Sword Art Online is an anime from A-1 Pictures based on Reki Kawahara’s light novels, and it is the series that made the trapped-in-a-game premise a genre. It aired from July 8, 2012 across four seasons on Tokyo MX, BS11 and a handful of regional stations, and it has been loved and argued about in roughly equal measure ever since. Both reactions are earned.
Trailer, via Aniplex USA.
The Premise
In the near future, a virtual reality game called Sword Art Online launches, played through a device called the NerveGear that reads the player’s body. On day one the players discover they cannot log out. The creator is holding them captive until someone reaches the hundredth floor of the game’s tower and beats the final boss, and anyone who dies in the game dies in real life. That is a superb premise, and the first arc treats it with the seriousness it deserves.
Kirito and Asuna
Yoshitsugu Matsuoka voices Kirito, the solo player who becomes the story’s hero, and Haruka Tomatsu voices Asuna, the fighter who becomes his partner. Their relationship is the series’ heart, and in the first season it is written with real feeling: two people building a life inside a prison. Hiroaki Hirata’s Klein, Hiroki Yasumoto’s Agil and Rina Hidaka’s Silica fill out the guild, and Kanae Itou’s Yui gives the couple a strange, affecting family.
The First Season
The early episodes are the reason the show mattered. The stakes are real, the world is beautiful, and the passage of years inside the game gives the story a weight that most action anime never attempt. When the tower is finally cleared, the show has earned its ending.
What Came After
The series kept going, and the later arcs move Kirito into new games with new rules. Some of it is good. The Alicization arc, with Ai Kayano’s Alice, is the most ambitious thing the show attempted, and its philosophical questions about artificial minds are genuinely interesting. But the tension of the original premise, that death is permanent, is gone, and the show spends a great deal of effort trying to replace it.
Where It Falls Short
Kirito is too good at everything, and the series knows it and does not care. The female characters after Asuna are too often written as admirers rather than people. The arc immediately following the first is a low point that the show never fully recovered its reputation from. And the animation, gorgeous in the fights, coasts in between.
The Verdict
Sword Art Online is an influential, uneven series with a first arc that deserves its fame and a long tail that mostly does not. Watch the first half of the first season and decide for yourself whether to keep going. Many did. Many were right to.
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