Oog. Just got finished watching like, the first 15 episodes of Sword Art Online… And had to stop. It takes a lot to turn me off a show with a cohesive narrative like this. I mean, this is literally the first show I’ve ever started watching and then stopped that wasn’t just short bits of whimsy. But this… Oog. It’s like a lesson on how not to do basically everything involved with writing a story. Open spoilers, obviously, but who cares - it’s awful. This might actually belong in the pit, but this is the more immediately relevant forum…
Setting: The entire buildup of the setting happens in about five minutes. We’re told, not shown, by some omnipotent god-thing that dying in the game means you die in real life. You’re asking me to really stretch my suspension of disbelief when you assert that there’s no way that in two fucking years with thousands of lives in the balance (all of which are apparently on feeding tubes in hospitals, mind you), that nobody found a way to engineer their way around the freakin’ hardware. In the Matrix, I’d believe that - you’re uploading your whole brain or something. In this though? The reason you can’t log out is because there’s no log out button, and because the onboard power supply will prevent forcible removal. I can think of at least two easy ways to get past that off the top of my head. But more importantly, we’re never shown this. It’s just taken for granted that because this guy says it, it must be true. Oh, and obviously nobody is capable of tampering with the source code of the game and making it easier, or installing cheat codes for the players - despite the fact that apparently it took all of a month for the people who hosted it on their servers to create a knockoff version. Remember, we’re talking about 10,000 people here. On life support. No fucking way. I’m not buying it. But even if I did, it’s a setup we’ve all seen before, except executed far better, made far more dramatic, and given more life.
Characters: Okay. SAO writers, let’s level here for a moment. If you want me to care about a character, you need to at least make them, well, a character. Put some life into them. Make me have some sort of interest in their wellbeing. And no, having them act like a lost child and say “mommy! daddy!” at the main characters for what amounts to like 5 fucking minutes is not characterization. Seriously, the Yui subplot made me damn near quit on the show right then and there. They keep pulling this bullshit. No, I’m sorry, but this cute cardboard cutout who you tell us is important to the main character means nothing to me, and their death, no matter how much you tell us it matters to the main character, has all the impact of a math error on an income tax form. Especially when that character is just bullshit Deus Ex Machina du jour.
And then there’s the main character. He at least has a little bit of interesting interplay between him and [strike]eye candy[/strike] [strike]obviously going to die love interest[/strike] Asuna, but as a character he’s a complete blank slate. And when you make the show all about him and what he does and why he does it, that doesn’t work. Like, apparently he was heavily impacted by his former guild being wiped (spoiler alert: you won’t care, because they spend all of five minutes showing you him interact with them, and they’re basically cardboard cutout cannon fodder). That’s neat. And he’s got a huge sense of right and wrong, and will throw his life on the line to protect even random people he barely knows. Huh. And yet he’s also lazy. None of this adds up to a well-rounded character; it adds up to a schizophrenic mess who you might as well just name “Mary Sue” because of course he’s the most badass character ever. To the point where the one scene where he actually does get beaten is passed of as cheating, and the other scene where he almost gets beaten comes off as completely scripted.
Really, the only characters who are remotely interesting in this are Asuna and a handful of comic relief characters, but none of them are truly fleshed-out either. Asuna is pretty much stereotypical Tsundere, but I guess that’s what passes as a female character these days. The black shopkeep (and yes, that’s basically his defining characteristic) is at least a little interesting but gets so little screen time that you’d think the writers are ashamed of him. The only character I really felt was interesting at all was the blacksmith who was crushing on the main character (because of course she was), who actually had something resembling, I dunno, an arc. But she’s just there for one episode.
Plot: Let’s make something clear here. If it’s made explicitly clear from the start that “we have to make it to floor 100 and beat the final boss there to beat the game and get back to the real world”, and then at floor 76 after a long, hard boss fight it’s suddenly revealed that the final boss is a player character and guild member and that for realizing this, you have a chance to fight them and win the game immediately… Yeah, that didn’t feel forced at all, huh? And then you manage to kill the boss. Despite, you know, your character dying before you pull it off. That was the point where I said, “you know what? Fuck this shit”. What were they thinking? It’s absurdly forced, ruins any sense of accomplishment, and is a lame cop-out to the rising intensity of the show. Basically the Anime equivalent of blue balls. It’s like if in Dragon Ball Z, Dende randomly kills Freiza with a destructo disc on form one, and then everyone just peacefully leaves Namek with no problems. It’s like in Megaman 2 if you beat Wiley’s Castle stage 1 and then Wiley said “Oh shit, he means business” and just surrenders and you win. It’s… ugh. Just no.
The show is terrible. I mean, dear god. I couldn’t keep watching it. According to a friend who watched the whole thing, it gets worse! I don’t care. It was awful enough as is. Basically, it failed on every conceivable level. Despite the obvious potential setup, there’s very little sense of accomplishment because 99% of the actual progression occurs offscreen and the main character is already an unkillable badass from day one, so what do I care if he seems marginally better? The only part that kind of works is the romance subplots, but given the setup for the show that’s both not enough and more than a little of a bait-and-switch. High fantasy action? Ha! Here, have a shitty story, brooding angst-balls, and romance between cardboard cutouts.
In case it wasn’t obvious: this show sucks. I just felt like getting this off my chest. 