Sword Art Online is a bad anime.
You understood that? Yes? No? Alright. I can already hear the weebs coming to flame me. SAO is an anime that had quite the potential, but wasted it, and became something it just shouldn’t have been. The result is a poorly written love story with next to no characterization and a side-plot of actually escaping the game. I haven’t watched the entire series. I’ve watched the entire first season and a few episodes of Sword Art Online II. Who knows, perhaps the Mother’s Rosario Arc wasn’t that bad. After all, it features different characters and a different story, so I won’t be commenting on that one. My main focus is gonna be season 1, which encompasses the SAO and ALO adventures.
First off, let’s start with the characterization issues. This one isn’t as big of a presence in the earlier episodes. Kirito is just a guy, playing the game, and he’s a bit of a lone wolf. That’s fine. That’s cool. In fact, that lays the foundation for his potential to grow as a character, along with potential for background. Alright, we know he’s kind of a nerd. What else? Why does he prefer to play alone? How can this hinder him? The answer given by the series is that it doesn’t. Kirito’s biggest development is pretty much the fact that his jacket changes throughout the series. He remains the same “lone wolf” and it becomes boring. The people he meets on his adventures don’t actually change him. He’s also pretty oblivious to any girl who’s not Asuna.
Right, those people he meets on his adventures. In SAO, we’re introduced to two minor characters: Silica and Lisbeth. Silica is a little girl with a dragon pet, but the group she’s with initially is pretty much just part of a murderous gang. How did she end up with these people? Lisbeth is a blacksmith who barely goes outside. There’s a picture of a guild in her workshop. What happened to this guild exactly? As far as I can remember, we don’t get any answers on these things. If we do, it’s very brief, very little, very unimportant and very forgettable. Both of these characters had potential for more than a few episodes as companions. But none of that potential is explored. Nothing happens.
Then here’s my main issue with, well, pretty much the entire series: Asuna. Asuna is introduced as an okay character, but turns boring pretty quickly, has practically no development [What else is new?] and her relationship Kirito is quite forced upon the viewer, next to it hindering development of several other characters. The relationship turns it into what can only be described as a bad love story [I wish I could say it was better than Twilight, but.] with a touch of the action slash fantasy hero RPG the series started with. The creators even felt the need to give them an AI daughter, which made things even worse.
And how does the first arc end? Kirito and Asuna die, survive through some deus ex machina, defeat the bad guy, who goes onto say something along the lines of creating the death game for the fun of it, or that he doesn’t really know why he did it anymore.
Onto the second arc. Hundreds of people weren’t saved with the fall of Aincrad! Instead, some hacker transferred them to a prison in the new VR game, Alfheim Online. But you know what’s worse? Asuna’s one of them! And the freak plans to marry her! Kirito wouldn’t care about those hundreds, but Asuna’s with them, so he has to save her. First of all, Asuna’s dad is a pretty terrible dad for marrying her off when she’s in a vegetative state. This arc actually omits a lot of the problems the first arc had, due to involvement of way less characters.
The big issues in this arc lay in the two important female characters. Asuna is in a vegetative state in real life, and a prisoner in-game, so she is pretty much useless. She’s the goal of Kirito’s current quest, which is a bad thing. They could’ve given him some heroic streak for saving the trapped individuals, but everything has to be Asuna. Accompanying him from SAO is their “daughter”, Yui. Joy. Because, in the arc where Asuna isn’t important at all, let’s make her really important.
The female lead of the Alfheim arc is Kirito’s little sister, Suguha. Suguha is an experienced ALO player who pretty much just wants to be a hero. She’s a noble fighter in-game and has lots of posters of in-game avatars in her room, the main one actually featuring her own avatar, Leafa. She also has a bit of a brother complex, but is very reluctant to tell Kirito, mainly because of Asuna. And while they’ve grown up together, very close, Kirito doesn’t notice her acting any differently until he realizes that Suguha = Leafa and that she’s in love with him. Of course, this development could have had potential, but Asuna is the true one, blah blah blah.
That’s what I’ll leave it at for now. Sword Art Online has a story that had potential with characters that had potential, but executed most things incredibly poorly, dismissing interesting characters and giving the potentially good characters nowhere near enough screen time. Hell, I didn’t even mention Kirito’s dead guild (of which one member actually committed suicide because of him), or his in-game best friend Klein, or the incredibly useless and boring detective arc with the ghost killers, or the apparent species war in ALO. Because none of those things are actually developed enough to matter. Points to the terrible love story, I guess.
