Review of Sword Art Online

There's a saying that often goes around in music production, that goes like this: "Mastering a bad song is like polishing a turd. Yeah, it'll look nice, but it's still a turd." Sword Art Online, in this case, is the turd. The first few episodes actually do a pretty good job of pulling you into the series, despite Kirito being utterly inept the second he has to be social. Yeah, there's not a terrific amount of depth in the story, but it looks & sounds nice. There are some seriously wallpaper-level moments in the first few episodes. As the series progresses, though, that lack of depth becomes actively angering,as it shows up in pretty much everything the show does. Those narrative shortcomings that were relatively easy to gloss over before become glaringly obvious as the show goes on, with clear logical solutions to problems being completely ignored over & over again for reasons I can't even hope to explain.

It's shocking to me how many missteps this show takes in terms of its plot, especially in the 2nd half of this season. The pacing ranges from "snail stuck in molasses" to "wait, it's already done?", and can flip between either of those extremes without a moment's notice. They take needless detours from the story for seemingly no reason at all other than to pad that 25 episode run-time, and basically don't even bother trying to justify them.

It almost felt like they were trying to make a terrible story, but couldn't find the self-awareness or the humour that makes some of those bad works worth watching.

All this without even mentioning that Kirito is basically God when it comes to skill at both games in the series (is that a spoiler? Eh, it's not like it's some gut-wrenching twist). The second of the two games adds a new element to the combat - flight. And somehow, after spending 2 full years in a game where flight didn't exist, not to mention that little thing called real life, he's able to completely master it in basically 5 minutes.

"Best Player in the Game" as your opponent? No problem, Kirito the Video Game God is here to help. Doesn't matter if it's Call of Duty or Tetris, he has you covered. Now THAT would be an anime I'd watch (if they made it a comedy). Unfortunately, they don't take this angle and end up seriously saying that Kirito can take on the best player in a game he picked up a week ago.

And that kind of encapsulates my thoughts on the series in general - it sounds like it should be a parody with the things that happen in the show, but it plays all of those situations completely straight.

Basically the only thing I enjoyed about the plot (well, relative to the rest of the season anyway) was the romance portion (so it was a GREAT idea to basically reduce half of that relationship to a damsel in distress - and other spoiler-related stuff that's frankly disgusting - for the second half of the season!), but even that was done better in the Abridged version (it's on Youtube, go watch it - it seriously turns this into a 9/10), as is pretty much everything else.

If you want a dumb, good looking anime & don't really care about a good story with memorable characters or any sane decision-making, the first half of Sword Art Online is for you.
If you want the exact same thing, but this time entirely unnecessary in pretty much everything it does, then the second half is for you. I just hope you know what you're doing when you're watching this.

I wanted to like Sword Art Online so badly. It looked and sounded great in the first couple episodes, and I've always been a fan of this kind of premise.

But, as with the turd, looks can be deceiving. No matter how much you polish it, it's still just a turd.