Recently, I've really gotten into anime, which has resulted in my game-playing time drastically falling, meaning I can't really review that many games. Since I love writing, I may as well review the stuff I'm watching. Anime has a really interesting way of telling stories, especially having not really experienced the style too much before. It often ignores the "show, don't tell" rule that's so important in western media, especially when it comes to character motivation, but it manages to somehow be just as effective. Still, it's often a whole lot of fun to watch, and I regret very little of my time with any of the anime I've watched so far.
There's a few really cool ones I've already watched that I want to talk about some day (in particular the three series of
Aria), but right now I want to write about the most recent anime I've watched,
Sword Art Online. I watched it so recently, in fact, that, as of first writing this, I finished the last episode no more than 10 minutes ago.
Sword Art Online, or
SAO for convenience, is one of the better regarded anime series out there, and I watched it on a whim upon noticing it being on Netflix. The "gimmick", if you will, to this one is that it mostly takes place inside a virtual reality world, namely an MMO, the titular
Sword Art Online (or, at least, in the first arc). It's an idea so obvious I want to say I've seen it a million times before, but the truth is I can't think of anything else that does this kind of thing.
The Matrix and
Assassin's Creed have similar ideas, but
Matrix takes it in a completely different direction and, let's be honest,
Assassin's Creed's animus is just an excuse for the gamey elements of a videogame. Which means it really doesn't need an excuse.
The first arc begins with the long-anticipated VRMMORPG,
SAO's release. We meet Kirito, our main character, and a roster of side characters. Soon, it's discovered that there's no log-out button, and that the gear the game is being played on has been engineered to fry the player's brain if its removed. The same punishment is given to player death within the game. The only way for everyone to get out is for someone to beat the game by defeating the boss on the hundredth floor of the world, releasing everyone. This is all for the entertainment of the creator of
SAO, Akihiko Kayaba. It's a simple set-up, but is actually a brilliant framing device for the story. It instantly explains away a lot of plot-points that would otherwise either not make sense or be contrived.
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| Surprisingly useful. |
For instance, take the common situation where Kirito's in trouble, but his friend, who had no way of knowing where he was, shows up at the last moment to save him. Normally, this would make no sense, but, oh, wait it's an MMO. Said friend was worried at Kirito's prolonged absence, and used his friends list to find out exactly where Kirito was. It also allows for rules to be installed that makes the writer's life easier, like the fact that players can't be harmed in towns. Perhaps one of the more useful elements are the health bars, which both explain how characters can keep fighting at full capacity even after being seriously damaged (the only point of health that matters is the last one), and also allow for an easy visual queue that shows us who's doing better in a battle or how close Kirito is to death.
Unfortunately, the MMO setting also comes with some hindrances. There'll be occasional moments that make no real sense, considering that this is a computer-controlled world. A lot of battle scenes that would otherwise be tense loose a lot of impact when, like me, you're aware that if these players know anything, they'll be carrying healing potions on them. There's also a problem with the rules of the game occasionally changing to fit the situation. For instance, in the very first episode there's a big deal made about how mobs don't respawn, making EXP and loot drops be valuable, limited resources. This leads to Kirito making a decision that arguably changes the entire rest of the
SAO arc dramatically. However, later on, there's an episode where an opposing faction is said to be tyrannical by having taken control and restricted access to monster spawn points. This is rare, and doesn't come up often enough to be any real hindrance, but whenever it does show up it annoys me to no end.
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| Look at that. That shit looks gorgeous. |
One thing to mention now is the artstyle and music. I'm not a huge fan of the anime look, though it can work occasionally (I showered praise on
Persona 4's art, after all). This is one such instance. The world looks absolutely gorgeous, everywhere from graceful rich cities to peaceful forests and intimidating dungeons, and the fighting is stylish and colourful, with swords flashing bright colors as characters unleash their "skills". I'm also a fan of the character design in the first arc: It very much feels like each character is an MMO archetype, from Kirito's obvious DPS loadout to Agil's support gear and Heathcliff's tanky paladin-style look. The use of game HUD type elements is also brilliant, both due to their slick look and their usefulness in conveying story beats. The music is mostly just there, but there's a few battle tracks that are absolutely gorgeous and appropriately adrenaline-pumping, and I really like both opening songs.
The first arc, taking place within
SAO's world of Aincrad is divided in two pretty radically different sections. The first is practically a series of disconnected stories involving Kirito, each centered
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The guy and girl on the promo materials eventually fall in love?
No way! |
around a different secondary character, most of whom don't really show up again for the rest of the series. The exceptions are Klein, the comic relief character that Kirito befriends in the first episode who'll show up here and there, Agil, a recurring supporting character, and Asuna, Kirito's love interest. This first section is entertaining enough, but feels plotless. Kirito sort of wanders from mini-story to mini-story, and, whilst each individual episode is satisfying, they don't really mean anything in the long run. The only real story progress that is made is the increasing floor number that the front-lines are said to have reached, somewhere far off-screen.
The second section of the arc is a lot more story-focused, and really where the series shines. It chronicles Kirito's evolving relationship with Asuna, from rivals to lovers, and, whilst the actual relationship I found cliche but moving, the stuff surrounding it was a lot more interesting. The way people are shown to live within
SAO is fascinating, and, though the plot is a meandering "We've got to get to the top!" style thing, the individual moments are entertaining enough for the whole thing to not get dull. Saying too much about him would be spoilerific, but I also found Akihiko Kayaba to be a really intriguing figure in this part of the arc.
I actually really like the character of Asuna in this section. She's pretty much your standard, overused
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| My favorite character. At least initially. |
"beautiful but deadly" ice queen deal for much of it, but somehow doesn't come across this way at all. For much of the arc, she's a genuinely cool (no pun intended) figure. This made me a bit sad in the later part of the arc, when the romance has bloomed and she takes more of a backseat supporty role. I'm not usually one to be bothered by this kind of stuff (I try to stay as far away from both sides of the GamerGate discussion as possible), but I couldn't help but feel she was put into a traditionally feminine role that just didn't suit her character up to this point. Sure, she opens up to Kirito and becomes less obsessed with clearing
SAO, but I have a hard time believing she'd stay back as much as she does.
Still, otherwise, the second section of the
SAO arc is really fun to watch. It gets genuinely tense at points, and knows how to keep an appropriate pace without overdoing it: it intersperses just enough alternately goofy and moving stuff in between the battle scenes for everything to still have the impact it deserves without getting in each others way. There's also what I personally found a pretty surprising twist in there, which I didn't expect in what seemed to be an extremely straightforward story up to that point. Still, I couldn't help but feel that the Aincrad arc ends a bit prematurely: There still seems to be character development to complete, and the end of
SAO sort of comes out of nowhere, way before the game is actually scheduled to end.
With this, begins the second arc, the
Alfheim Online arc. Or, as the subtitles insist in writing it,
ALfheim Online (I guess to be able to abbreviate it to
ALO). This second arc feels a lot weaker than the first. Kirito gets out of
SAO, but for some reason, 300 ex-
SAO players never woke up, Asuna among them. However, a picture of someone who looks very much like Asuna taken by players briefly cheesing their way to the endgame of
ALO encourages Kirito to try and beat this game as well.
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| Welcome to Alfheim. Not much to see here. |
The
ALO arc also has story taking place in the real world, as well as the story within the world of
ALO. This story is... OK, I guess. The main thread involves Kirito's adoptive sister, who is in actuality his cousin, developing a romantic attraction for him and being rejected. They also unknowingly meet within
ALO, where she proceeds to fall in love with him in-game as well. This story is not as moving as it thinks it is, since it feels more like a high-school crush than anything else, which at least slightly mitigates the rather uncomfortable incest stuff. Still, it did get a few emotions to come out of my dead heart, so it must be doing something right.
Unfortunately, the
ALO setting suffers even more than
SAO from being a virtual world. As
ALO isn't a deathtrap, the penalty for death is merely in-game. This significantly lowers the stakes of every battle: When Kirito is surrounded on all sides by hostile players the tension is somehow lowered by the fact that the worst that can happen is some gold or EXP loss. The world of Alfheim is also less interesting than Aincrad, and considerably worse developed. Whilst Aincrad had a very clear social hierarchy, as well as a lot of exploration of what the consequences of having a real society based around MMO rules (guilding in particular) would be, Alfheim has some tension between nine player races, which is barely explored, and of which we only get to know six (Kirito being the only player we get to meet of one of them). Aincrad is also a lot more diverse, due to the way that floors work acting as an excuse for completely different enviroments and cultural inspiration for cities, whilst all we see of Alfheim is generic forest, generic cave, and generic medieval town. The character design also suffers, with a lot of the characters looking goofy in-game due to their huge ears, being a lot less striking and suffering from a lack of variety.
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| Kirito, mate, I like you, I really do, but you look really stupid. |
The main plot of the
ALO arc has a lot of good points, but these bring with them huge negatives. Kirito spends the entire time working toward a goal which seems a lot less far-fetched than the 100th floor in
SAO, which gives the story more momentum. There's also a more imminent threat: Asuna, still not woken up, is about to be forcibly married to Sugou, a man who is shown to be truly detestable. There are also some more intimidating threats revealed later in the story. This adds a lot more tension to the proceedings, as Kirito is forced to work against a time limit he's not sure he can beat.
However, Asuna spends most of the story sitting in a cage, not doing much, relegated to the typical princess-in-a-tower role, talking about how she's waiting for Kirito to come save her. This isn't something I usually have an issue with, as long as it's done well (though it rarely is) but I found it disappointing that we didn't get more time to admire the cool hard-ass Vice Commander of the Knights of the Blood Oath, Lightning-Flash Asuna (which, by the way, is a goofy nickname). The fact that Asuna is just supremely dull in the
ALO arc doesn't help.
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| To be fairer, have a look at one of the cooler places in Alfheim |
The other characters here are a lot more memorable than in the
SAO arc, perhaps because there's considerably less of them. You've only really got Kirito, who is as much of an archetypal young hero as ever, his sister Sugu (and her in-game avatar, Leafa), his "adoptive daughter" Yui, Asuna and the villain, Sugou. I've criticized Asuna, but Kirito does his job decently: He's goofy when he needs to, cool when he has to, and is better at showing emotion at reasonable times and reasonable levels for reasonable reasons than most characters in his position, though, to be fair, this remains largely unchanged from the
SAO arc.
Leafa is a fairly good character. As I said, in the real world her story is rather touching despite its rather uncomfortable nature. Still, she has a strong personality, and
comes across as noticeably different from Asuna, despite filling the
same role she did in the
SAO arc. The writers are pretty good at keeping her story from becoming too oppressively sad, and she's still often shown to be cheerful. My biggest issue with her is how weirdly fan-servicey she is, in both her incarnations. Whilst the
SAO arc avoided fan service for the most part, both Leafa and Sugu have a weird number of shots of their breasts (which appear to change size and get ridiculously huge for these occasions) and hips. This also spreads to Asuna during the
ALO arc (even including what comes dangerously close to a tentacle rape scene for no apparent reason), so perhaps it's a new direction the producers decided to take. Still, Asuna isn't around nearly as much, so we don't really get much of this with her. It just seems strange to suddenly include a fanservice character after having not gone in this direction for the first arc, especially considering how much screentime Asuna (a supposedly very attractive female character) previously had.
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| Hello, my name is boobs... I mean Leafa. |
Another of the more important characters, Yui, is a strange one. She was arguably a major character in the
SAO arc, despite only being in it for a couple episodes, due to her pretty massive influence on Kirito and Asuna's characters. Giving you her backstory would be spoilerific, but she ends up becoming kind of an adoptive daughter for Asuna and Kirito, going as far as referring to them as Mommy and Daddy. It's rather moving in the
SAO arc, because of how briefly it happens, and her return in the
ALO arc is also originally moving. However, she gives many more indications at her true nature here (which makes her presence less touching, though saying what she is is, once again, spoilerific), and she's around enough for it to be unsettling that the 16 and 17 year old Kirito and Asuna have pretty much adopted a child now.
However, perhaps the strongest point of the
ALO arc is Sugou, the villain. I won't say too much, but
he's an absolutely brilliant character. He's a really hateable figure, and is also terrifying in that, for a lot of the arc, there genuinely doesn't seem to be a way to stop him. Unlike Akihiko Kayaba, who offers a clear way out and disappears, Sugou is constantly present through the story, and is most definitely not playing fair.
Unfortunately, he's perhaps set up a bit
too well as unstoppable, because the ending of the
ALO arc reeks of bullshit. There's a series of plot contrivances that not only can't be explained by the fact that this is an MMO, but actually make even less sense that way. Still, I found it hard to care: Sugou is shown to be such a piece of human scum that I didn't really mind letting the writers bend the rules to have him get his comeuppance.
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| A man who can make that face cannot be trustworthy |
The final episode of the series could technically be considered part of the
ALO arc, but, after the first five minutes, is just as relevant to the
SAO arc. It's a lot less action-packed, and almost serves as an epilogue, but it puts a nice, satisfying end to what's happened so far, whilst still leaving room for more to happen in this world with these characters. Which, as it happens, is good because the light novels this is based on went on considerably longer. And there's also a second series of
SAO, named, shockingly enough,
Sword Art Online II.
And now, introducing, the Animu and other film-type stuff review system!
Which works exactly like my game one, except there's 5 fairly self-explanatory ratings at the end rather than 2 obtuse ones scattered through the review.
Character & World Building: 7.5/10
The two arcs seem to suffer from opposite problems: Aincrad is a really cool world, but there's too many characters for many of them to be memorable, whilst Alfheim is bland but inhabited by a smaller, more interesting cast of characters. Still, the problem of each world doesn't really bring down my enjoyment of the events that happen within them. The biggest hit this category takes is the series' handling of Asuna, who is immensely enjoyable to have around before she gets officially together with Kirito and frustratingly boring after.
Story: 7/10
Both arcs have problems with their overall story. The Aincrad arc, probably the worse one as far as story goes, sets a far-away objective, and then meanders around before almost stumbling into it at the end. Whilst the meandering is entertaining enough to forget about the overall objective, that's just as much a diss at the main plot as it is a compliment to the meandering about. The Alfheim arc, on the other hand, sets a much clearer and more attainable goal, and focuses more on getting there, but is forced to also spend time in the real world, which reduces its sense of momentum. It's also got a few plot threads that don't really go anywhere, or at least have a fairly minimal payoff. The fact that death isn't permanent anymore like it was in
SAO is also a big hit, since situations loose their tenseness as soon as you remember no one can die.
Visuals: 5/5
Absolutely gorgeous in almost every regard. Environments look amazing, battles look amazing, characters look amazing (though less so in the second arc), and it has some really nice implementation of videogame HUD elements: Stylish, non-intrusive, and useful for the plot.
Sound: 3/5
Kept from being the average 2.5 by the fantastic intro songs and the couple amazing battle themes. Most music is appropriate enough for the situation, but easily forgettable, and voice-acting is standard anime fare. I mostly watched the Japanese version with subtitles, though I did switch to English a couple times out of curiosity, and what I heard of the English dub also seemed very run-off-the-mill.
Enjoyment: 9.5/10
As this is perhaps the only non self-explanatory category: This is the enjoyment I personally extracted from this thing, ignoring things that I know are objectively bad that I subjectively didn't mind. A huge amount of fun from beginning to end:
SAO manages to be tense, adrenaline-pumping, funny, feel-good, disturbing, saddening, and relaxing exactly when it needs to be. Despite all of
SAO's problems, I grew attached to Kirito and Asuna, and, despite its horrific death-trap nature, I fell in love with Aincrad. Even if just for those three, I'll likely be revisiting this series.
Overall: (7.5+7+5+3+9.5)/40 =
32/40
(simplifies to 8/10)
I think it's enough to say that I'll be watching
SAO2 as soon as humanly possible. For all its flaws,
SAO is a fantastic time. It's gorgeous to watch, it's got entertaining storylines, and, despite the fact that by all rights I shouldn't, I get ridiculously invested in each episode I watch. Whilst the
ALO arc was somewhat weak, it was still a great investment of my time, and the
SAO arc was, in almost all respects, an absolute blast. The series is far from perfect, but it manages to get enough right for the flaws only to appear when looked at in retrospect.
Yes, TellTale did indeed manage to pull its fantastic trick twice. The Walking Dead was my favourite game I played in 2013, and, for a brief time, my favourite game ever, so it's no surprise that I'd loveanother game by the same people. Whilst Wolf Among Us suffers from many flaws in execution that pulled its score down when I reviewed it, it's still a fantastic story told fantastically. Add to that the fact that it's a story than, when given the choice of premise and premise alone, I'd choose above The Walking Dead in a blink, and you've got yourself a real winner. Wolf Among Us maybe shows me an issue with the name of these awards: They're not quite "The Xth Best Thing", but more like "My Xth Favourite Thing". Wolf Among Us may be flawed in many ways, and is likely not the 2nd Best Thing I Played In 2014, but it certainly is my 2nd Favourite Thing I Played in 2014, and that's more than good enough to secure this spot. Don't mess with the Big Bad Wolf.
