Earlier this year, when Sword Art Online reached its midpoint, I called it the smartest anime I’d seen in years due to its in-depth analysis of the long-term effects of being stuck in a virtual reality world. Sword Art Online’s– This past week Sword Art Online ended its Japanese television career. And while the second half of the series was still entertaining, it failed to live up to the thematic highlights of the first half. Read more here about this article.
When I wrote my review of the first half of SAO, I had watched until episode twelve. Sword Art Online’s– The main characters were in a series of side stories as part of their honeymoon, and there were still 25 floors to clean until the end of the game. Little did he know that two episodes later, the series would completely change due to the biggest plot twist: the hero wins early.
After discovering that the creator of the game is actually one of the players, and also the final boss of the game, the creator gives Kirito the opportunity to fight a one-on-one duel.
In any other anime, the hero would have lost and the villain would have escaped waiting for the main characters in the final dungeon.
But in SAO, Kirito wins, and the villain, true to his word, frees everyone from the online world. What’s more impressive is that this doesn’t happen at the midpoint of the series where you might have expected it; rather it happens two episodes after that.
Plus, it happens right after a seemingly irrelevant side story about fishing, making for one of the most unexpected plot twists I’ve ever seen.
Of course, with 11 episodes remaining in the series, some kind of conflict must remain after everyone escapes from Sword Art Online. And the conflict is this: 300 people, including Kirito’s love interest,
Asuna, I haven’t woken up yet. However, Kirito finds an image from another virtual reality MMORPG, ALfheim Online, that shows Asuna a prisoner. Therefore, it is up to Kirito to enter the new world and fight to save the girl he loves.
By entering ALfheim Online, we, the viewers, learn about a completely different world of virtual reality. While Sword Art Online was a world without magic, ALfheim Online is a game built around magic and another game mechanic: flight. So while Kirito may have been the best at Sword Art Online, he is a complete newbie when it comes to ALO. It is fun learning about this new world with him.
Starting the ALfheim Online story arc, I had a question: How can you be a better villain than a man who caught 10,000 people in a death game without a properly explained reason? Easy. It just goes to show how good that guy was compared to the new villain.
Like its sister series Accel World, Sword Art Online is a series in which the first half is much stronger than the second.
The first half is interested in the psychological and sociological problems of living in an online world, while the second half decides to take the simpler route of retelling a classic myth in a modern setting. Both, however, are nice for what they are.
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