearly doesn't have motivation or respect for his work as long as it makes money. The reason why SAO seems like a 15yr old's wish fulfillment fantasy about how he is the most bad-ass player in the entire world and gets all of the girls... is because that is exactly what it is.
But hey, even if they're stupid, at least fantasies are fun to watch, and even more important, they're harmless. So maybe I'm being a little hard on Kawahara, after all, I've never even met the guy. At least I'm not angry at Sword Art Online getting popular, like I am with something that insults my very pride as an anime fan like Valvrave. I'm not offended by it. It's a fun, stupid show, that got popular because of the demographic it attracted, the luck that came with the mindset of that demographic, and the comfortable cliches it nestles itself in, and got a huge backlash and negative connotation in the community because of that very popularity. And that's all. So go watch it. It'll be fun.
Final Verdict: 4/10
P.S: Klein is the real MVP.
Recommended Anime:
Log Horizon
Log Horizon takes all the potential of SAO's premise of being trapped in a game and takes it to new and exciting places. More politically driven than SAO and less action oriented, but the fun characters will keep you interested, especially one of the best MC's out there.
Accel World
Another anime adapted from a light novel series by Kawahara, so you know, it's relevant, and even takes place in the same universe as Sword Art Online.
Sword Art Online is available for legal streaming on Hulu.
Goodbye for now guys.
Click here for my anime review of Toradora.
Or here for a game review of Thomas Was Alone.
My countdown of the Top Ten Anime You've Never Seen is located here.
Find Me At:
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| https://hummingbird.me/users/Quan |
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| https://twitter.com/QuanReviews |
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| Email Me At: quanqreviews@gmail.com |
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