My review of Sword Art Online

Now, sword art online was the show that introduced me to the wonderful world of anime, because MatPat from game theory talked about it, BUT that doesn't mean I can't hate it. This review will contain no nostalgia first anime stuff. Anyway let's get into the review. Sword art online is easily the worst show I have ever experienced, and here I will explain why I hate it so much.

Kirito, our main character is a wish fulfillment character who has a massive harem despite having no personality whatsoever, he also makes the idiotic decision to make everybody think that beta testers are evil (isolating a TENTH of the population of aincrad) and since he is so amazing and overpowered there is no tension at any point in the show. And he comes back to life after being killed at the end of season one for some stupid reason.

Asuna starts out as a strong independent female character, and remains the best character in the show for the rest of the trainwreck known as sword art online - though that isn’t much of and achievement - but as the show progresses she becomes useless and can’t do anything without her boyfriend. For example when a member of her guild tries to challenge her for her freedom, even though she should be strong enough to take him herself, she hides behind Kirito and lets him fight the guy instead.

Did I mention that every other male character in the show is an idiot, pervert, just a bad person or didn’t have enough screen time for any character development. And there aren’t any female characters who know shit about the game, even though it would in theory have been an incredibly expensive game, on a very expensive console, and only hardcore gamers would want to pay that kind of money.

Speaking of the console, the whole thing surrounding the nerve gear is completely illogical. The biggest part of the show is that, if you die in the game, you die in real life because there are microwaves inside of the nerve gear. There is an episode where they have a revival item, which works if it is used 40 seconds after you die, does that mean that you don’t die in real life for 40 seconds? Does that mean you can just take it off at any given time and be fine? It’s not like it’s a bomb so it will take about a minute for any brain damage to set in, if anything. They say that kids died from parents trying to remove the helmet. What, did the parents fiddle around with the strap and then just leave the child to die?

Let’s assume though, that attempting to remove the nervegear means immediate death. Why don’t the government send out a bomb squad to disarm these helmets, preventing these children from dying? I mean, the government was clearly aware of the issue and was clearly involved because the created wings in the hospital for these people affected by sword art online and the nerve gear.

In episode 4, there is a ridiculous scene where our main character Kirito get attacked by SEVEN GUYS and takes no damage, eliminating any feeling that Kirito might ever be in any trouble. In episode 9 he hides that fact that he has the ability to dual wield swords - something that apparently nobody else can do because Kirito is anime Jesus - allowing several people to die before he stepped in to save him, and even the friends that he hid this from didn’t care about this. He did this again later in the show when he was fighting a boss and was at low health, proving that he didn’t learn the lesson that people die when he hides his powers.

Kirito isn’t even doing anything special to be this overpowered, sure he was a beta tester for the game, but the beta test didn’t go on for nearly as long as the time people spent trapped in the game, and it’s established as early as episode 2 that things have changed since the beta, meaning that he didn’t have masses of data from the data that nobody else had. MMORPGs aren’t even that difficult to understand, they might take a few days at most for a beginner, and the top player in this game is a 14 year old boy! You would think that other people would have come to the same conclusions as Kirito.

Even after the month timeskip that happened between episode 1 and episode 2 nobody knows anything about the game, even though the beta testers had made them a handbook. Most people learn how to play games in a few days, even when they are just messing around and playing them for fun. So you would think that everybody in a game where their LIVES are at stake would immediately learn everything there is to know about this game and create a community where adults protect the children and focus on carefully grinding. None of that happens. Instead, they decide that all beta testers are cheaters because they know more than everybody else. The games most powerful players were isolated by a community of idiots.

What annoys me more than nobody bothering to learn about the game is that they should have already known how to play because the were first responders. The show starts on the launch day, players had slept outside of stores and stood in massive lines to get a copy, or they had preordered it for a massive price. The 10,000 copies in existence sold out in a few hours. In the first episode Kirito has to explain the basics of the game to Klein - the show’s chosen method of exposition - who claims he was so hyped for the game that he and his friends waited in line for 3 days to get a copy. Klein knows nothing about the game, he doesn’t even know how the nerve gear works.

Kirito spends most of his time in the game messing around on lower levels using level grinding tactics that admits are inefficient, he still manages to remain the most powerful character around. In episode 9 he teams up with Asuna, the front line fighter for the most powerful guild in the game, the guild that leads the charge into the higher levels of the game, and generally being strong enough for everybody in the game to recognize her. Given how well known and how powerful she is, one would assume that she would be at a much higher level than Kirito, however, when he reveals his dual wielding power it is revealed that he is still exponentially more powerful than Asuna, and everybody else in the game.

Did I mention that as of episode 25 of season 2 he has a harem consisting of 6 members (one of whom is his cousin who loved him in the second arc which was just, ugh, and one of whom is dead) in fact, the only strong female in the show not in his harem died. This anime doesn’t even pass the bechdel test. The bechdel test is, as the name suggests, a test to see if a show or book or movie or whatever is sexist. Here is the test: Rule 1, the show has at least two female characters. Well we have Kirito's harem. Rule 2, they talk to each other. Mebers of Kirito's harem to talk to each other. Rule 3, about something other than a man. Oh dear.

This show has two redeeming factors though, and these factors stopped me from giving it a rating of one out of ten. One was the soundtrack, the opening was sung by LiSa and the animation. The animation was easily some of the best out of any anime I have ever watched.

I fell like there's something I'm forgetting... Oh. Oh god. I still haven't talked about the entire second half. I haven't mentioned this yet, but everything good in this show happens because of Asuna, and all of the worst things come from degrading her, for example the breast groping scene (Yes that is actually a scene in the show.) Unfortunately, the entire second have is built on degrading Asuna. This season is why I gave this show a 2/10.

I think I will start by talking about how the show treats Asuna. After Kirito has his deus ex machina moment were he came back to life to finish the game, apparently some players got stuck in a different game so that some the main antagonist of this series could attempt to control their minds and take over the world. Asuna was one of these players, but instead of just being experimented on, she was trapped in a birdcage and our main antagonist tried to marry her body that was in a coma. He wasn't allowed to do so because she did not give her consent, instead he tried to get adopted into her family - which is something that does sometimes happen - but he still insists on making her wear a wedding dress. ANYWAY she attempts to escape at one point and succeeds, only to be sexually assaulted by tentacles. I'm actually not kidding. That actually happened.

As if this anime wasn't bad enough. In the episode 24 our main antagonist actually rips her clothes off and does everything short of raping her in front of Kirito. Again, I'm not kidding. I'm going to assume that the only purpose for any of this is to make the viewer hate the villain, and it does a good job of this, it also makes me hate the show though. The fact that shese scenes were drawn erotically just offended me. The show may have made her seem weak at some points in the first half, but they were obviously trying to show that she was a strong, badass character. They just gave up on that in this half of the show. These scenes don't even belong in this show, sure it has some dark moments and there is death and suffering but it isn't Game of Thrones, it's just a 14 year olds wish fulfillment show.

I think I've covered all the worst things that the show did to Asuna in the second arc, so now I'm going to talk about the incest underplot. Being generic and annoying must be genetic in Kirito's family, because his sister who is actually his cousin seems to have also inherited that trait. You could even take her out of the story and it wouldn't make a difference whatsoever. She adds nothing to the story and is just there to increase the size of his harem. She falls in love with his in game character (While also being in love with him in real life but not being able to express that because he is her cousin) that looks exactly like him, acts exactly like him, has a name that is almost exactly like his, and she doesn't realise that is't him. She says that she gets into VR games because she wants to learn about the thing that he is so passionate about, but she NEVER brings it up with him, even though it would be a good conversation starter and good way to bond with him.

As I said in the introduction, Sword Art Online is easily the worst show I have ever experienced, It’s so bad that I think it may have broken me, so bad that it made me want to write a long and boring essay about how bad it is, which is exactly what I did.

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