Thoughts on Sword Art Online

I recently watched Sword Art Online for the first time and I was surprised just how much I loved it. For the first fourteen episodes anyway, after that it kind of becomes a mess. The premise: 10,000 people get trapped in a virtual reality MMORPG and must beat the game to escape. The catch is that if they die in the game, their VR equipment will kill them in real life, so it's a race against time while their bodies waste away to try to beat the game and get out. Well, they get put on life support but one would assume that if they didn't get at some point they would have just died anyway.

Our main hero is Kirito, a teenager who beta-tested the game and has come back for the full version. He knows how the game works and becomes a hardcore solo player, taking on challenges on his own when most people join a guild and work together. He has good reason for working on his own, a lot of players don't like the beta-testers from a combination of envy and fear. We don't know what the beta-testers did as a whole in the game, but a lot of new players end up blaming them for the deaths of other players, saying they didn't do enough to help in the early days. Kirito gets labelled as both a beta-tester and a cheater (beater) which gets him loathed by some.

I'll just jump into what made me really enjoy this show. The romance, which is the most surprising to me because I'm not one to generally enjoy romantic media. It works here though, we see how Kirito and his beloved Asuna come together, from their first meeting to their work relationship which leads to a more intimate relationship that turns into love. I believed that their transformation from an argumentative pair to a couple willing to die for each other was genuine, it felt natural and right. I wanted them to survive and escape because of what they meant to each other, and it made sense they would grow such a bond because of the chaotic and intense lifestyle they lived inside the game world.

The reason I titled this thoughts instead of a review is because I really don't want to touch on much of the other stuff from the first half of the season. The side characters are cool, though disappointingly a lot of them only appear once and the ones who reappear don't tend to stick around too long. For instance a guy named Klein bonded with Kirito before they found out they were trapped and they seem to have a sort of 'best friend' style relationship but they hardly interact and they didn't know each other before hand. It's kind of weird, and there isn't really any resolution or development.

The game world looks cool and it was interesting to see how many people just sort of stopped trying to beat the game and started building lives in it. For some reason people could run shops, I would have figured players wouldn't have that option and it would be NPC only, but I guess it was a more advanced game system that allowed for it or something. The first half has a lot of focus on the game, the rules and really makes it feel like a game world they are in. That's one of the things the second half doesn't do.

Spoilers from here on.




In the second half, after Kirito defeats the game maker and releases the 6000 surviving players, he finds out in the real world that 300 are still trapped somehow, even though SAO was deleted. Asuna is among them, and even worse, her father has allowed a man she detests to marry her in her current state. She of course can't say no, and this man, Suguo, is the one responsible for her continued captivity. He's experimenting on the other minds for some sort of reason I don't remember, but he has Asuna trapped in another game using the SAO data called Alfheim Online.

Kirito, or Kazuto since that's his real name, finds out she's trapped there after seeing an in-game photo taken by other players, so he once again heads in to Virtual Reality to rescue Asuna. This is where things stop being so great. First off, Alfheim Online feels much less like a game world because they don't spend a lot of time on game mechanics. There are few fights, and there are new powers that don't seem to function like game mechanics more like your average fantasy powers. It's more fantasy feeling than game feeling is what I'm getting at.

Second, Kazuto's sister Suguha is introduced for the first time in this half of the season. She's discovered since Kazuto came back that she loves him. I've been assuming it's a romantic love and I'm not really sure how that would be looked upon in Japan but I found it kind of... off putting. She feels jealous of Asuna, as Kazuto goes to visit her unconscious body in the hospital regularly. When he was in SAO, Suguha got curious after her anger subsided about what her brother even liked these games and so she started playing Alfheim Online. Wanna guess who ends up being Kirito's helped in the game? They don't know up until the last couple of episodes that they've been playing together so Suguha mostly just gets to be sad when they realize it.

Anyway, the game world in this game is divided into seven fairy races, with the ultimate goal of each race to get to the top of the world tree where rumor has it the first race to make will become a super fairy and be able to fly forever, instead of the ten minutes or so they got now. Asuna is also up there, so Kirito just pretty much goes straight there, making a few allies along the way, and yeah he eventually gets to her. Asuna doesn't get to do much except be a captured damsel in distress and get molested (and nearly raped), which is a big slap to the face after her performance in the first half. Her fiance is a pretty terrible character, both morally and as a character. He's one dimensional, and there's nothing interesting about him. He's just disturbing and a sociopath.

There are other things I could talk about or go into more detail over but I guess now's as good a time to stop as any. The last episode is pretty good all things considered, it feels like a wrap-up to the first half more than the second, most of the characters in it were from the first half not the second, and it showed that Kazuto and Asuna would be able to be together in the real world. I haven't seen SAOII yet because Netflix only has it in Japanese and I'd like to watch it in English, hopefully it is up to the quality of the first half.

The Sword Art Online episodes make it into the top of my favorite anime list, but the Alfheim Online episodes drag the whole package down a bit. I don't know if I'd recommend skipping episodes 15-25 altogether but if you don't really want to watch all the episodes 1-14 and 26 are what I personally enjoyed very much.

-Subtle