Review of Sword Art Online

This anime has gotten a lot of strong opinions from a lot of different people and despite having aired over five years ago it’s still one of the most talked about anime. Some say the widespread hate for it is just because of all the negative reviews of it on the internet and others say it’s so bad that having it in your favourites is proof that you have bad taste, but although it’s one of the most common gateway anime that doesn’t mean liking it makes you unknowledgeable about anime automatically. The story is definitely not generic in any way, but it also wasn’t thefirst of its time like some people think. Tron was the first type of any media to have the concept of getting stuck in a videogame and .hack was the first anime to do this. This can be credited as being the anime that made the genre popular or even the one that turned it into a genre at all, so that is something it can be credited with. Although it terms of concept the story was good the execution leaves much to be desired. The main character is already at the top of his game, which many know to be the boring part of their game. Just like how most romances are about two characters falling in love rather than just showing their daily lives being in love the same is for any story. The story you would expect in a fantasy anime where the protagonist gets better over time doesn’t happen since he’s already so much better than anyone else that he doesn’t need to get better and is basically just showing off for most of the anime. The story of clearing the floors to get to the top one to beat the game seems like a good enough idea, but clearly showing all of the unique rooms and the characters who beat each one would be boring and tedious, but it felt a bit forced the way they dealt with making this process faster.

The Princess Asuna arc was a lot worse than the Aincrad arc. I guess this is a bit of a spoiler to mention even the existence of this arc, but I would guess you’ve probably already seen the show anyway. Asuna was a well developed character in the first arc and unlike most of the female characters showed some actual character development that wasn’t cringy, but in this arc she became a princess who needed rescuing, which is really a waste of a good character. It’s only 11 episodes which is shorter than the first arc, but I feel like the show would be better as a whole if the second arc didn’t exist. The average quality was dragged down a lot by this.

The art in this anime is fairly decent. The character designs are fairly generic and we have a regular spiky black haired protagonist, but the rest of the art is done well. The layout of the world is done well and the backgrounds are well drawn. It’s a fairly small world they live on, but they do show a lot of good things around it even though they often don’t give enough context to show exactly where everything is in relation to each other, especially since a lot of their world is vertical which makes accurate maps hard to draw. The weapons and outfits look cool, just as they’re supposed to, but the whole concept of an MMORPG that has warrior as the only class is kind of flawed and there could be a lot more cool weapons and outfits if it was set up like a proper RPG. The fight scenes were animated well and the icons and screens in the game were made well. They did a lot to show us that they really were in a videogame as opposed to some anime where they go to the world but when they get there it isn’t a videogame anymore.

The theme songs were good and the background music was great. Swordland has a real feeling of epicness and even though I don’t consider the anime as a whole to be all that great that song still gives me nostalgia. I watched the series in dub so I can’t comment on the original voice acting, but the dub was done fairly well. The sound effects are pretty good, but they do mess up sometimes and they don’t always enhance the scene but occasionally make it worse.

The characters, just like in any anime, are probably the most important part to talk about. Kirito, the main character, has far too much power, as I’ve already mentioned. He doesn’t have much of a personality other than being overpowered and being arrogant about it, despite originally trying to cover it up. He’s able to escape a situation where the game would have expected any normal person to have died where the nervegear doesn’t manage to kill him, but according to my calculations the nervegear would take around two hours to kill an adult by frying the brain like an extremely low current microwave so his recovery just means he has a stronger will to live than the others. To be honest, it’s less odd that he survived that and more odd that no one else did. Even if it uses electric shock to make the victim unconscious to give the microwaves enough time to kill them you’d think other people would have been immune rather than the protagonist being the only person to overcome it while thousands of others died from it and not a single one of them did what he did.

Aside from Asuna pretty much all of the girls have very little personality. We basically just have them introduced as “harem girl #X” and have a few pieces of basic information to remember them by. Silica’s only personality trait is her affinity to animals, which isn’t much. I liked Lisbeth when I watched the show because of her short pink hair and how her blacksmithing gave off a tomboy aura, but in terms of personality she really doesn’t have much going for her. It’s interesting that she would go into that career path and even the fact that there are career paths in the game considering the fact that everyone is a warrior class character so things like magic aren’t something you could use to your advantage, but we never really get an explanation for it and she seems to just fall in love with Kirito at first sight despite the fact that their first encounter isn’t all that positive. Asuna is the only character in the series who really has a decent personality. She does play hard to get at first, like a regular tsundere, but quickly it turns into actual love which is something we rarely see in anime.

My enjoyment of this anime was somewhat skewed since I watched it after being recommended it by my cousin who really liked it and so I was convinced this was something I was supposed to like, but even then there were still some things I didn’t really like about it. Overall I did enjoy it, but partly just because I felt like it was the right thing to do. There wasn’t really much of any reasons I had to argue for the reasons I liked it at the time so soon after I disregarded by enjoyment of it as being fake so I’m not really sure what to think about it. If I were to watch it again now I’ve already had my opinion poisoned by everyone saying bad things about it so it’s hard to say if I would enjoy it genuinely or if it would just be laughing at it for all of the problems that have been brought to my view. The cafe scenes didn’t bother me when I watched it, but now they seem like such a blatant flaw like the author had no way of explaining things naturally and just relied on exposition scenes which he thought would best take place in cafes.

Overall it’s a fairly average anime. It does a lot of things right, but it does so many things wrong that it cancels out. The concept is interesting and the music is amazing, but the poor characterization and bad execution of the story turns everything back to average. Would I recommend this anime? It’s an anime that’s considered an important one to watch despite the fact that the quality isn’t that high, but it’s also not one I personally think you need to feel obliged to watch if it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you would enjoy.