So this show is pretty good. The first half is great 4/5 stars. But it's bogged down by the second half of the series which merits 2/5 stars. And here's why:
The first half of the series is about people who are trapped in a game that they have to clear to escape. The catch is, if they die in game they die in real life. This makes for some compelling scenes. For one, it actually matters if
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So this show is pretty good. The first half is great 4/5 stars. But it's bogged down by the second half of the series which merits 2/5 stars. And here's why:
The first half of the series is about people who are trapped in a game that they have to clear to escape. The catch is, if they die in game they die in real life. This makes for some compelling scenes. For one, it actually matters if people die in game. The series can explore the results of actual death and the behavioral patterns that come with it, granted they don't do this as much as they should. They barely explored the PK aspects or the people who choose to not even bother, or the people that band together to help worse players survive. They briefly go over these topics but mostly focus on the main character.
So the first half follows our main character who is a solo player and his quest to clear the game, on his way he falls in love with a chick he meets and their love for each other just magically manifests out of practically thin air, He seems to like her because she's pretty and can cook, and she seems to like him because he's a nice guy and strong. That this is all it takes for "love" to occur is indicative of the immaturity of anime as genre and the cultural problems and stereotypes associated with the Japanese. As with most anime you get the normal sexist stereotyping of women as helpless, supporting characters who generally are good cooks and unconfident cry-babies. You can imagine my surprise when asuna turns out to be a capable swordsman. Of course she's only capable when it's convenient. Often times she still needs big tough kirito to save her or to take on the tougher enemies. Even in major boss battles that should not be solo-able asuna tends to take a supporting role.
But let's ignore the flaws almost all anime have with predictable character architecture and story telling. The world is pretty. Some of the storylines of minor character make the plight of being trapped more real. Some characters don't get explored enough. It's like the makers of this anime looked at .hack//sign which had a very similar overall story plot but chose to tell the story through dialogue and character development. The makers of SAO said, let's not do that, let's make it an action show with lazy character development.
The most interesting character choice was to give asuna and kirito a child. But this lasts only one episode in the first half and has no more relevancy until the second half where the child becomes merely a supporting character with no more significance than an information source and plot device.
The resolution of the story for the first half is arguably the weakest part of the story-telling. It felt rushed and poorly thought out. For instance, early in the series they get an item that allows you to revive someone 10 seconds after death, preventing them from dying. Kirito gives this item to klein who is at the scene of the final battle. But rather than have Klein use the item to revive asuna, or revive kirito to finish off the boss, kirito just gets mad and ignore the fact that he just died and as a ghost kills the boss. It was super lazy story telling I've come to expect from anime. Also the revelation of the final boss and how quickly that came about and also how the main character had already fought the final boss before makes the final fight kinda boring and uninteresting.
Overall the first half of the story merits 4/5 stars at best. Interesting side character story lines that should've been fleshed out and more in depth make the series good. Lazy story telling and stereotypical anime flaws bring it down from 5 stars.
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The second half of the anime is terrible. They spend time introducing a flying control device and then the very next scene and episode that control device is entirely irrelevant. Let's ignore that this is poor game design to have a control device for flight that becomes irrelevant the moment you try to learn to fly the right way, this is blatant filler which just goes to show that this second half of the season was just to make money off a brand that was popular.
The second half focus' on kirito's quest to save asuna who no longer is a capable warrior but a damsel in distress incapable of saving herself. The one time I thought they might actually let her escape on her own and be relevant to the plot as anything more than a trophy to capture from the final boss led to disappointment. It makes all the airtime they spent showing her learning the code to her cage and escaping pointless because it leads nowhere. It does nothing more than to motivate kirito to try to suicide out of desperation into "heaven" or the top of the tree, w/e. The entire result of that sequence is, we know asuna is there for sure and the new supporting character, kirito's sister figures out kirito is her brother. Which at MANY, and I mean MANY points could have happened if these two characters had half a brain or interacted at all in real life like human beings.
Which brings me to why this second half is f-ing terrible. It's all about how kirito's sister is apparently in "love" with her brother who is in love with Asuna. But then she meets kirito and over the course of a week, yes you heard me, a week, falls in love with the online persona of kirito, her brother but she doesn't know that. The very fact that she thinks she loves somebody she just met on an online game is already pathetic story telling. They have no bond other than she thinks he's a nice guy and he's strong. But she has very little context for this other than him saving her and her game leader by fighting and killing players (who don't die permanantly obviously).
After barely knowing the guy she is in love with him, she also still loves her brother for some unexplained reason, despite the story even telling us that he and her barely interact at all in real life in the first half of the story. Apparently Japanese women are very easily attracted to guys because all you have to do is be nice to them a few times and they will fucking die to have you love them if you're a man.
Of course it eventually breaks her heart when the brother she hardly interacts with winds up loving asuna. So she clings to kirito as her love. Of course, in the most convoluted way, she winds up finding out that kirito is her brother and is heartbroken.
I guess they are trying to form some sort of love triangle romance. But that's what makes the second half of this series so shitty. For one, the love triangle isn't believable. It's hard to even feel bad for sugu when she has her heart broken because her love isn't believable at all. We have no context to understand why she would love the main character so much other than that he's the main character and she loves him. At least with Asuna x kirito we have some scenes that show them together and growing closer through shared circumstances of terror, fear, joy, etc.
What makes this fact the problem with the series is that nothing else really interesting happens at all. Many people complain that they feel the episodes are getting shorter in the comments on the videos. You know why this is? Because more and more screen time is given to this drama that doesn't really matter and less and less time is given to actual story progression. The pacing of this show turned into a fantasy show to soap opera between story arcs.
And that's why the second half gets 2/5 stars. The fact that death isn't a consequence means there's no tension in any of the scenes for the second half and they lean to heavily on the "romance."
Because you can't separate these halves you get 3/5 stars as my over all review for the series. If the second half of the series had never happened, and they just ended the first half with asuna and kirito waking up and living happily ever after, that would make this series worth 4/5 stars.
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