(This is Part 2 of my full review of the Sword Art Online anime series in the eyes of someone who only started it in late August 2020; Part 1 can be found here) Part 1/Part 2
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Ordinal Scale movie Source: http://www.pixiv.net/artworks/80450431 After getting though Season 2 on a high note, I was curious to see whether the only major post-web-novel era content adapted so far would keep up with this tempo as I head into territory where SAO is already an established big series around communities in this world.
Unfortunately Ordinal Scale, while being a dazzling and thrilling movie to watch, was bogged down by several problems that severely affected my watching experience.
But firstly let's talk about the good things: with the battles shifted to the real world with the concept of "blended virtual reality", it really gives a change in the atmosphere with real life settings back into play. With things like Pokemon Go appearing just after this movie was out, it also points to something slightly more plausible to happen in the real world for virtual reality to appear. I like how the "random bosses in Tokyo" concept was presented with hundreds of people appearing in popular tourist destinations every night to beat some virtual monsters to earn shop discounts and gifts, something that in a different is already pretty common practice for sports activities mobile applications. And as with what I would expect for the flagship movie of one of the flagship anime series of Sony's Aniplex, we got some amazing fight scenes and lighting effects that are truly dazzling to watch. If nothing else, for those who want really good sword fighting and magic casting for our familiar main cast, this is definitely for you.
Never mind that Suguha got deliberately sidelined in this movie.... Yet the identity of the movie as the series' first (and as of this writing, only major) original story adaption beyond content originally laid down in the 2002 - 2008 Web Novel era means that some considerations were added to the movie that would ultimately become its Achilles' Heel.
The first one is that the movie's pacing is
way off - thanks to the "fan service" consideration of getting every major Sword Art Online character on board (curiously missing Suguha), adding scenes like Asuna bathing and KiriSuna moments to please our audiences, adding song-singing moments to allow new singers showing off, adding enough fights (like the virtual Aincrad Level 100 fight) for showing off every one's skills and techniques while trying to explore a new problem with virtual technology within 2 hours, everything were written as if they are checkpoints and never got enough time to elaborate. This became very apparent as story rushed towards its conclusion at Yuuna's concert in the stadium, where the conflicts within our antagonist this time barely had any time for us to reflect on. Considering that the early director of Sword Art Online (Season 1 - Ordinal Scale)
Tomohiko Itou has had quite a few acclaimed works around that period (
Erased, Silver Spoon, and most relevantly the pretty good sci-fi anime movie
Hello World) that didn't have serious pacing issues, I'm sure the story of Ordinal Scale here have influences outside of the directoauthor's discretion. Which is pretty unfortunate, for a better written story would have made this movie the catalyst to a much better received Sword Art Online.
The worst part of the movie, however, goes to the antagonist. Well, at least for a change we don't have sexual abusers here (
o kawaii koto), but while the professor tragically losing his daughter in SAO forever could have been shown as an emotional back story addition to the series with how Yuuna is presented, the rushed pacing really hurt here as the professor's inner thoughts, as well as assistant Eiji Nochizawa's, never got enough time to be adequately explained, leaving emotions for this incident washed out and gave the impression of this story as inexplicitly elaborated as Akihito Kayaba's thoughts of setting up SAO. For a movie that promised to explore the potentials and dangers of "blended virtual reality" in the same way that the Mother's Rosario arc did, it was a really disappointing performance.
Oh well, I guess my rants doesn't matter because SAO Ordinal Scale held the box office records for any late night non-idol show series anime movies in Japan for years - until a wild
Demon Slayer appeared...
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Alicization arc, first half Source: http://www.pixiv.net/artworks/69590113 As I head into the biggest arc of the series, one that was given a now rare treatment of a full year length season spread over 2 years, I cannot help but think that
maybe, just maybe, I'll get a fairly good phantasy world x virtual reality crossover story here in one of the most praised parts of the franchise by avid readers of the novels. Maybe we won't get a masterpiece either, but I expected an adventure that would be a decent watch for 47 whole episodes from start to finish.
The truth, as it turns out, is much more roller-coaster like than I would thought. But the start of this new story did at least partially deliver - starting with a dream-like scene of Kirito falling into a completely new world along side "new old kids" Eugeo and Alice, the first episode was a strong start not seen before in the same franchise IMHO. It was followed up in the next few episodes where we got the main conflict of the whole arc in Underworld with Alice's capture, decent world building in the process from the village and tree-cutting up to Kirito and Eugeo passing the initial exams at the capital's sword skills academy. There are some good coming-of-age growth illustrations thrown into the story, while step-by-step the secrets of Underworld got revealed, both inside UW and outside where Kirito ended up in UW after being attacked in the night with serious injuries (more on that later). It may not exactly be the most interesting one the genre can offer (A Certain Magical Index, Made In Abyss, Madoka Magica etc. offering even more impactful world revealing and building in the same length of time IMHO), but nevertheless I was intrigued in following this arc as Kirito and Eugeo became brothers in arms.
In terms of character development the first episodes were also fairly decent. You can clearly feel Eugeo growing up from that tree-cutting kid in a rural village to a rookie knight and the tell-tales are all handled with satisfaction, despite apparently his growth suffered quite a bit from deleted scenes in the anime adaption. (more on that later) Kirito in this new state was also done fairly well up to at least his entering the sword academy, clearly showing more or less the same character as in his real world while keeping himself mostly oblivious to this fact, though I feel that there are certain aspects of his character that didn't quite mesh with his previous personalities (see my detailed analysis below). As for Alice...I'll talk about her later as she really didn't had enough screen time to properly develop a distinctive character until late in this arc, and further in WOU.
Speaking of the linkage to the real world and UW with "fluctlights", this was presented as a fairly interesting concept of living 2 different lives in a non-game like environment. This and the proposition of using virtual world environment to repair one’s brain as introduced in the introductory episode did stimulate further in.
There's also one major further development in the real world part that I would give a thumbs up, and that is Asuna making a bold step of hers and independently came up with her own plan to directly come into contact with Lass and the Ocean Turtle, which is always nice to see. As of this stage the intervention from the “real world” to the story remains minimal and no major problems propped up on that side (yet).
Back in the Underworld, an explosive event in episode 10 would seriously tainted my view to this part of the story (see below), however the plot did make a comeback of sorts afterward with the long climb towards top level of the Central Cardinal. The process of getting past major hurdles by the leading members of the Integrity Knights is fairly good, with various enemies being at least mildly interesting (all of which would get further development in the WOU arc), examples include fighting against Bercouli, Fanatio and the two girls who grew up in the Central Cardinal. Meanwhile I found Cardinal herself to be quite an interesting character, if not completely living up to her name that signifies the protector of the AI system. Yes, world-overseeing program AI would not need its representative "avatar" to move around the world physically, but I expected her to have more power than her name seems to indicate (something pre-planned by Lass perhaps? This was not elaborated in the anime).
Unfortunately all such developments towards a decent season mostly came to naught with the assault incident on Tiese and Ronie in episode 10 - a turning point in the plot that was severely trashed by Kawahara unable to think of any other ways of making antagonists than sexual assaulters. This is a thing that he actually apologized to his audiences and the VAs when this episode aired, for making use of novels with similar plots in his younger days. I actually highly appreciated his self-criticism out in the open for such a long time and in that he even took time in writing classes after hearing many of the criticisms from readers/watchers, however in my humble opinion he and the anime production team should have realized by the time Alicization's anime was under production that adapting such scenes in this full way, without any changes, would be highly problematic after criticisms from earlier seasons. Alas, the problem didn't even stop there afterwards, and I'm highly not amused with such cliché and awful content were adapted one on one in animation form, indeed in certain cases more things were added than what the novel wrote (see below). This is a huge NO-NO to me and it really set off my thumbs down for this season here.
Another major problem with this part stems from the final battle against AdministratoQuinella, who does have a good back story of why she became the one ruler of the Underworld with the ruling methods she uses, but that part of her character was ruined by things like seducing Eugeo (I know she made her body hot, but eh that part was embarrassing to see), plus the awkward introduction of her clown which really was at odds with the atmosphere set up in previous episodes. There were also pacing problems around here as well, making Eugeo’s one desperate final attack quite a bit less impactful than it should have been (see Gurren Lagann for what I expected to be the high order standard), especially given the lack of transition on why he could suddenly fought back against Administrator’s seduction.
One more thing that would seriously hurt the Underworld arc later is that the underlying theme of "you can do whatever your heart tells you to" wasn’t properly developed in this part, as such an ability usually requires one to suffer from a lack of self-esteem in parts of the story for it to be "set-off" once our character realizes it. A good comparison target would be one similar power introduced in the same author's
Accel World several years later. Here though Kirito never had such a problem to illustrate why he thought of this power and made use of it so well, while for Eugeo the contrast wasn't made well in my opinion. This may be a problem of the anime adaption and not from the novel itself, but the underlying damage would persist until it all blow up in WOU.
Overall this part does have long times of decent story writing and character development, but then huge stumbling occurs at the key moments really negated the better aspects of it. This is really unfortunate, because as we will see below, the damage would doom the WOU arc.
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Alicization arc, War of Underworld Source: http://www.pixiv.net/artworks/79754700 That's what you call
All Hell Broke Loose.
Yup, this happened both in Underworld and in the anime adaption which started to plunge in the Fall 2019 season and would reach its worst point ever in my opinion as the final 11 episodes aired last season. Yet this wasn't how it started off when the War of Underworld started with the downfall of the Administrator.
There are, in fact, some genuinely good parts in the first half of WOU that aired in Fall 2019, notably several Integrity Knights’ resolutions to their own lives. Notable good examples are the fight between Scheta and Ishkan, Renly’s fight against his own fears, and (partially) Alice’s disciple who choose to live up his life by sacrificing for others. The fights themselves and (at least before the deity accounts chime in) illustrations of the battle tactics are also quite good. Maybe not the best tier in the fantasy regime, but I'll give a pass for that.
With Alice finally featured prominently here, I think Alice’s character development in this part is good, though not particularly notable even among the major SAO characters (I would put her slightly behind Sinon and in front of Asuna). Her growth of determination ever since the reality of the Underworld and the existence of an "outer world" was revealed to her was done at least fairly convincingly.
Unfortunately this is also where the plot of the whole arc started to plunge. On the real world side that mercenary that works for the CIA was horrifically poor written, especially Gabriel who’s as unnecessarily disgustingly written as he could have been, and written so badly that he became a joke character (e.g. his previous memories of a certain Alicia). His colleagues seems to be no better than him either, fumbling around the Underworld like 10 years old kids. Come on, really?
Asuna’s arrival at the Underworld is where things got really wrong. For her we do see her in fighting action for periods more than she ever did in the series, yet in the anime she seems to have lost all her determination and fought like a weakling. Yes I knew she did have problems with adapting to the loads from her super-powers in UW, but I don't think that could explain why she seems to venture between calling for Kirito and crying “Stop it please!” across the last parts of the arc. This is definitely quite a lot of steps backwards from her real self, a huge disappointment with me hoping that she would really show off as an independent and reliable person after getting away from Aincrad and made an excellent show-off in Mother's Rosario.
Meanwhile the parts about worldwide gamers joining the fight is laughable at best and not making any sense at worst. I can easily believe the American players not knowing what they are doing, but that part on Chinese and Korean players being that easily deceived to join the fight seems a bit off common sense to even the most stubborn gamers. We do have real life incidents of spamming and hate-inducing on the web due to national stand-offs, but not for something like this LOL.
To be fair it’s no better on the Japanese side either, that part on Kirito’s
harem friends being that easily moved to tears by merely the call of Yui feels very awkward, cumulating with a bizarre and unconvincing rally speech from Lisbeth that fails to ignite the atmosphere at all (seeing that she’s just a high school student a good comparison target would be the one speech in the last episodes of Sakurasou - now
that one’s really emotional). Or just look at the rally calls in
Log Horizon where real moments of determination in virtual games are shown decently.
The plot continued to dive as Sinon, Leafa et al. came to the rescue around the start of this year's season, with Leafa coming out as the worst characterized of them. After completely side-lined since her awful debut in the ALO arc and even missed out in Ordinal Scale, she came into Underworld only to end up serving zero purpose till the end except than to nearly got sexual abused (again). Yeah I knew the sexual abuse part and tentacles - the lowest point of Sword Art Online so far in my opinion - isn't that overplayed in the original novel, but how was I supposed to know that since such things happened so many times before? Sinon’s supposed-to-be mental scar from the GGO incident wasn’t shown properly either - heck her first thing to do after dropping into Underworld isn't fearing of being attacked, but
kissing Kirito right in front of her new Best Friend Asuna. Wait, what?
And the came Kirito’s revival and subsequent sweep up of the Gabriel gang, which is, eh, simply cringe. This is supposed to be a show off of how powerful one’s own thoughts and determinations could wrap the world around you, yet the flashbacks alone are already nullifying this attempt. It’s highly annoying that the ghost of Eugeo pops up, again and again and again, telling Kirito to stand up. Never mind we got Sachi popping up for the N+1-th time and even Yuuki (!) popping up for Asuna. Yes I understand what Kawahara was trying to portray, but the way it was executed, especially in anime form, is so poor that at times I was thinking this is a psychic themed show.
And then this latest season, with Kirito awakening within a circle of girls, got another further whack with how poor his regaining of his power part got written and adapted. It’s almost as if the whole Underworld is waiting for this Messiah to come down and wipe out the intruders. OK, this may be actually close to the real mark, but what’s with the harem suggestive scenes like Sinon kissing Kirito in front of every other girl there? Come on, I thought Asuna have full control of that...
By this point I didn't even want to further comment on other things, but still: what’s with the strange things happening in the real world? Like the Code 871 being inserted to Underworld by someone who, um, wanna follow Sugou’s footsteps? Isn't that person knowing that this would nullify the experiment by itself and would lead to subsequent doom to the project and company if not for the One True Kirito (TM) saving the world once again?
The thing that this arc - and more or less the end of Sword Art Online’s Web Novel Era - ends with a ridiculous scene of Kirito/Asuna/Alice killing off space monsters with, uh, swords in UW where space used to be non-existent tops it all. Again I know what Kawahara is trying to show (UW getting a huge development leap in those 200 years) and that we all like “Shiny Sword My Diamond”, but this just takes the cake for so many things I wanted to say here. At least the last 2 episodes did brought up some good discussion of AIs living in the real world and how that would affect history, but that is far too little to overturn my impressions.
It's just sad that after 8 years and over 100 episodes of anime adaption, and waiting for this ending adapted in anime form for a year by me to really try out Sword Art Online, that it ended with the lowest rating ever in my history. I'm sorry for being so critical, but this part was really tough to swallow.
With Sword Art Online: Progressive announced for anime adaption, I do hope that this back-to-the-basics action will bring along some clean air to the series as it approaches a decade of anime adaption and 20 years since Kirito and Asuna first appeared between words. I'm not holding my breathe, but I
will be there to witness how KiriSuna might finally got the sweet development they 100% deserved, 10 years late in the anime world.
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Characters At a glance, the “Gary Stu” setting of Kirito - a name which I would more than gladly accept, more on that later - actually doesn’t exclude the possibility of the story being good in itself. Many stories - even classics that have been around for centuries - feature male MCs without a prominent personality/character where his position in the story is the eyes to the world. However once that said character is involved in a romantic arc,
and that part of the story is the main plot, one would expect he would get at the very least some reasoning, inner thoughts or actions to show how he get into a relationship. (The same applies to the other member(s) of the relationship, more on that later) One would also expect that, given how Kirito is the core of so many Virtual World related stories that saves one people after another, we would see some notable growth in his character over the years since he got trapped in Aincrad for 2 whole years.
In the end though, after a hundred or so episodes I'm not impressed in that his growth in determination was only on the surface (determined to enter the VR programming career etc.), not how he grew in personality. This probably is not Kawahara's intent (he certainly did somewhat better for Haryuki Arita in Accel World), but if he tried he didn't wrote that well. For example in GGO I really feel like his urge to save Sinon was weak and doesn't really have a solid standing point (see Season 2, Episode 10), despite having a perfectly reasonable back history with Laughing Coffin, making Kirito's move too much "gentlemen-like".
I also don't think Kawahara has managed to keep his illustration of Kirito's character consistent across the books - in the Central Cathedral fight in UW along Eugeo against Fanatio (Alicization Episode 15), he somehow called out Eugeo that "hatred can't win you this battle" and stopped him from killing the no. 2 Integrity Knight. I really feel like this is out of Kirito's usual personality shown before. It
could be tangentially explained by the differences in Kirito's fluctlight doesn't work in the same sense as in the real world, but if so the linkage has never been made properly in the anime.
Other than that, Kirito simply didn't have enough prominent personalities to speak of, no life-changing conflicts except for his trapped-in-SAO days (considering that he lost his original parents way younger, one would think that this would be talked about a lot in the story - nope, this background info was never used), no repealing and fighting back of what his life ambitions are with regarding to many other similar characters in anime I have seen (Shirou Emiya, Touma Kamijou, Hachiman Hikigaya etc.). This is a huge shame considering that the back-and-forth relationship between the real world and the virtual world would have caused huge changes to people's feelings about the world, but it doesn't seems that we saw that change on Kirito at all.
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Before starting the series I had predicted that Asuna Yuuki would prove to be the most controversial character and the center point of all the arguments around the series. It turns out that this isn't quite correct, simply because her character is more like
incomplete than
poorly written.
A huge chunk of that problem lies in the 2 major problems I have previously mentioned on season 1 - the time skips between episodes in the Aincrad arc due to how the novel was originally written and not adequately fixed while turning this into anime, and the awful decision of making her the "prey in cage" in ALO. The former means that her settings of being a highly admired guild leader was almost left unused (before WOU I think the only major fight where she's in the limelight is the Aincrad Level 1 one - and that's a late addition that lead to SAO:P), the later was the source of why every one call her a "Mary Sue" - and Kawahara didn't do enough to overturn this impression.
This was highly regrettable, especially after seeing Asuna scoring major growth in the well written Mother's Rosario arc. Her argument with her mom about choosing a separate road for the future might not be the best written parent-children argument in the anime world, but it's nevertheless a great boost to her character.
The growth above, however, didn't meant much to Asuna's further development as she simply got sidelined in subsequent seasons. In GGO all she did was guarding Kirito's safety while he went on "diving" in the hospital and helped Sinon to find the person she guarded in the shooting incident; in Ordinal Scale she didn't have much sparkling performance; in the first half of Alicization she did took a bold step to find her getting into the Ocean Turtle, but had no power to interfere with UW. When she finally did have the chance to do so deep into WOU, her power limitations seems to have a huge impact on her actions as she fought timidly and scared - especially when the Far East players invade the UW. The story was written such that she and everyone else cry for help for the One And Only Savior Kirito to wake up and beat every invader - this may not be the intent, but the anime really feels like this during the latest season.
It did nothing to help Asuna's case as a not well developed character (just look at other
anime Best Girls - Mikoto Misaka, Rin Tohsaka, Kurisu Makise and even Rem has had more in-depth diving into their own minds and how they grow during the process than Asuna did in the 100+ episodes). Heck, looking at Kawahara's later work
Accel World, our Black Snow Princess got more growth in getting over her past of betraying others in the animated part of the story (only 4 books in out of 25 published!), despite even her having many of the same lack of further development of character that Asuna has in SAO. And never mind other titles in this genre like Log Horizon where Akatsuki got her determination to live and find something to fight for in her new world shown well within a much shorter time than Asuna got.
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Conclusion It might have all its flaws, its moments of head banging and desk slapping, and it did repeatedly shattered my lowest anime rating records several times while I went through it, but I throughout enjoyed the process and time spent with Sword Art Online. It's an unique experience like no other as I plowed through genuinely shining moments in the series followed by strange things that I really feel headache to watch through, yet understanding that looking through all its deficits, the charm of the tales Kirito, Asuna and friends playing through virtual worlds do grip around people (enough for me to grasp through the Aincrad arc in 24 hours for example). Reki Kawahara did actually wrote some unironically decent stories in many parts, way before he got a editor to help guide his path since 2009 - he really did improve in story writing already partially seen in the
Accel World anime adaption. His open-to-criticism and self improving attitude was one that I have never seen in any authors so far and deserves high praise regardless of how his works turned out to be.
Sadly I don't think I would be interested enough in reading the novels (well very few Japanese LNs made it to my shopping cart), but I promise that I would be back when SAO:P airs and me coming back to explore more of how KiriSuna really grew in people's hearts as one of the model couples of the anime world.
Thank you to all of you Sword Art Online fans in persuading me to try your favorite work in full. I would have missed out such an interesting work to critique had you not voiced your defenses loudly.
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