--Yuuki Konno
Sword Art Online’s first season arrived in 2013 with all the storm and bluster of a Nickelback concert. It racked up massive commercial success and drew a legion of dedicated fans and haters by appealing to a very wide audience. On Western shores, SAO took on a life of its own, aided by a spectacular English dub with some relative unknowns in Bryce Papenbrook and Cherami Leigh putting together excellent breakout performances in the lead roles of Kirito and Asuna. Fans hailed its colorful cast of characters and novel premise, while haters decried its impossibly perfect protagonist and lackluster execution.
Personally, I stood on both sides of this “love or hate” divide, originally disliking it and growing to like it after watching it with friends. While it’s nothing too spectacular, I thought the premise was compelling, the characters eminently likable, the romance sweet without being sappy or swallowing the plot, and the action scenes well-choreographed and animated (insert ridiculous Kirito face meme here as a counterpoint). The second arc lost a lot of the head of steam the first season had established and had stripped my favorite character, the daring Asuna Yuuki, of a lot of what made her compelling, but still managed to turn it around into a satisfying conclusion.
So when Season 2 rolled around, I delayed a little in watching it until just last month to avoid having hype/hate circle-jerking poison my opinion of it. It felt like an inversion of the first season in a lot of ways. The first arc of Season 2, Phantom Bullet (or GGO, or Sinon Ass Online, whatever you want to call it) is a reintroduction to Kirito as a character, and an introduction to Shino “Sinon” Asada. Sinon is a high-ranking sniper from Gun Gale Online, which is another VRMMO game created from the “world seed” of Aincrad. The two meet while Kirito investigates the identity of a new “player-killer”, the enigmatic Death Gun, who possesses the power to kill players for real by shooting them in the game.
Phantom Bullet is also the dullest story SAO writer Reki Kawahara has told to this point. The big battle tournament has no real tension to it because you already know Kirito’s gonna win. Sinon comes off as a prickly asshole to Kirito for very little reason, and Kirito’s own motivations for entering GGO are never quite clear other than “the government asked nicely and bought me lunch”. The pace feels slow, the climax/big reveal is something of a disappointment. The only redeeming quality I can show for it is that Sinon as a character develops quickly, and Kirito is, as always, the man when it comes to action scenes. The animators at A-1 Studios know how to draw ferocious 1-on-1 sword duels, but that talent is lost on gun battles, which feel very passionless, rote, and dull.
The second arc of SAO II, if you haven’t given up after 14 episodes of GGO, is Caliber, which is a bit of a return to form and a return to the cast of Season 1 as they gear up to take down a tricky quest in ALFheim Online, the setting from season 1’s second arc. It’s mostly an excuse to dredge up characters like Suguha, Silica, and Lizbeth to actually get some screentime, but it’s alright, and seeing these characters is like coming home to old friends if you enjoyed some or all of them in the first season, as I did. Especially after 14 episodes of almost zero presence.
Caliber is two episodes long before segueing into Mother’s Rosario, the final arc of the season. As if to balance out and apologize for Phantom Bullet, we get what is definitively the best SAO story ever told, centering around Asuna and her rivalry and friendship with “Zekken”, the strongest swordsman in ALO (yes, even stronger than Kirito). I can’t spoil anything about this arc, but it deals with very serious subject matter, and the philosophy of life and the virtue of machines and virtual reality within it, with respect and heartfelt authenticity. It made the season for me. It hit me right in the feels. It made me think. And it elevated my respect for Kawahara as a writer. The OP and EDs for Mother’s Rosario are compelling visually and aurally, and gradually change as more is revealed about “Zekken” and their guild, the “Sleeping Knights”.
Visually, the show is mostly unchanged from the first season. One of the shining points of SAO for me is how it gets across the feeling of being in a video game fantasy world. The colors are bright and contrasted. The characters’ in-game avatars are sharply reminiscent of their real-life appearances but with a fantasy twist such as elf ears (or in the case of Silica, dog ears?). Which is another reason GGO disappoints me: it’s just dull to look at, having copied the brownish-tan dominant visual style of “GRIM-N’-GRITTY” American first-person shooter titles as an inspiration for its setting and character design.
Sword Art Online II is very uneven, but still has moments where it shines, sometimes brilliantly. The conclusion paves the way for further sequels and movies, much to the chagrin of its detractors, but I’ve never had a problem with something just because it’s geared for commercial success. Indeed, as a show for newcomers, I think SAO is a great representative sample of what anime is all about. Some will never watch other shows and declare that SAO is “the best ever”, and of course they are wrong, but it’s still worthy of the acclaim and following it has earned. Some will declare it a cliched mess of tropes and stereotypes, but I’ve come to the conclusion that those people hate this show just because it has reached the level of ubiquity and recognition that it has, and will never be happy with it no matter what (and usually even they do not deny that Mother’s Rosario is great).
I ultimately gave the show an 8, although it is closer to a 7.5 for me. It falls just short of the standard set by the first season because it fails to consistently be good, but the heights it reaches are much higher than those set by the first arc. Mother's Rosario is a rather daring step forward, and hopefully we will continue to see similarly ambitious arcs in the future of the series.
Until next time, continue to make your mark!
