Sword Art Online Fails To Embrace Its Most Important Core Element

The first few episodes of Sword Art Online are exactly what I wanted from an anime where people are thrust into an MMO-style game. There are plenty of fight scenes, people struggling to adapt to rules that aren’t similar to those in the real world, and unique items and fighting styles based on different classes. When Kirito fights the boss of the 74th floor, it feels pretty epic.

The fight scene is intriguing and does remind the viewer of a game.

All-in-all, up to this point in Sword Art Online, the story delivers what it promises, which is a game focused on people trying to survive and escape an MMO-style game. However, shortly after this, Sword Art Online started to lose me. Though I acknowledge that years have passed while our main characters learn and grow, we don’t really get to see any of this.

The time skips are so long and sudden that it stops us from really seeing how the world has changed and the growth of the characters. In my head, they’re still young teenagers in the early stages of trying to escape the game.

So when the theme of Sword Art Online changes, it feels sudden and forced. While it makes sense that after several years, people have somewhat given up on the idea of escaping the game and are now trying to settle into their new lives, watching it on the screen is awkward.

The same is true for the romance between Kirito and Asuna. Yes, they’ve been living together for some time, and are mentally older than when they started. However, audience members have seen so little of it that the new direction of Sword Art Online still makes me think of two young kids falling in love.

So when they want to be closer, get married, and essentially adopt a kid, it doesn’t seem right at all. Something needed to be done to make the transition from MMO fighting to normal life a little smoother.

When I watched the series for the first time, it was a little heartbreaking to see the epic fights go away, and so suddenly, only to be replaced by a lukewarm romance. Even a couple more episodes to show the time passing and characters growing and maturing would have been helpful.

Overall, it seemed that the series relied too heavily on fans willingly being led from one point to the other via explanation and quick summaries rather than being shown the story. I haven’t seen many cases of the classic line for stories “show, don’t tell” is a problem in movies and TV shows, but that’s exactly what happened in Sword Art Online.

GFR SCORE

The first few episodes of Sword Art Online set up the story and showed us MMO mechanics. Once they were certain that fans understood the premise and the world, though, the story was somewhat dropped. A lot of the video game mechanics were abandoned, leaving fans to guess their involvement in the world, just like the development that happens during the time skips.

Of course, many people are willing to overlook these problems for an otherwise enjoyable anime, I just wasn’t one of them. If you want to watch Sword Art Online for yourself and see what you think, it’s available to watch on Crunchyroll and Hulu.