Anime Review:Why Sword Art Online is Good

A while back I posted on a seasonal anime blog called Infinity and One (I was RightToLeft), where we discuss our thoughts on the anime in the coming seasons.  One thing that was always irked me is how people treat Sword Art Online (SAO) like it was the worst thing since Mars of Destruction.  However, I always gave it the benefit of the doubt.  So as a throwback to the good old days, I wanted to write about why I think SAO was actually good.

The verdict

The Good

Like many of the top tier shounen action animes, SAO excels in both animation and sound.  I would rank this right behind Fate/Zero, since it provided crisp visual stimuli, with a full choir chanting in the background.  The fight scenes are the standard for what shounen action should be.  Comparitavely, when we look at all the fights in Bleach, One Piece, and Naruto, we see glimmers of the secret sauce that SAO has, but the consistency of quality are only doable in seasonal anime.

Animation

I, for one, have always stressed animation above all else, and I could not for the life of me watch Ping Pong, no matter what the reviews say.  The reason I choose to watch anime is to see networks really provide an experience only animation could pull off.  When a show like SAO provides stunning anime fight scenes, it really gets my blood a pumping.  

Sound

You know that an epic fight scene is about to break out when the choir lets out a booming chant of "COFFEE, SODA."  This is always the weakest part of my analysis, because I tune out the background noise to some degree, which any good OST should allow you to do.  After playing back the sound track, you get flashbacks of those boss battles and those fight scenes.

The Bad

SAO was ambitious in its approach.  It got everyone's expectations up with the 1st level boss battle and then failed to deliver on those expectations.  However, this does not inherently make the show bad.  The idea here was for SAO1 to set up another season and then a movie.  By getting everyone on the hype train, it prepped itself for making a large amount of money in the future.

Characters

This is where I found that most shounen animes fail to live up to the hype.  They promise a cool world with interesting plot line, but the main character is just some soulless, overpowered video game character.  Kirito is no exception.  The characterization of the main heroine, Asuna, and to a lesser extent Sinon, were much more up to par with actual humans.  However, these were not without their inconsistencies, because Kirito had to make them swoon over him in the end.  This was alleviated a bit in the later seasons, and for its genre, it is not THAT bad.

Story

SAO1 opened with an interesting plot line that led to copycat animes to come in the later years.  Overall the world seemed interesting and was a great setting for what could have easily been one of the best animes of all time.  The main problem was that it became increasingly clear that we would never see the world in its entirety.  Unlike Log Horizon, SAO focused on mindless action elements and cheesy romance sequences.  With the growing amount of time skips and a King Butterfly as the main antagonist of the second half.  It is clear why people were left with a sour taste in their mouth.

Final Thoughts

In the end of the day, I gave SAO an 8/10, because it was an entertaining show to watch.  There was enough of a story to keep me invested, and the animation was picturesque.  It was for sure an anime that I considered worth watching.  Overall, it is good that so many people were that disappointed in the way SAO turned out.  It meant that everyone was just as invested, if not more so, as I was, but the fact that it couldn't deliver knocked it down a few pegs in the ratings.

For those of you who haven't watched SAO, I recommend that you go in with no expectations and just let yourself be entertained.  Thanks for reading.  If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment in the comment section.

Peter