Sword Art Online is intriguing. When it's dealing with the psychological/sociological element of being trapped in an MMO where time/experience is the most valuable currency it's a genuinely interesting series. The pacing is atrocious though. The romance is so idiotic. And most everything post-SAO is awful. I'd say for me, SAO is interesting for the concept and not for the actual execution.
Sword Art Online is intriguing. When it's dealing with the psychological/sociological element of being trapped in an MMO where time/experience is the most valuable currency it's a genuinely interesting series. The pacing is atrocious though. The romance is so idiotic. And most everything post-SAO is awful. I'd say for me, SAO is interesting for the concept and not for the actual execution.
Unfortunately, in the anime adaptation of SAO, those interesting parts comprise the first episode and maybe half of the last episode of the SAO arc. The rest of the show falls firmly into the second camp.
The villain was unsatifying as well. "Why'd you do it?" "LOL can't remember why I trapped 10,000 people at risk of life in prison and my life getting ruined."
Unfortunately, in the anime adaptation of SAO, those interesting parts comprise the first episode and maybe half of the last episode of the SAO arc. The rest of the show falls firmly into the second camp.
I binge watched the whole series over the course of a weekend a couple weeks ago. The interesting parts are always there. It's just mentioned in an off-hand way or referenced subtly. It's there enough to keep you intrigued (plus I'm a sucker for really stupid romances) but so sparsely that you're constantly left frustrated with the show as a whole.
For example one interesting aspect of the show is the time/experience currency. The beauty of the game is that, theoretically it's a bit of a socialist paradise. Everybody starts on an equal playing field and its up to the players to progress collectively towards a common goal. It should be the ideal iteration of "equality of opportunity". Except the game isn't equitable. The amount of experience available is limited, and some players are coming in with prior knowledge of where the best spots are, at least for the first few levels. The result is that the beta players (Kirito, for instance), and those players whom the betas trust enough to let into their group (Asuna and Klein) get an immediate advantage. As the game progresses this small advantage compounds on itself. The highest level players form the advance guard, and, therefore, get first access to the best experience, and as experience is evidently logarithmic, with every stage that level gap grows higher. Experience dictates the social stratification, and experience is a product of time. The more efficiently you employ your time, the higher your level, and the better your status in the world. You can see it in how Kirito and Asuna talk about the game - even spending a handful of days off the frontline causes concern among them - they're worried that they'll fall off the pace of the frontline, and once you fall off, there's no returning to that uppermost echelon. As time progresses that level gap grows ever starker. We see some of the results manifested in the episode where Kirito helps Silica. Kirito's level is SO much higher than that of the bandits (who themselves pose a serious threat to anybody else operating on that level) that even 4 of them attacking Kirito at once is not enough to counterbalance his autohealing - Kirito is literally unkillable to those people.
This level gap compounds internally too. The advance guard develop close relationships with a small group of blacksmiths (Agil and Lisbeth, for example) with whom they deal exclusively. Because these blacksmiths are crafting the highest level gear possible for these players, their skills are developing faster than other blacksmiths, and so, even among gear, a bit of an oligarchy develops. The best players and best crafters form a group totally separate (both spatially and levels-wise) from the underclass who either topped out or didn't bother in the first place. These players are left to their own devices by the advance guard, and are often ultimately subjected to the whims of bad-manner or high(er)-level players who retired and settled in lower levels. We see in some levels these bad-manner players have built syndicates or mafias and run those levels with an authoritarian, often malevolent fist (as we see the Army do on Level 1). This is precisely because the only players who could step in to stop the injustice are either a) wholly/blissfully unaware due to spatial/oligarchic seclusion, or b) are aware but can't leave the frontlines too long for fear of falling out of the oligarchy.
The problems are rendered even worse due to attrition. Because the amount of experience is limited, takes time to accumulate, and, as we've seen, the game is firstly dictated by experience (reaction times play a role, as Heathcliff noted, but that's more of a "ceteris paribus" sort of situation), losing any front-line players represents a significant loss to the effort to end the game. Every front-line player represents (by the end of the game) a) LITERALLY 2 YEARS worth of time spent accumulating experience in the most efficient manner possible, and b) thousands upon thousands of experience points worth of bosses and quests that are unrecoverable. Next part spoilered:
Spoiler:
By the end of the game, this attrition was becoming a significant problem. The number of front-line players was thinning out with every passing level. Heathcliff, the designer of the game, recognized this, and the situation was rendered even worse when the 2 unequivocal best players in the game besides Heathcliff (who is an admin and immortal) fell for each other and subsequently lost any real interest in completing the game. With those two players retiring, any hope of ever completing the game (which I interpreted as Heathcliff's primary motivation; an interest in watching people work together to overcome adversity, plus a way to test his own abilities as the game's final boss) was thereafter dashed. Heathcliff knew this, and that's why he embarks on his scheme that comprises the final arc of SAO. He knew that as long as Kirito remained independent and unbound to any authority in the game, the blossoming romance between Asuna and Kirito was eventually going to lead to their retirement. So his first objective was to make Kirito subject to the orders of someone outside that relationship, hence the plan to get him stuck in a guild. This plan worked perfectly. As expected, Kirito's and Asuna's relationship blossomed and they "retired" (theoretically they were on a honeymoon/vacation, but without Heathcliff's intervention it can be assumed they would have stayed in that level 22 house forever.) Eventually Heathcliff felt enough was enough and so called Asuna and Kirito back to take on boss 75. The advance guard beat boss 75 but not after a) losing many players, and b) revealing the game to be unwinnable. Kirito, Asuna, and Heathcliff were the only players we see who really contribute AT ALL to the boss' defeat. You can see everybody besides Kirito and Asuna are COMPLETELY demoralized by that bossfight. It was at this point Heathcliff decided to end the game then and there, and not because Kirito discovered Heathcliff's true identity. Heathcliff could have said "yes I'm the final boss see you on level 100 bai". He didn't, and this is because boss 75 revealed something important about the prospects of finishing the game. In the past Kirito and Asuna (again, the unequivocal best players in the game and only realistic shot at reaching boss 100) were fighting for themselves. They wanted nothing more than to see the game through to its bitter end and were more than willing to take risks towards that goal. This is honestly what set them apart from other players. Even Asuna, a nominal member of a guild, was more or less a solo player. Neither Asuna nor Kirito were concerned about the well-being of other players, in fact they preferred staying away from other players because they didn't want to be culpable for their well being. This enabled them to be more reckless than most, which translated to their overall success. By boss 75 they had essentially gotten soft. The show spends an inordinate amount of time dwelling on how little they want to expose each other to danger. Heathcliff could compel them to keep fighting through his authority as their guild leader, but they were going to be more cautious players regardless, which reduced the likelihood of the advanced guard progressing forward. And if one of them died, the game was effectively over as the other would surely kill themselves. This is why Heathcliff decides to give Kirito the chance to end the game there. As the situation presently stood that was the best chance Heathcliff was going to get to face the final opponent he so desperately desired
Those elements of the show are genuinely interesting. The economy. The politics. The society that develops around a system like that. That stuff is cool. It's a major part of the first 2 or 3 episodes, and after that it sort of falls into the background. It's still there, it's just mentioned briefly or implied contextually. That is the stuff that kept me hooked through the first season. I stuck with the next two seasons mostly out of obligation. Kirito is a terrible character though. He's a blank slate. There is nothing to him outside of "he's really good at this game" and a vague sense of wanting to do right by other people. The whole losing close friends and never wanting to get close to anybody else as a result-thing could have been REALLY interesting, but they never really do anything with it. Once Asuna enters into the picture the writers seem to completely forget that backstory is there in the first place. Asuna was actually a really interesting character throughout the first season, then gets progressively lamer/useless in the subsequent 2 seasons. The rest of the characters are sort of just "1 Thing". Like Klein is the guy who can't get a girl. Lisbeth is the gal who can't get a guy. Silica is the cute girl every guy lusts after. There's not a lot to them, and this isn't helped by the pacing, which is nothing short of abysmal. Characters kind of drift in and out of the picture. This could be something really interesting - a vignette-y slice-of-life approach to the show could be really interesting, especially with the show's overall approach to the passage of time. The problem is that for this to work the episodes really needed to be a bit longer - an hour at the least - enough for us to actually get invested in the characters we're introduced to, and satisfactorily develop the world. With 22 minute episodes the writers simply don't have enough time to both tell a story and give decent characterization to somebody who is ultimately going to be a recurring character, but we won't see again for another 10 episodes down the road after this one. So that's the big problem with the show. An overall lack of characterization...of ANYBODY.
As I said, intriguing world and concept, just [feces] execution.
It was a bit of a guilty pleasure. Basically, blatantly shameless nostalgia porn which might as well have been written specifically for me (1970s/1980s nerdy kid, was into all those videogames and D&D and whatnot).
I binge watched the whole series over the course of a weekend a couple weeks ago. The interesting parts are always there. It's just mentioned in an off-hand way or referenced subtly. It's there enough to keep you intrigued (plus I'm a sucker for really stupid romances) but so sparsely that you're constantly left frustrated with the show as a whole.
For example one interesting aspect of the show is the time/experience currency. The beauty of the game is that, theoretically it's a bit of a socialist paradise. Everybody starts on an equal playing field and its up to the players to progress collectively towards a common goal. It should be the ideal iteration of "equality of opportunity". Except the game isn't equitable. The amount of experience available is limited, and some players are coming in with prior knowledge of where the best spots are, at least for the first few levels. The result is that the beta players (Kirito, for instance), and those players whom the betas trust enough to let into their group (Asuna and Klein) get an immediate advantage. As the game progresses this small advantage compounds on itself. The highest level players form the advance guard, and, therefore, get first access to the best experience, and as experience is evidently logarithmic, with every stage that level gap grows higher. Experience dictates the social stratification, and experience is a product of time. The more efficiently you employ your time, the higher your level, and the better your status in the world. You can see it in how Kirito and Asuna talk about the game - even spending a handful of days off the frontline causes concern among them - they're worried that they'll fall off the pace of the frontline, and once you fall off, there's no returning to that uppermost echelon. As time progresses that level gap grows ever starker. We see some of the results manifested in the episode where Kirito helps Silica. Kirito's level is SO much higher than that of the bandits (who themselves pose a serious threat to anybody else operating on that level) that even 4 of them attacking Kirito at once is not enough to counterbalance his autohealing - Kirito is literally unkillable to those people.
This level gap compounds internally too. The advance guard develop close relationships with a small group of blacksmiths (Agil and Lisbeth, for example) with whom they deal exclusively. Because these blacksmiths are crafting the highest level gear possible for these players, their skills are developing faster than other blacksmiths, and so, even among gear, a bit of an oligarchy develops. The best players and best crafters form a group totally separate (both spatially and levels-wise) from the underclass who either topped out or didn't bother in the first place. These players are left to their own devices by the advance guard, and are often ultimately subjected to the whims of bad-manner or high(er)-level players who retired and settled in lower levels. We see in some levels these bad-manner players have built syndicates or mafias and run those levels with an authoritarian, often malevolent fist (as we see the Army do on Level 1). This is precisely because the only players who could step in to stop the injustice are either a) wholly/blissfully unaware due to spatial/oligarchic seclusion, or b) are aware but can't leave the frontlines too long for fear of falling out of the oligarchy.
The problems are rendered even worse due to attrition. Because the amount of experience is limited, takes time to accumulate, and, as we've seen, the game is firstly dictated by experience (reaction times play a role, as Heathcliff noted, but that's more of a "ceteris paribus" sort of situation), losing any front-line players represents a significant loss to the effort to end the game. Every front-line player represents (by the end of the game) a) LITERALLY 2 YEARS worth of time spent accumulating experience in the most efficient manner possible, and b) thousands upon thousands of experience points worth of bosses and quests that are unrecoverable. Next part spoilered:
Spoiler:
By the end of the game, this attrition was becoming a significant problem. The number of front-line players was thinning out with every passing level. Heathcliff, the designer of the game, recognized this, and the situation was rendered even worse when the 2 unequivocal best players in the game besides Heathcliff (who is an admin and immortal) fell for each other and subsequently lost any real interest in completing the game. With those two players retiring, any hope of ever completing the game (which I interpreted as Heathcliff's primary motivation; an interest in watching people work together to overcome adversity, plus a way to test his own abilities as the game's final boss) was thereafter dashed. Heathcliff knew this, and that's why he embarks on his scheme that comprises the final arc of SAO. He knew that as long as Kirito remained independent and unbound to any authority in the game, the blossoming romance between Asuna and Kirito was eventually going to lead to their retirement. So his first objective was to make Kirito subject to the orders of someone outside that relationship, hence the plan to get him stuck in a guild. This plan worked perfectly. As expected, Kirito's and Asuna's relationship blossomed and they "retired" (theoretically they were on a honeymoon/vacation, but without Heathcliff's intervention it can be assumed they would have stayed in that level 22 house forever.) Eventually Heathcliff felt enough was enough and so called Asuna and Kirito back to take on boss 75. The advance guard beat boss 75 but not after a) losing many players, and b) revealing the game to be unwinnable. Kirito, Asuna, and Heathcliff were the only players we see who really contribute AT ALL to the boss' defeat. You can see everybody besides Kirito and Asuna are COMPLETELY demoralized by that bossfight. It was at this point Heathcliff decided to end the game then and there, and not because Kirito discovered Heathcliff's true identity. Heathcliff could have said "yes I'm the final boss see you on level 100 bai". He didn't, and this is because boss 75 revealed something important about the prospects of finishing the game. In the past Kirito and Asuna (again, the unequivocal best players in the game and only realistic shot at reaching boss 100) were fighting for themselves. They wanted nothing more than to see the game through to its bitter end and were more than willing to take risks towards that goal. This is honestly what set them apart from other players. Even Asuna, a nominal member of a guild, was more or less a solo player. Neither Asuna nor Kirito were concerned about the well-being of other players, in fact they preferred staying away from other players because they didn't want to be culpable for their well being. This enabled them to be more reckless than most, which translated to their overall success. By boss 75 they had essentially gotten soft. The show spends an inordinate amount of time dwelling on how little they want to expose each other to danger. Heathcliff could compel them to keep fighting through his authority as their guild leader, but they were going to be more cautious players regardless, which reduced the likelihood of the advanced guard progressing forward. And if one of them died, the game was effectively over as the other would surely kill themselves. This is why Heathcliff decides to give Kirito the chance to end the game there. As the situation presently stood that was the best chance Heathcliff was going to get to face the final opponent he so desperately desired
Those elements of the show are genuinely interesting. The economy. The politics. The society that develops around a system like that. That stuff is cool. It's a major part of the first 2 or 3 episodes, and after that it sort of falls into the background. It's still there, it's just mentioned briefly or implied contextually. That is the stuff that kept me hooked through the first season. I stuck with the next two seasons mostly out of obligation. Kirito is a terrible character though. He's a blank slate. There is nothing to him outside of "he's really good at this game" and a vague sense of wanting to do right by other people. The whole losing close friends and never wanting to get close to anybody else as a result-thing could have been REALLY interesting, but they never really do anything with it. Once Asuna enters into the picture the writers seem to completely forget that backstory is there in the first place. Asuna was actually a really interesting character throughout the first season, then gets progressively lamer/useless in the subsequent 2 seasons. The rest of the characters are sort of just "1 Thing". Like Klein is the guy who can't get a girl. Lisbeth is the gal who can't get a guy. Silica is the cute girl every guy lusts after. There's not a lot to them, and this isn't helped by the pacing, which is nothing short of abysmal. Characters kind of drift in and out of the picture. This could be something really interesting - a vignette-y slice-of-life approach to the show could be really interesting, especially with the show's overall approach to the passage of time. The problem is that for this to work the episodes really needed to be a bit longer - an hour at the least - enough for us to actually get invested in the characters we're introduced to, and satisfactorily develop the world. With 22 minute episodes the writers simply don't have enough time to both tell a story and give decent characterization to somebody who is ultimately going to be a recurring character, but we won't see again for another 10 episodes down the road after this one. So that's the big problem with the show. An overall lack of characterization...of ANYBODY.
As I said, intriguing world and concept, just [feces] execution.
Yeah, this is a very good assessment of a pure meritocratic hell.
I agree with everyone that SAO turned into complete turd after the first arc. But the main character being boring and flat is pretty much a trope. SAO is ultimately also a wish-fulfillment anime, a Twilight for otakus. The protagonist is a blank slate so you can imagine yourself in his place being a boss and romancing the girl of your dreams (Asuna).
There's also an MMO that is quite important in Serial Experiments Lain, but it's not the main subject of the anime.
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