Please note that this review might contain spoilers and will probably have some. Also note that his is my personal review on this anime and should not be taken as professional in any sense at all. I’ll try to keep it objective while adding my own tinge of subjectivity to it. Please enjoy.
Sword Art Online or SAO for short is what I'll be reviewing this time: An anime that was hyped to hell and then thrown to the ground after episode 16; An anime with many pros and many, many cons. I'll be frank, when I finished it I fanboyed it to high hell and back, I even went to the point of asspulling arguments in order to make it look better but as I compared to my favorite anime of all time, another action-fantasy anime by the name of Shakugan no Shana and as I compared it to many other animes of slightly different genres but, nonetheless, action animes I found many flaws. Now, with that out of the way, let's crack down the trainwreck into tiny pieces and put it back together after.
Let's start with the story:
The story is something that will attract many gamers such as me. The first VRMMORPG(Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) ever created just came out from beta and the day of launch is upon the many people of japan(because apparently only japan can create such wondrous feats and play them) and people race to their local stores just to find out the beta assholes that pre-ordered it already emptied the shelves. We are then introduced to our main character Kazuto Kirigaya more popularly known as Kirito. Kirito was a beta tester of this new VMMO… GAME which is called Sword Art Online and so he already apparently has a copy of the game, has installed it and just about everything else even though the game was released just a few hours before. The story is mainly set inside this virtual reality as players find themselves suddenly trapped in a world they don’t know, they aren’t familiar with and doing things they’ve never done before. The creator of the game also made it so that if they died, they died everywhere, game and real life. And so the anime presses on with a focus on the repercussions that such a decision brough- who am I kidding. The story turns into a classic harem story with a focus on the main character’s endeavor to find emotions on his otherwise bland personality as he, alone, is able to defeat 25 man-raids, 5 man dungeons and achieve one of the highest levels of the game… Even though the game is clearly designed for people to work in groups. He also manages to break the rules of the game due to “HUMAN WILL” since games are not made with codes and so on which can’t be altered unless you have access to the game’s console and what not… But apparently if you wish for it hard enough or believe in the fairy magic of love, you can bend a computer game to your will!
I COULD forgive the bland approach to such a nice setting if they just managed to do the rest right… But they didn’t, instead the story plummeted into such a deep shit that you can’t distinguish what is the anime and what is the pile of humongous, smelly feces.
The characters:
First we have Kazuto or Kirito. A gamer for life which apparently has no social life apart from his pseudo-sister which is actually his cousin which isn’t actually his cousin or maybe is since I don’t even know after all that went on between them. Kirito is the embodiment of all gamer related stereotypes from the dull eyes to the zero social life and the full dedication to games. He’s also bland in personality and shows little to no emotions apart from his irrational love for his dear Asuna which provokes on him extreme anger at the most appropriate of times and… Not much else apart from a few episodes in which he actually gets sad because people died.
Asuna is by far my favorite character, too bad they had to ruin her with the typical harem crap of not developing her. She has by far the most vivid and real personality, the most interesting and actually the only bearable story and she is the only female that doesn’t disappear forever after one or two episodes.
Then we have the character I hate the most. Suruga, which is Kirito’s pseudo-sister or cousin or whatever. She is… Dreadful. She’s just there for the silly harem love triangle and she has almost absolutely no depth. Her reasons for pseudo-incest are laughable at best and her whole character is just dreadful. She deserves every little once of hate I have for her and if you don’t hate her than you should reconsider everything that you know about her. She has no depth, no development, she’s there for a simple love-triangle so all the fanboys can fawn over Asuna while feeling sorry for Suruga when she, in fact, deserves nothing but hatred because of just how shallow her character is.
All the rest are just plot-moving characters and non-developed characters that demonstrate little to no development or depth.
The music and the animation:
I could go on a rant forever about these but I’ll sum them up really quickly for you. They are absolutely amazing. If there’s anything that makes this anime worth watching it is clearly the art and music.
With my review concluded I end with saying that this show… This show is really enjoyable for the first 16 episodes. I’d give it a 7.3 if it ended on the 16th episode but it didn’t and so, considering the stupidity of the ALFheim story arc I’ll give it a certain score I’ll say in a bit.
So with that said here are my scores:
Story: 3/10(Good setting ruined by harem focus)
Characters: 1/10(Childish, bland, love triangle)
Animation: 10/10(Superb)
Sound: 10/10(Superb)
Enjoyment: 8/10(It will be very enjoyable at first, including the second half, but once your turn on your brain and examine what you just saw and experienced, everything above will plummet on you and make you feel bad for enjoying yourself like you did)
My overall rating is of a 6/10 with a recommendation to watch it up to the 16th episode and then NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN!
