Summary
In 2022, the Nerve Gear, the first virtual reality console, has been
developed, and ten thousand lucky gamers have managed to get their hands on the
limited first-run copies of its first MMO, Sword Art Online, a.k.a. SAO. But
things don’t go as expected when nobody can log out. Everyone is suddenly
transported to the starting area, where a hooded figure appears and identifies
himself as Kayaba Akihiko, the creator of the Nerve Gear and SAO. He deliberately
made it so they can’t log out; the only way to escape is to clear all 100
floors and beat the game. Forget about someone on the outside taking off your
Nerve Gear – trying will make it send a microwave signal to fry your brain. Over
200 people have already died this way, and now that news organizations have
picked up on it there’s little risk of anyone else trying. And try not to die
in the game – if you do, you’ll die for real. He’s also given everyone a mirror
that, once used, changes them to their true appearance. He gives no reason for
his actions apart for a desire to mess around with a world he created.
A player named Kirito vows to do anything he can to survive and tries
his best to go it solo, but never succeeds in keeping to himself. When he joins
an expedition to take down the first floor boss he feels guilty about thinking only
of himself after another player sacrifices himself during the fight, and teams
up with another player named Asuna to defeat the boss. Later, he falls in with
a guild called the Black Cats, who are friends in real life. He is reluctant to
try and fit in with them, even hiding his real level, but envies them their
camaraderie, and in spite of himself he starts to care about Sachi, the only
girl and most timid member, after she confides to him her fear of dying. After
everyone else dies because of a failed dungeon raid, he blames himself and
eventually manages to get an item that can revive a player. So long as it’s
used within ten seconds of them dying. Frustrated, he gives it to Klein, a
player he met on the first day. Back at the inn, he receives a message Sachi
arranged to be sent to him on Christmas Eve in case she died. She admits she
saw his real level once and couldn’t figure out why he was hiding it, but still
genuinely thanks him for being supportive and encourages him to keep on living.
Even though players will die in real life if they are killed in the
game, there are those who are willing to attack others. When Kirito helps a
girl named Silica get a crystal to revive her pet dragon, he was ostensibly
just using her to lure out a group of player killers she’d been adventuring
with, whom he easily defeats and captures, being of a much higher level than
them. However, he admits that she reminds him of his sister, who promised their
grandfather she’d work twice as hard at kendo after Kirito quit, which he feels
guilty about.
When two players are unexpectedly murdered in a town, where attacking
another player should be impossible, Kirito and Asuna team up to solve the
mystery. It turns out both players actually faked their deaths to try and lure
out whoever murdered their guild leader. The culprit turns out to be her
second-in-command and in-game husband, who reveals that he was also her husband
in real life and resented her change from a passive housewife to a confident,
outgoing guild leader. After leaving him to his old guildmates, Kirito and
Asuna awkwardly dance around the development of their own relationship.
When Kirito asks a player named Lisbeth, who runs a smithing shop, for
a new sword, he breaks her best one when testing it against his current sword.
However, there’s another, probably stronger sword she can make for him, but they
need to go to another floor to get the necessary crystal, and since he needs a
smith with him for that she tags along. While Kirito fights the dragon guarding
the crystal, Lisbeth steps out from hiding and gets the dragon’s attention,
causing her to fall into a pit. Kirito jumps in to save her, and they end up
spending the night there. In the morning they find the crystal in the hole, but
then they realize it’s the (nocturnal) dragon’s lair. They manage to get out
after it returns, and Lisbeth, who’s developed a crush on Kirito, refuses
payment after she’s made the sword, on the condition that she become his
exclusive smith. Asuna, also a client, stops in to find out where Lisbeth has
been, and the latter gets upset and runs outside after seeing the former two
argue and realizing they’re Not-A-Couple. She gets over it.
Thoughts
Sometimes you do commentary on a bunch of episodes at once because
you’re trying to catch up on something, other times it’s because you can’t
think of much to say about individual episodes or smaller chunks. SAO is the
latter (well, it’s actually a bit of both, but I tried doing write-ups about
fewer episodes without much luck, so mostly to have enough to say). That’s
because there isn’t much story progression after the first two episodes.
Episode three definitely has strong thematic resonance, reminding the viewer of
the omnipresent threat of death as well as giving some character development
for Kirito, but afterwards the story takes a back seat to largely
self-contained episodes focused on building up the world and society of SAO.
This is actually fairly interesting and does a good job of showing how
the players have adapted to being trapped in the game and formed something of a
society, complete with its own social conventions and taboos (it’s considered rude
to ask about real life or a player’s level), a rudimentary economy with people
using the craft skills to run businesses or becoming information brokers – both
particularly important given the need for top-quality gear and reliable
information in order to survive and no other way to find out anything – and
even a seedy underside of disreputable types, namely player-killers. It’s all
brought up, but the thing is none of it is ever explored in any real depth so
far. Some of it works just fine as flavor – crafting skills are nothing new in
MMOs, so some kind of economy around them would exist anyway, while the taboo
on asking about levels or real life isn’t crucial to the story but is a nice
touch that shows a collective consciousness that everyone’s trapped in a game.
Others, however, seem like they deserve a little more attention. For one thing,
until now it’s never really brought up what makes player-killers tick, or why
there’s enough of them to form gangs. Sometimes it appears to be traditional
reasons like resenting another player and/or wanting some of their shiny
equipment, as in episode 4, where Rosalia and her gang were ultimately just
bandits. She does bring up an interesting point – nobody actually knows for certain that anyone who is
killed really dies. After all, they only have the word of one person, whose
reliability (and sanity) is most definitely up for debate. So if you decide
that there’s no reason to believe what Kayaba – or whoever it may been, because
there’s no proof of that either –
said, and choose to believe that those killed are simply logged out, I guess
PKing would have some appeal when in this scenario it has the observably true benefit
of the target player being unable to respawn pissed-off and seeking bloody
revenge. Still though, it’s one thing to PK when you’re ultimately just being
an asshole and quite another to do so when, for all you know, you might actually be killing someone. The news
reports make things a lot more convincing, though I supposed you could falsify those if you have the
technical know-how to be the mastermind behind a virtual world and really
wanted to, though it’s probably a lot less work to just make it true in the
first place – then you can just pull up actual news reports. Granted, some
peoples’ sanity has probably deteriorated from that whole ‘trapped in a game
for two years’ thing, as is seemingly the case with the Laughing Coffins, but
that doesn’t cover everyone – Rosalia and her cronies seem to be completely
sane. It just feels like it would take a certain je ne sais quoi to actually do something like that, especially if
you’re otherwise sane, and it’s never really brought up.
Plus, there’s that whole ‘frontliners’ thing that’s never shown up except
for that one time at the start of episode 5. Only Kirito got very far as a beta
tester, and he only got to level 8, so very quickly everyone is in new territory, risking their lives fighting new
monsters with unknown abilities, and it’s barely seen. Is it just me, or does
that sound more interesting than Kirito going off getting into random hijinks
and building up a pseudo-harem? It’s not
that what we get is bad – showing how everyone adapts to living in a game is
done well enough to make it interesting and allows the setting to be more than
just a backdrop, and episodes 5 and 6 in particular cover a number of things
well (Kirito and Asuna’s developing relationship, the existence of player
killers, and the theme of how games, especially those like MMOs that allow high
levels of social interaction, can change someone for good or bad). It’s really
only episodes 4 and 7 that stand out as lackluster since aside from a few minor
things (I’m sure Kirito’s new sword will be important later) they otherwise
show us nothing about Kirito’s character we don’t already know (apart from that
tidbit about his sister, which would hardly have been difficult to work in
somewhere else) and the girls aren’t well-developed or interesting. And fall
for him far too easily, but that’s standard harem logic. Thankfully, the girl
who’s so far been pretty clearly telegraphed as the eventual ‘winner’ does seem
to have more going for her – a good thing since she shows up much more
regularly – but I can’t think of anything specific I want to say about Asuna
right now. The frontliners sound much more crucial than generic harem
‘introduce the next girl’ episodes and like something that deserves more
attention than they’ve gotten. Of course, one of the things about commenting on
the first handful of episodes when the show’s nearly finished is that some of
this, like the absence of episodes focused on the frontliners, feel like they
might turn out to be disingenuous when those things could come up even in the
next few episodes, but that just might be the frame of mind I’m approaching
this from.
Fortunately, despite some harem trappings, Kirito is hardly the typical
bland male protagonist. For one, he clearly comes off as anti-social – not in a
bad way, just in the sense that he’s not comfortable dealing with others. He
balks at Klein’s invitation to introduce him to some friends, and never really
tries to integrate himself into the Black Cats, keeping himself at a distance
and envying them their collective friendship rather than trying to become part
of it, consistently preferring to remain a solo player even on the front lines.
But like a certain other Black Swordsman, he cares about others a lot more than
he prefers to let on. Despite his early declaration that he’ll do anything he
can to survive he’s consistently more compassionate and helpful than he seems
to admit to, helping and caring about those he barely knows, at least those who
are cute girls (but he does also ask Klein to come with him after they find out
they’re trapped), and willingly gets involved in situations he has no need to.
He consistently feels a sense of responsibility for others and his own actions,
even blaming himself perhaps too harshly at times if things go wrong (it’s
debatable whether the Black Cats is his fault or just an overall bad decision
on the part of the group; if nothing else it’s not his fault the guild leader
committed suicide after finding out his friends were dead), and goes to some
length to try and atone for what happened or ensure it doesn’t happen again,
even taking it to the point of objecting to a plan to let a floor boss kill
computer-generated NPCs (which, unlike players, can respawn) while the players
take it down. There may be elements of harem in the show, but the male lead is
hardly generic, which is a good thing because he easily could’ve been. For one
thing, as a player he’s basically invincible when he’s away from the front
lines – his level is high enough that he can afford to stand there and let
Rosalia’s goons hit him because his natural regeneration heals more HP than
they can do damage. This is more than likely not the case on the front lines,
but since he’s rarely shown there, just in places where he’s stronger than
everyone, it’d make him pretty damn boring if he didn’t have a well-developed
personality to make up for it.
Overall, not a bad show. It’s at least nice to look at, even though the
visuals fall into the typical pseudo-Medieval European look common in fantasy
anime. There haven’t been any surprises so far, and the harem side-plot doesn’t
add anything to the show, potentially even taking the focus away from some of
the more interesting elements, but still quite watchable.
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