Sword Art Online is awful

Sword Art:Online is awful shit except for the last six episodes of season 1.


To start with, the show never really knows what the hell it wants to be.  It starts off looking like it's going to be a .hack clone with the MMO and the goggles and everything, but then all of a sudden, the game creator guy sets up this batsu game, a game of life and death, for seemingly no reason and motivation.  He comes out and declares "Haha, gotcha bitch" and prevents everyone from logging out until the 100 floor tower is cleared, something that even the beta testers couldn't do in 2 months.  Humans can survive for a total of 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food.  What exactly was his long term plan here?  To kill everyone?  Why would he set up a game that couldn't be physically completed without outside aide?  This seems like an already inept villain.  Plus, think about all the people who lived alone who started that game?  The kids got off onto help, sure, but what about the other 80% of the virgin neckbeards who moved out?  Just dead on the spot, so now the game would be filled in less than a week with nothing but 12 year-olds who don't have the motor control necessary for large scale combat with bullshit boss monsters, let alone actually doing that 100 times.

Then he says "Oh wait, by the way, we used brain magic to make it so that you look like your real life counterparts".  Excuse me?  What planet does that make sense on?  Your brain never actually functions like that.  Your brain has a different image of who you really are based on your own imagination.  If you were to suddenly tap into an inaccurate lying sack of shit that your brain is to it's interpretation on itself, you would NEVER get to see your actual self. You would either resemble what you WANT to look like, or you would see yourself in a depression fueled monster state.  It would be the equivalent of seeing your "true soul" in a fantasy arc.

See, the whole point of this part right here, to make everyone look like they actually do, is purely so they can set up the love plot for Kirito later on with Asuna.  The bad guy doesn't need to do that at all.  What does he get out of it?  They don't need to look like themselves in order to get out of the game.  They don't even need to do that to talk to people.  It's only there so that Kirito and Asuna can fall in love without the whole "Whoops, you're accidentally ugly" situation, or the joke that "If you're dating a girl on the internet, it's actually a guy" thing butting it's head in and taking the seriousness out of it.

Right from the get-go, this entire story is set up to be a deserted death island so that Kirito can find Asuna and fall in love with her and be a complete badass.  The inclusion of pointless things like that is just a testament to the statement.

But no, not yet, first they have to establish a few other things first.  Such as how bosses work, how teleportation crystals don't work in certain trap rooms and boss fights, how player-killing works, the entire next 5 episodes of the show are haphazard and jump around unnecessarily purely to set up the rules of the game for the player.  But the stupid thing is, none of this was necessary.  If you want to set up tension in a boss room, why did you make an entire episode about meaningless one-shot people getting slaughtered in a trap room, instead of making characters I WOULD care about, and just saying "teleport crystals don't work in here", or even better, just don't INCLUDE teleport crystals in the first place? It's already been established there's no magic system, why even bother to have magic items?

The worst part is, all this jumping around explains things about certain characters, but then the story conveniently forgets about them during dramatic moments.  For instance, the Revival item that Kirito fought so hard to get and gave to his friend is conveniently forgotten about during the final fight moments.  In fact, one ability of Kirito's in specific bugged the hell out of me.  Kirito has HP Regen.  He recovers 400 HP/6 seconds.  THAT'S INSANE.  That was more than 6 HIGH LEVEL BANDITS could do to him attacking him at once while he's not fighting back at all.

Where the fuck was this ability when he was being poisoned by a traitor?
Where the fuck was this ability when he was in a fight with the Commander and Cheif for Asuna's freedom?
Where the FUCK was this ability during the last episode of season one when he was taking constant damage for impaling himself?

And the best part is that he wasn't even near his highest level when he revealed he had auto-regen.  Meaning that the skill obviously had room for improvement.

See what I mean?  The entirety of the first 6 episodes jumps around so much and it's all done just to set up the plot for later on, but a lot of the elements they either don't use, don't need, or outright forget, meaning it essentially wasted my time.

Then the last 6 episodes of season 1 happened.

I'm gonna be honest here.  It was cute.  If the entire show was based around these specific 6 episodes, it would have been decent.  It's a nice little love story about happenings in an online MMO.  If you remove the 6 episodes and just start it off as is, and just have the whole "Commoner wants the high-commander in his private party but jealous parties in the high-army use political muscle to stop this", you would have had a REALLY nice plot.

And then season 1 ends on a completely random note.  "Oh, whoops, I accidentally discovered you were the final boss because I'm too badass to be blocked, right?"  This is a level of "dropped the ball" not seen since Vincent accidentally discovered the Boss was actually a bartender.  It's shoddy and just rushed through, like someone decided "Wait, I don't wanna actually plot out 30 more floors of this.  Let's just end it here?"  Basically, the final boss is delivered to Kirito, and Lord Dracula and Kirito go hand to hand one more time.  Eventually, Kirito wins.  Not before killing himself.  Oh wait, he still killed the boss, so that means he won still, right?

I play video games religiously.  If you lose all HP at the same time as a boss does, either you don't die and become invincible until the next cutscene, or the boss kills you because your game over cutscene overrides the victory screen.  I've never died, and then been magically brought back to life.  It's an unnecessary asspull to make the audience worry about the main character.  Which I can't do because WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO HIS +400 HP/6 SECONDS DURING THAT WHOLE TIME HE WAS TAKING DAMAGE OVER TIME?!  Unless it caps at 400hp, and he had 4 billion HP during that fight, that's horse shit that his life went down that fast.

Then the seasons ends, and Kirito wakes up and runs to his waifu, blah blah blah.

The show should have ended here.

The second season happens though.  In a move I would call boarding rape, a business man attempts to marry a COMATOSE UNDERAGED GIRL in a move to take over a company.  And for some reason, her parents just agreed to that?  Really?  "Hey, my daughter is comatose now.  Could you please defile her and her honor for the sake of money, mr. creepy guy?"  And it turns out, he's using another game to keep her mind trapped so this marriage can go through.

I think the biggest fault of season 2, honestly, is the fact that it didn't need to happen at all.  The set up is really ham-fisted, forcing this really bizarre situation on the hero, when they could have just simply NOT ham-fisted the ending of season 1 and continue in the bounds of THAT game.  Instead, they have to make this season.  Which wouldn't be all that bad, but it's just full of so many unnecessary things that just seem to be reinforcing that the mary-sue main character is a badass.  For instance, logging into this new game (Uh oh, guys!  We gotta go collect all 12 talismans AGAIN!), Kirito discovers that his stats from the last game overwrote the stats from this game making him uber-powerful.

Ignoring how many things I take offense to that on a programming basis (Which is ALL of them), the idea of that ruins the whole point of including a new game in the first place.  He no longer has to master new game mechanics, because he can just carry himself through the whole game with his awesome old sword powers from the old game.  He logs in at level 99, and whoops he can beat the shit out of everybody.  Now that just proves that having a new game was stupid, because the people with more experience in THIS game than he has are automatically weaker than the main character.  He never bothers to learn ANY of the new magic system.  It's only briefly explained to him, and then he never uses it.  His fairy pixie daughter (I wish I was making that up) does all of that for him.

Then you have the angle of the fairy girl who's helping him is actually his sister.  Oh, wait, no nevermind, not really his sister.  So there goes the awkward "I fell in love with my brother online" thing.  Then he discovers it's his sister, and she confesses to him, but even then, it doesn't break his spirit or resolve.  He still adamantly refuses anyone that isn't Asuna.  So what's the point of all this then?  It doesn't shake his resolve or build him into a better character, it just exemplifies that he loves Asuna, but that's the entire point of him entering this game in the first place because the plot is "Dude, save your grrl".  The only time the sister comes in handy is with her magic, and with a revival potion she uses to save Kirito.

Which is ANOTHER problem I had with season 2.  There's no consequence for death.  What exactly was it that Kirito loses again?  Experience?  Experience in what, and how much?  Does it completely reset his levels?  That might be something to worry about, except his levels are all in bullshit skills from a different game.  How would that even work out?  If he only loses a little bit, and in one particular thing, then. . .who the hell cares?  Whoops, I'm dead.  Better just calmly log the fuck back in?

And the motivation of the villain, the secret twist and point of season 2?  He's using the technology to run tests on kids for them to experience pain or pleasure through the VR helmets.

. . .why not just hire test subjects instead of running a billion dollar corporation to the ground?  Instead of wasting tens of thousands of dollars just running the servers, paying the engineers to run this whole program, fix bugs, etc?  No matter which angle, it would have been FAR simpler for them to just, I dunno, test it on some hobos?  Or even volunteers?  Maybe themselves?  It's not just incompetence that's ruining them, it's them being so evil it's MAKING them incompetent.  These are the kinds of villains you would discover on a kid's Saturday morning cartoon show.  Oh no!  The evil Math Magician is tying up all the kids and forcing them to do homework forever!  Who the fuck would be so pointlessly evil as to carry out random acts of violence like that?

Also, now that I think about it, what happened to all the player-killers from season 1 anyways?  That was never addressed.  What they did was intentionally and knowingly attack people to murder them in a game that would kill people if they died.  Isn't that fucking murder in the first degree?  What happened to these people?  Oh, wait, no, it's the end of the show and everyone is going to a special cool kids school for people who played too much MMORPGs.  The fucking end.

As stated before, Sword Art:Online is a jumbled mess designed specifically around making kirito look as 'awesome' as possible with no real rhyme or reason, no real direction, and taking and using elements of it's own show without thinking just to make them fit to the scene even if it doesn't make sense.  The fact that anyone can like these episodes at all shows a real lack of common sense and conceptualization of well written characters.  If you know people who like SA:O, you need to stop knowing those people.  They are not good people.