Review Sword Art Online :)

SAO

Sword Art Online Review

SAO Review, Season 1

 I liked it. It’s an anime I wouldn’t mind watching again, 

Sword Art Online’s premise isn’t anything new. Players getting trapped in an MMO made real has been done before. Expand it to players getting trapped in a game that’s suddenly deadly and it’s been done to death. So we’re not exactly breaking new ground but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. SAO does a good job of it and goes with the premise. In most the “gaminess” goes away and it’s just a generic fantasy adventure that someone occasionally shouts, “It’s only supposed to be a game!” SAO never stops being an MMO. You don’t cook conventionally, you do it via recipe and a few taps of a knife and you’ve got a perfect stew. Doesn’t matter if you can cook in real life, grind the skill or suck. You don’t get dressed by putting on clothes, you pull up a menu, click the items you want to wear and you’re dressed. Slam into a wall or structure that would have damaged it, a sign saying, “Immortal Object” pops up to explain why it wasn’t wrecked. The examples go on and on and it’s one of the strong points of the series. It continually reinforces the central tenet that the characters are trapped in what is otherwise a bog standard MMO fighting for their very lives. It commits to the bit and I respect that greatly.

Kirito extra skill

Character wise we’re not really breaking new ground either. The main character Kirito is pretty much your standard issue anime badass, motherfucker even wears all black. I actually laughed when he looted his trademark black long coat and equipped it. That said he’s got what so few protagonists do, actual character development. It’s sort of clunky. You can divide SAO into three sections quite definitively. You’ve got the opening two episodes where the world is established. Then you’ve got five random episodes that feel like filler, and then the real story arc for the next seven episodes. However, those five episodes of seeming filler are where Kirito goes from the bland nobody of the first two episodes to the badass loner of the last seven. You can see why he’s a loner. You can see his deductive skills used. You can see the qualities in him that wind up attracting so many girls/women to him. In my honest opinion if you skip those filler episodes you reduce SAO to a far weaker story about a badass who just is one. The other main character is Asuna, who in game is a very powerful fighter, on par with the strongest players in the game and second in command of the strongest guild. She is, in her own right, a badass and does not require Kirito to be one. It makes for a very enjoyable relationship of equals between them and the development of their romance is one of the main subplots and really one of my favorite parts of the anime because it actually felt like a real relationship rather than the usual love and devotion at first sight that you get. Like Kirito Asuna’s character develops but unlike his she develops over the course of the main story arc primarily. You can’t really talk about Kirito and Asuna without bringing up Yui, their “daughter”. Yeah, I loved Yui from the word go. She’s pretty stock cute but it was her relationship with Kirito and Asuna that sold her to me to the point where when she was shut down by the system I got a little teary. Really the only part that irked me about the ending of the first arc was at the end how Kirito was absolutely focused on Asuna and she him and neither one of them seemed to remember Yui. Yeah, kind of a major goof there. AI or not if you’re going to shed tears over her and consider her your daughter you might want to make at least passing mention of her in the finale.Secondary character wise you’ve got some fairly stock secondary characters but they’re executed well. Found myself liking several of them and wishing we got to see more, especially Lisbeth, Silica, and Sachi.

ALfheim Online

So far I’ve been talking almost exclusively about the SAO portion of the show, the first fourteen episodes. Really, it’s a pretty open and closed arc for the most part. Aside from being clunkily broken up into intro, character building, and story arc sections the story hangs together well. Action is not drawn out. A showdown between Kirito and the leader of the strongest guild in the game lasts all of five minutes. In any other anime this would have been an entire episode, minimum. In some shonen series it would have been half a season. Even the final battle lasted under ten minutes. The series was very good at leading up to significant events, have them pay off, and then going through the results of those events in an expeditious manner. It didn’t waste my time, and it let the story get through a lot more events than pretty much any other series I know of could have in fourteen episodes without ever seeming too rushed. Storytelling is about pacing and I think SAO paced itself better than just about any anime I’ve ever seen.

The biggest let down I think was at the end, during the conversation with the big bad as the game is crumbling around them what’s his motivation? “I forgot.” Yup… almost four thousand people are dead and you don’t even know why? I mean, why not just perma-ban? You die in SAO you’re perma-banned from the game. Want to keep people from taking off the helmets? Just put the perma-banned people in an actual coma and leave them there until the game is cleared. Killing them at that point just seems like spite. Yes I’m still pissed about Sachi. Killing Santa should have brought her back.

And then Alfheim Online happened.

Ok, I have to get this off my chest. How in the hell would a VRMMORPG be allowed to exist after SAO’s clusterfuck? This game apparently started up while more than six thousand people were still in a coma like state and more than three thousand were fucking DEAD because of it and somehow a new VRMMORPG that was just a reskin of SAO was brought to market and wildly popular… THE FUCK?! I mean sure, the last VRMMORPG killed more people than 9/11 but this one is gonna be legit, I just know it! Not just that, but the sister/cousin of Kirito, who’s spent nearly three years in a coma because of a VRMMORPG is one of the significant players of this new one? There’s bad parenting and then there’s just actively trying to kill your kids.

ALO is in many ways a mirror image of SAO. Everything SAO does right ALO gets wrong. Things SAO didn’t do so hot ALO knocks out of the park. It’s still enjoyable, don’t get me wrong, but if the ALO arc had been as good as the SAO arc I’d be giving this whole thing a 8.5 or 9.0 instead of a 7.5. It’s just not as good and that’s painfully obvious.

Kirito keeps all his skills through the power of plot so he doesn’t have to start over from square one. Well… ok, but then why even start this new world and arc? If you’re just going to leave him an overpowered badass why not leave him in SAO. Beat the game, but then no one still gets out. Yui is there, as Navi. Kirito doesn’t seem to treat her as his daughter past the first episode of the arc and just treats her as an annoyance afterwards. Which she is, she mostly seems to exist to call him Daddy and make him uncomfortable around Leafa. Asuna goes from badass on par with Kirito to a depowered damsel in distress. That’s bad enough, except in both the real and virtual worlds she is constantly being threatened with rape. It’s wildly incongruous with Asuna from SAO. She’s reduced from a heroine to the McGuffin. Then there’s Leafa, who is quite possibly the only character in the entire last ten episodes of the season who actually grows and changes. In game she’s not on Kirito’s level but she’s far from useless aiding him and serving as a guide. The only other character of any significance is Recon a rather hopeless dork whose only role seems to be to spill the plot to Kirito and Leafa and serve as a secondary romantic interest for Leafa though that’s rather laughable.

Which brings us to the bit that gets a lot of attention, Leafa’s real life player is actually Kirito’s adoptive sister, actual cousin Suguha. Suguha is rather madly in love with Kirito. Say it with me, “Ewwww, incest!” got that out of your system? Honestly, it doesn’t bother me. The cousin angle is really there as an out for Japanese audiences. While incidences of cousins intermarrying are on the decline in Japan historically its not seen in the same light as closer relations. Call it incest lite, still taboo, but not strictly go to jail illegal. Getting past the big I her story is an interesting one as she deals with the fact that her love interest isn’t interested in her because he’s already taken. Her giving her brother up to focus on Kirito is nicely done. Until she just about immediately finds out that Kirito is her real life brother. I mean, there’s being unlucky in love and there’s Aphrodite just spitting in your face out of spite. It speaks well to her character that she aided him anyways but it remains something that I hope gets dealt with next season. I’ll be perfectly honest, with none of the SAO crew returning (seriously, seriously who’d have guessed that none of them wanted to get into a VRMMO again) and Kirito more or less stagnant and Asuna reduced to a plot point she’s the only person I gave a damn about for this arc.

Which is sad really because I think they just wasted ALO’s potential. I wanted to know more about the world of ALO than I ever did about Aingrad. Let’s face it, SAO is a pretty bog standard MMO but ALO gave characters flight. Admittedly you have to be a fairy, but hey, flight, and girls with pointed ears. Sacrifices shall be made. The show still had its excellent pacing, and the fight between Kirito and Eugene in episode twenty was fantastic, showing what you could do with this style of fighting and flying players. The problem is just the whole concept of the arc. It’s flat and lifeless. The only interesting part is Suguha’s sub-plot. No realplayer death leaves defeat as meaningless as it is in an actual MMO. Given the stakes of the story arc, Asuna and ending the big bad’s plan, making corpse dragging the final boss room kind of… pointless. Ultimately I’m left wondering… why? Why did SAO finish up at episode fourteen? Why not fill up all of season one with SAO and use ALO as the setting for season two. It certainly has the potential as a setting. The real kick in the balls is seeing Aingrad floating into ALO’s world at the end and everyone rushing off towards it. Leaving the actually interesting world for the one they’ve already almost beaten and tried to kill them. I actually facepalmed at that moment.

Anyways, I enjoyed SAO even with it’s issues and I’m eagerly awaiting the next season. Been a while since an anime actually made me say that.