Does Sword Art Online really need an introduction? No. The VR anime is one of the best-known anime in the world. Even though it came out six years ago, there are still blog posts written, anime episodes watched, and video essays made by some of the brightest anitubers around. Most of which are about how Sword Art Online is a load of crap. I can’t get too angry at the show – it’s what got me into anime. But across the five story arcs which were adapted, all of one of them was good and even that arc was undercut by some of the weaknesses of Reki Kawahara, the author of the light novels the anime adapted.
Despite this SAO is incredibly popular with TWO shows coming out this year. In October we’ll get a third season of the main anime which will start the Alicization Arc. It will be both utter garbage and amazingly popular. And I’ll still probably end up watching it. But the second show is coming to our screens much sooner, in just a few days at the time I’m writing this. Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online is a spin-off show that will be airing on April 8th and I have hope that it won’t be as bad as the rest of Sword Art Online. It’s likely to be comparable to the best arc in SAO: Mother’s Rosario. But before we talk about Mother’s Rosario, we need to talk about some of the flaws in the writing of the original Sword Art Online.
Sword Art Online’s Flaws
I’m not going to break down every nitty-gritty detail about why SAO sucks; I don’t have that kind of time. Instead I’m going to talk about two of the show’s biggest flaws that constantly undercut it and the one flaw that is so great that it allowed Mother’s Rosario to be good and gives me hope for SAO Alternative.
The first of these flaws is in the foundation of any good sci-fi or fantasy show: The world building. SAO is set in near-future Japan where full-dive VR technology has been developed, allowing somebody to submerse themselves in an entirely digital world. The first generation of this is the Nervegear, a bulky helmet that ended up being the device that trapped 10,000 players inside SAO. And it’s full of plot holes; in fact, Kawahara said as much in an interview with Aniplex, calling the Nervegear the best gimmick he could work up. The idea of a virtual reality, of course, isn’t unique to SAO. There are plenty of Western narratives with this theme – The Matrix and Ready Player One to name two.
But there are a plethora of flaws in the design of the Nervegear – how does it intercept the brain’s signals? How was Kayaba Akihiko able to design it to destroy a brain without anybody discovering it? The way full-dive technology works is brushed under the rug and it weakens the story because it is such a crucial element to the plot.
The other underlying flaw with Kawahara’s writing is the way he handles exposition. At first it didn’t seem bad; the scene where the game’s mechanics are explained to us by Kirito teaching Klein how to play is decent. It’s a little clunky, but it establishes Kirito and Klein as characters and their relationship and it’s not terrible. But as time goes on the exposition is always handed out in that clunky fashion, with the characters being a little more heavy-handed than necessary.
Kawahara also has a fascination with making characters sit around a table eating while they spout this exposition. There are times when it’s appropriate to use this, but there are many other times where it just seems convenient and lazy, like it was easier to just drop a couple of characters around a table and have them dump info for five minutes rather than integrating it more carefully.
Both of these flaws are worked deeply into the first two seasons of SAO, including the Mother’s Rosario arc. But even considering these and some of the other flaws in SAO, I still really enjoy Mother’s Rosario because it fixes what is arguably the greatest flaw of Sword Art Online: Its protagonist.
The Greatest Flaw
Kirito is in many ways a terrible protagonist. Let’s start with the most obvious one: His OP status.
Kirito faces little to no challenges. There is one scene where he is literally standing still and letting a half-dozen players attack him without being in any danger. There is a surface-level explanation of Kirito’s strength: He was a beta tester of the game, so he had an edge in being able to find the best spots to farm monsters, the quests with the best rewards, etc. But he was one of a thousand beta testers and we only meet two others: Argo, a beta tester who didn’t fight and was mentioned once, and Diavel, who died before the first level was cleared. There were 997 other beta testers who were each given a copy of the full version of SAO, but we never hear of any of them being close to as powerful as Kirito. All the other top-level players we meet are people who tuned into the game for the first time with the exception of Heathcliff, who was Kayaba in disguise.
I want to take a moment here to address the fact that I don’t have an instinctual hatred of over-powered protagonists. Goku is obviously a very popular character, and both One Punch Man and Mob Pyscho 100 are great examples of how to make an OP character work. One Punch Man examines how having everything you’ve ever wanted without having to struggle for it can derive life of all meaning, while Mob takes a similar look at having people like you simply for being strong isn’t the most rewarding, so its protagonist spends a lot of time trying to better himself outside of his psychic capabilities.
But SAO fails to show any struggles of Kirito being so powerful. It doesn’t even show his journey to being a god; after the players are trapped there’s a two-year time skip and suddenly Kirito is the best player in the game. This removes all stakes from the game. He’s so powerful that he can literally rewrite the game with his mind, so there’s no real conflict from an external foe. With that being said, the anime mentioned previously were able to take the fact that there was no real external conflict and turn that into internal conflict.
But there’s no real internal conflict or growth on Kirito’s part at all. There is a brief moment during the Phantom Bullet arc where Kirito suffers from PSTD from being trapped in SAO for two years and being forced to kill people, but it’s over before it began. In many ways, Kirito is the same person walking into the Alicization Arc that he was when he entered the Aincrad Arc – a full five story arcs and NINE light novels later except he has a harem of girls following him around . Actually, that’s not quite accurate. Kirito wasn’t the protagonist of these five story arcs, only four of them. And kicking Kirito to the background is what pushes Mother’s Rosario to being good.
Mother’s Rosario
I’ll admit right of the bat that the Mother’s Rosario arc doesn’t fix every problem in SAO, or that it’s some great viewing spectacle. What it is is the first arc to lose Kirito as a protagonist and the first arc to really get some of SAO’s themes across in a compelling manner.
Mother’s Rosario focuses on Asuna instead of Kirito. After a powerful player named Yuuki selects Asuna to help her after a fight, she takes her to meet her guild, the Sleeping Knights. The Sleeping Knight needs Asuna to help them on their quest to defeat a floor boss with only seven players rather than the typical seven parties of players. It’s the journey that Asuna and the Knights go on in this are that helps push Sword Art Online’s themes through.
One of the themes that SAO tries to push across is the idea that relationships created online are as meaningful as those created in the real world. We get to see this in several ways in Mother’s Rosario. The first is through the conflict between Asuna and her mother, who doesn’t approve of her use of the AmuSphere, the second generation of Nervegear. Asuna eventually convinces her of the reality of…well, virtual reality. And the other is through the guild of the Sleeping Knights in-game. The Sleeping Knights are a close-knit guild of friends who have played many other VRMMOs together. They all also have chronic illnesses that prevent them from easily travelling around with friends and the virtual world is the only way they can be together. It’s in this world that they’ve built some of their closest friendships, and it’s as tangible as any they’ve formed in the real world.
The rest of Sword Art Online struggles with this theme, partially due to…you guessed it, Kirito! Basically every interaction he has during the course of the game only serves to add another girl to his harem. In Mother’s Rosario, however, the interactions with the Sleeping Knights helps Asuna grow as a person, and it helps Yuuki and the other guild members too. It shows how online relationships aren’t really all that different from those we forge in the real world, and it’s Mother’s Rosario that gives me hope for SAO Alternative.
Hope for Alternative
When the original SAO anime went to the world of Gun Gale Online I was pretty excited; this was before I recognized it for being as bad as it is and I thought it was great that they were showing a VRMMO outside of the swords and sorcery-style games of SAO and ALO. It was also the moment where I started to dislike it because they still ended up giving Kirito a sword.
But I’ve seen the promos for Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online and I’m happy to say that the protagonist is never shown wielding a lightsab- I mean laser sword. The description of the show talks about how the protagonist, Karen, and how she’s never fit in in the real world because of her height, so she plays a cute chibi character in GGO. This is heavily appealing because it’s the kind of story the SAO wanted to be – about finding a place in a digital world that might not have been there in the real one, but is equally valid. If the name Sword Art Online wasn’t attached, I’d be psyched about this.
I don’t think SAO Alternative will be able to shake off all the flaws left behind from it predecessor, but it has a big chance to be acceptable, maybe even good. I like stories like this, about how the real world interacts with the digital one. It’s something I can personally identify with. So I don’t have high hopes for Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online. But I do have hope.
Movies, Magic, and Anime 