Sword Art Online is a franchise about a bunch of FDVRMMORPG players who get trapped inside of an FDVRMMORPG. Unfortunately for them and their dreams; dying in the game means dying for real.

This article will remain mostly empty for a while, as I don’t yet have the motivation to work on it…because I don’t remember all that much about SAO, due to the fact it’s been a few years since I last went through the series.
Ironically, although perhaps not surprisingly, I know more about SAO Abridged at this point.

I will slowly start to work on these reviews (and the rest of the article) as time goes on. I will maintain a set of notes, that I will include here if you wish to read them, before I actually write something proper up. They’ll be placed in spoilers.

My impression of SAO has remained consistent over the years - it’s alright.
The series isn’t a masterpiece, or even that great, but it’s around a 7.5. I think it’s a reasonable enough start to get people into anime, and I don’t think it’s all that bad.
The series does suffer from some pretty serious storytelling issues, but I think it’s fairly telling that SAO’s issues aren’t that significant compared to the godawful storytelling in western film…and SAO is considered one of the worst shows, which reflects well on anime as a whole.

What’s interesting about SAO is that people’s views of SAO have been clouded to a point where a lot of criticism is simply invalid, and can be disproven simply by watching the show and paying attention (a blasphemous concept, I know). I think this is due to the detrimental influence of reddit and anime youtubers.
In fact, after realizing this, I started to realize that my own views on SAO are up in the air as far as being valid or not, which is why I won’t say anything specific until I’ve actually gone back through the series.

This is (currently) the only thing that I will comment on, although still generally.
Ordinal Scale is bad, it’s not well written, although it isn’t awful. There are some interesting ideas in here, but most of them are wasted because the writing isn’t the best.

While Kirito has more of a character, he feels disconnected with the rest of the series (at least from what I’ve currently experienced). This is also true of Asuna. And of their relationship. Kibaou actually feels like a character, rather than an idiot like in the anime.
It’s a shame that the manga appears to have ended early, because it’s probably the best of SAO, as far as the Aincrad portions go.

I’ll work this in properly later as well, but Progressive also introduces an NPC that Asuna and Kirito…keep? It’s not quite clear. She’s a dark elf who was part of an early quest-line that the two of them did.
What’s notable about her is that she is chronologically the first hint that there are self-aware NPCs inside the game. In fact, her possibly being self-aware confuses and intrigues Kirito.
What I noticed only now is that this may explain why Kirito is opposed to using NPCs as bait in one of the Boss strategy meetings. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense on its own and makes Kirito look really stupid. But with the added context that Kirito knows that NPCs can be and sometimes are self-aware…well, suddenly he isn’t looking so bad.^A)

• Official Website
• Official American Website
• LN Official Website
• The Wikia - 50/50 on quality.
• This was one of my first anime and it got me interested in watching more. It didn’t quite hook me though… that honor belongs to Girls und Panzer.
• I actually like SAO a lot, although that’s partially because I’m working on a re-write of SAO, which has gotten me obsessed with figuring it out.
• I figured recently that it might make sense to mention the elephant in the room: Sword Art Online: Abridged. This parody series is a big deal and likely the best Abridged series that exists. I haven’t mentioned it because I planned to write an article, but then forgot about that. It’s good and you should watch it, especially if you’ve seen SAO (whether you like or dislike SAO, you’ll like Abridged). That said, I should note that there are people who compare the two and some who say it’s better than SAO. I think that this is a silly comparison because, on the one hand, Abridged came after and is built directly on top of SAO, so comparing its shortcomings in this fashion is a bit unfair, though I hesitate to say this because I’m not quite sure where I stand in this ‘politically contentious storytelling issue’. The other hand is that SAO and SAO:A are not the same genre. SAO:A is a parody of SAO. This is like comparing Space Balls and Star Wars. At the same time, I think it’s fine to point at SAO and SAO:A and compare how the two approached storytelling, or specific plot…things. I just feel that most comparisons between the two are focused more on badmouthing SAO than actually comparing the two fairly. Not that I see an issue with saying something is bad, if you can explain how.
  • Oops. Maybe I should write an opinion piece on this instead.