Worst Anime Ever: Sword Art Online

 

I’ve somehow managed to abstain from talking about this show in any length for the entire year-and-three-quarters run of my blog, but I shall abstain no longer. Sword Art Online is a 49 episode anime series, that consists of two seasons, was directed by Tomohiko Itou, and produced by A-1 Pictures. I sat through all 49 episodes. I gave it a 0.5/10.

Before I get into my feelings about the series I want to make something clear. I love SAO, or at least, I used to love SAO. While I’ve been watching anime since around 2008, there was a gap of a couple years from 2012-2014 where I stopped watching it all together. SAO was a show I randomly clicked on, on Netflix and decided to give a watch. I really loved it when I first watched it and it quickly skyrocketed to my #1 spot when I saw the second season. SAO single-handedly got me back into the medium that I love so much.

That said, last year I went back and revisited the series, and I couldn’t stand it. But I wouldn’t chock that up to simply “It’s not as good as I remember it so, therefore, it’s bad.” No, to be clear, I had pretty low expectations because of how much hate I had heard about the series in my time since my first watching, and how much my tastes had changed. But it somehow still disappointed me.

Sword Art Online is a show about an edgy teenager who gets trapped in an online world, goes on a bunch of filler missions, can’t die, adopts a daughter and gets married. It’s also a show about an edgy teenager who has to go into a fantasy world to save his wife and almost fucks his sister, a show about an edgy teenager who goes into a virtual world where he gains a very feminine body and pretends to be a girl, while he investigates murders in an FPS, and a show about a not-edgy teenager who befriends a bunch of people about to die and helps them accomplish their goals. If any of that sounds cool to you, well I’m sorry to have to inform you that it isn’t.

I have a lot of problems with SAO, but the biggest part is our Lord and Saviour, Kirito. Kirito is built from the bottom up to be pure wish fulfilment for 14-year-olds. He’s good at everything, everyone around him is some hot girl, he’s is the strongest guy, can’t die and has a super devoted girlfriend. Kirito is not a character. Instead, he’s simply a viewer insert with a lack of personality traits other than being a “nice guy,” and no development at all over the course of the series.

One could argue that he has some development in the way of knowing how to interact with others but that’s total bull-shit. In the first episode, he clearly knows how to communicate well when he’s instructing Klien perfectly on how to play the game. Any time that he’s shown having a hard time with it is just character inconsistency.

Another major problem with Kirito is that he literally can’t die, but that’s just representative of a much bigger problem with the series, its lack of any stakes after the first few episodes. At the beginning of the show, they’re actually pretty good at this. Characters die, and you never know who’s going to survive until the next episode. But then they stop killing characters for a while, and it gets to a point where they need to kill one in order to keep the stakes up. So you know what they do? They introduce a daughter character that from the begging is obviously there just to die. This lack of ability to kill off any of the main cast was bad enough, but it gets even worse.

That character they constructed just to die? Yeah, sorry buddy, but they’re still alive. In one of the most mind-bogglingly stupid scenes in any anime ever Kirito (a teenager) is somehow able to hack into an AI’s code (the most complex kind), crack it in seconds, and revive her. What the actual fuck? This completely destroys any stakes that the show could ever have now that you know they won’t kill off any major characters. There’s even a part at the end of the first arc where Kirito dies in the game and is somehow able to come back to life even though his brain would have been fried through sheer willpower. The next time they even kill anyone is 4 arcs later and it’s characters they just introduced to die.

Oh man, the pure catharsis of shitting on this show that I’ve hated for so long is absolutely fantastic, so I’m going to keep going. Let’s talk about Alfheim shall we? The second arc in the series is the one that most people think sucks, and I agree. Of course what I and most of those people would disagree on is the quality of the rest of the show, which is just as bad.

Alfheid fucking sucks, I’ll just say that right away. There’s nothing good about it. The one character who didn’t suck from the early part, and had any actual development, Asuna, is relegated to being a doll from some weird paedophile dude, who’s trying to marry her comatose body. This is not what you do to the one good part of your show.

Instead of Asuna, they fill her role with Kirito’s sister, or, cousin, I guess. Basically, her character is that she really wants to fuck her brother. When the hell did this become Eromanga Sensei? This arc was really hard to sit through. With the only good character relegated to the side being tentacle raped (this does happen, and yes it is as uncomfortable as it sounds), a main character who has no personality, and with shoehorned incest and political drama subplots, the show really stumbles and falls here (or at least a few more steps than it had previously).

The ending of this arc is also just as bad, with the main character once again somehow finding a way to best the creator of the game, even though they were using cheats, through sheer willpower. This shows message seems to be “if you think you can do it, you can,” which is a fine message, but when the way it’s delivering it is through some of the most ass-pulley endings I’ve ever seen, it may just want to rethink that.

 

Now let’s get out of the specific arc gutter for a moment and talk about some consistent problems with the series. The fights in SAO suck ass. That’s right I said it. Listen, this has to do mostly with the lack of stakes. To enjoy a fight scene I need to be invested in the characters and context, or it better has the best animation I’ve ever seen. SAO has neither of these. I can’t care about the characters because of the fact that I know nothing will happen to them, and the animation for the majority of the series really kind of sucks. Plus the choreography is normally really weird. No one has ever used swords like that.

That’s another problem I have, the series looks aesthetically awful. This is mostly a problem with the adaptation. I’m not going to come right out and say that I hate all A-1 shows because that’s simply not true. Do they mostly produce mediocre series that are just there to make money and are totally creatively bankrupt? Certainly. But sometimes they’re good. Really my biggest problem with them is also my biggest problem with the series’ aesthetics. The character designs suck.

I swear the studio must have template faces or something because they all look the same. That’s not an “All anime look the same” sort of statement either, I can very easily differentiate a character from K-On! from a character from Gurren Lagann for example, but, the majority of A-1 shows look the same. And SAO is no exception. All of the characters have the same face, bland. This is really unfortunate too, considering how beautiful the light novel illustrations are (which is about the only good part of the novels).

On the subject of visual presentation, the directing is also ultra-bland. The show doesn’t do anything creative in the way it’s presented, it just feels flat. I’m not asking it to be a Shoinbo show or anything here, but my god, just give me something to catch my eye. The backgrounds aren’t really that great either, they feel too clean, and the characters don’t really feel like they’re inhabiting it, but that’s a problem with most modern anime, and has been since the genesis of people animating on computers.

But that’s not all, oh no, I’m not letting you go yet. There’s still more to be salty about! SAO has some of the shittiest pacing I’ve ever had the displeasure to sit through. There are constant time skips that while they don’t make the show confusing, are unnecessary and annoying. They have a stretch of romance episodes in the middle of the first arc that has really nothing to do with the rest of the series other than to bore the audience to death with characters that I don’t get why you could care about. The arcs also feel ultra-condensed because of these time skips, which leads to it feeling rushed.

Okay, well I guess that it. I’ve got most of what I have to say about the first season out (maybe I’ll talk about season 2 and the movie(s) one day). The longest post on my blog is now 1700 words of me shitting on one of the worst anime ever. I just realised how high I set the bar for myself for this challenge, and I probably won’t live up to it. Whoops.