At its core, Accel World is a mediocre MMORPG, mini-harem, shounen. It’s a tale about a high school loser, Haruyuki, joining a sophisticated VR PvP gaming subculture. Playing this game allows one to slow down time in order to PvP battle, but also lends itself into manipulating real world situations. In addition to gaming for the sake of gaming, Haruyuki follows his stubby little c*** into the “Accelerated World” in hopes of winning the favor of his crush and helping her achieve her goal of becoming the ultimate high ranking player in the game.
The mediocrity is strong in this anime. It lacks character development and contains many cliches and stupid plot lines. It ultimately fails to be much of anything beyond a waste of time.
Clichés vs Rules:
A cliché is born from lazy, unimaginative writing. It copies something that worked in another setting and clumsily pastes it onto the current one. One example of this in the MMORPG anime context is giving the protagonist a super special in-game power that nobody else has. We saw it in Sword Art Online with Kiritu’s Beta-testing head start and his *ahem* special power pertaining to swords. We saw it in that Dungeon anime where the wimpy protagonist leveled at x10 or whatever the pace of everyone else. Anyway in Accel World we see the same shit where Haruyuki’s character gets a special skill that lets him soar above competition. Convenient, right?
Rules are just basic, genre-specific facts that are necessary to the plot to make sense. In this case, it’s a rule that MMORPG anime should have real world stakes. Imagine in Sword Art Online if the solution for escaping the SAO virtual world was….*Drumroll*….Logging out?!?! Holy shit man. Boom. All the suspense, urgency, purpose etc. would evaporate. In SAO at least the anime characters were as trapped as the viewers of that shitty world. Accel World it’s just a game. If you lose all of your points you’ll just no longer be able to play that game. No Death, no brain-melting retardation, you just suddenly have a lot more free time to devote to homework. You have these faux emotional scenes were Haruyuki freaks out when he sees his friends slaughtered in the game and you can’t help but roll your eyes. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! DON’T DIE!!!!!!!!! Then the match ends and they get ice cream and talk.
The unforgivable part of this anime is that they hardly explore the amazing real-world uses for their ability to slow time. Everything is about leveling up and getting a stronger character not robbing banks or setting world records. The conflict in the anime is just juvenile and ultimately uninteresting.
Romance Angle: Props for making the main character legitimately physically unattractive. None of this good looking, tall, athletic but can’t seem to get a chick archetype. Haruyuki flat out looks like an Anime Eric Cartman. That being said, their unconventional character design makes the all-too-familiar cliché of having the school’s hottest girl throw herself at the MC even more ridiculous. Really? The class president/hottest girl in school/academic prodigy/Miss popular etc gets all hot and bothered watching this chump play virtual squash with a piglet avatar?!?! Fuck! I feel cheated by my high school experience. But seriously, the romance subplot is just lazy and irritating. There’s no chemistry and she does all the work.
Character development is absent.
Animation is acceptable but not great
Sound meh
Overall: It’s painfully clear that I’m too old for this. Ignore my opinion if you want and enjoy the rancid Pizza.
