Story 5: I’ll divide this section into two parts: “What it could have been” and “what we actually got”
WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN: The premise is awesome; it’s World of Warcraft meets The Matrix. The protagonist is stuck with 10,000 other players in a Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game called “Sword Art Online” where you can’t log out and if you die in the game you die in real life.
Mission: Clear all 100 levels and everyone who is still alive in the game will be logged out. Solid right?
The first episode did a good job anticipating and then answering many of the questions a rational viewer might have about the premise of an action/romance anime in cyberspace. For example:
Q: What if you die, can’t you just respawn?
A: No, your brain will get fried in real life
Q: Can’t someone in the real world just pull your headgear off?
A: No, see previous answer
Q: Why is all this happening?
A: Mad Scientist…stop asking questions
Q: So they’re all trapped…how on Earth can the protagonist possibly distinguish himself amongst 10k other players?
A: He’s was a beta-tester and most of the other 10k players are complete noobs
Q: Ok…Ok…the protagonist has an edge but let’s say he happens to fall in love with a girl in the game, how do you KNOW for sure that she’s really a hot gamer chick and not a balding sex-offender?
A: Everyone (for no logical reason) looks like their real selves in the game.
You can see how everything just falls into place to allow an ordinary dude who is good at video games to evolve into a legit badass. Sure the set up was a little cheesy and there were a couple of times I wanted to roll my eyes but it could have been a really cool story.
They also use the premise to ask a few interesting questions.
-Is in-game love real? Would it last in the real world?
-What happens when you spend years (I’m not joking) in a game? Do you forget what the real world is like?
-Is your online personality a reflection of who you really are?
-Can human willpower fight programming?
Cool huh?
WHAT WE ACTUALLY GOT: My main problem is the poor pacing of the series and the entire second story arc. The first arc moved too fast and disjointedly. We literally jump around 3+ months at a time between episodes. This means that the character development, the “becoming a badass” and the “falling in love” (aka the meat of an action/romance anime) get skipped over in a bad way. It’s like they are trying to show that these things don’t happen overnight (i.e. over the course of years) but they don't realize that by omitting great spans of time they end up not showing us anything at all. They also insist on adding a few filler episodes and “slice of life” moments in the first arc which makes everything else that much more rushed.
The second arc is really bad. I’m not going to give you any specific spoilers but they pretty much shit on the entire premise of the first arc. It picks up again at the end I guess but the damage has already been done.
Let me just say this, if they had scrapped the second arc altogether and used those 12 episodes to enrich the first I don’t think I would have any complaints. Story-wise this anime went the way of Gantz: great premise, poor follow-through.
Art 9: I have no complaints, it was beautiful. I thought the landscapes were really cool. The premise gave them a lot of freedom to make crazy environments for the characters. This was the strongest point of the anime.
Sound 9: Music was actually pretty good. The fight music was well done and I thought the intro/ending songs were well above average.
Character 5: The main characters were stale and underdeveloped. Everything keeps coming down to that second arc which changed Kirito from a lone, wandering swordsman to just a role-playing nerd with ADHD. When you get to any of the later episodes (when they start talking about the “Salamanders”) just ask yourself this, “What the fuck is he doing?”
The character development of the females in this anime is stunted. The best case is Asuna, who started off very promising but quickly fell into the damsel in distress role. There was so much potential to for them to make this relationship about a serious, mutual struggle for survival too. Such a shame.
Enjoyment 5: Look, Everyone knows that the second half of Death Note was not as good as the first half but the series still rocked. Unfortunately, the second half of SAO killed it for me. If you are looking for a clever series this is not it.
Overall 5: I couldn't get past the wasted opportunities and the fragmented plot. The main character was just too annoying to like or relate to.
Violence/Gore: Very little blood but many character deaths
Love/Romance: Heartwarming but rushed. It could have been better.
Sex/Nudity: lol, cleavage and a PG tentacle scene. Both of which were silly.
