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nflstreetsanimereviews · 1 year

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A Retrospective on Sword Art Online's Aincrad Arc

What you’re about to read was originally going to be a review of the first volume of the Sword Art Online series. Then after reading it along with the second volume, I realized that they were so interconnected that it only made sense to combine the two into one review. After that, I had a realization–most people reading this have probably already watched the SAO anime. Meaning that reading this would pretty much be redundant since it’s a pretty one-to-one adaptation. Even if you liked the anime, there’s no payoff in reading the light novels, since the anime has the superior version of the Aincrad arc. Needless to say, this review became more of a slightly below-surface-level view of Sword Art Online as a series, Reki Kawahara’s growth as a writer, and what you would be better off reading if you wanted to learn more about Aincrad. Please excuse the title, I couldn't think of anything better to name it.

Believe it or not, it’s been almost eleven years since Sword Art Online first aired. For those who don't remember, it was a huge deal when it aired. It was probably the biggest anime back in 2012. It was also the most panned, with many calling it overrated or saying it just plain sucked. While some of the criticisms were over the top, it was understandable why many didn’t like SAO–there were many better anime that aired that year that only got a fraction of attention it did. Many of SAO’s plot points, especially in the second half of the show, were rightfully slammed for being inconsistent about Asuna’s personality and the way it handled Kirito’s and Suguha’s relationship. After a while, it became ‘cool’ to hate on SAO. After all, it was a mediocre-at-best anime that became immensely popular despite said setbacks. I’ve always had a soft spot for SAO–for a series that wasn’t that good overall, it does maintain to keep being interesting, which at the very least is what you want. With that in mind, I decided to re-read the first and second volume to see how it holds up, years later after the hype.

For those who’ve already watched the first season of Sword Art Online, the first two volumes cover roughly the first half of it. It begins with Kirito, our protagonist, playing the game Sword Art Online, a Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (VRMMORPG). The game is played on a device called a Nerve Gear, a state-of-the-art VR headset that simulates all five senses. For Kirito and the ten thousand players that were able to log on and play SAO, they’ve just unwillingly signed up to be trapped in the game’s world (Aincrad). The game creator, Akihiko Kayaba, states that he’s holding them captive until they’re able to reach the 100th floor of the game’s map and that anyone who dies in the game also dies in real life.

I don’t think it’ll come as much of a surprise when I say that this book isn’t good. With all of the knowledge and lore I know about the Sword Art Online series, SAO volume 1 is alright–but on its own, it’s flimsy and hollow. After the big reveal that Kirito and everyone else in the game are trapped in there, there’s a two-year time skip, which in my opinion is a huge mistake. What the reader knows of SAO and Aincrad from this volume is almost at an elevator pitch level, assuming that this is their intro to the series. For now, we almost know nothing about the world around us–we just know about how powerful and cool Kirito is.

Most of our perspectives on this are warped because most of us already knew about Sword Art Online from the anime, which had a completely different pace from this. It’s why I’m including the second volume in this review as well. This volume skips most of the world-building and spends an extensive amount of time showing us what ends up being the final boss fight, along with Kirito and Asuna being together, although we as a reader don’t know that much about her or why she fell for Kirito in the first place. Funny thing is that the Aincrad Arc part of the anime takes parts from other entries in the light novel series–from Volume 8 (which is a collection of short stories, like Volume 2), Material Edition 1 (which I don’t even know is translated into English officially), and Progressive Volume 1 (written four years after the first volume was published, and is a ‘spin-off’ that expands on the Aincrad arc). To put in perspective how much this volume is lacking in detail, the anime adaptation only uses material from the first volume in episodes 1, 8-11, 13, and 14. That’s a whole lotta gaps! Compare that to the second half of the anime–the Fairy Dance Arc. It adapts from volumes three and four chronologically, and it shows in an obvious decline in plot quality. There are other reasons why that is, but that’s not relevant here.

I mentally tried to put myself as a reader that didn’t know anything about Sword Art Online before opening this book, and this was the interpretation I got: This volume leaves a lot to be desired. We know that Kirito is perhaps the most powerful person in the game. We know that Asuna is in love with him. We know that many have gotten used to life in Aincrad and have given up all hope of returning to the ‘real world’. But we don’t get to see them transition into that. All we get is the tail end, where life is already settled in. It zaps most of the fun out of it. It straight up didn’t make sense how THIS became popular enough to be animated in the first place–it is, until I did some more research on how this light novel came to be.

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At the beginning of the afterword for Sword Art Online Volume 1, Reki Kawahara, the author writes “The volume of Sword Art Online you hold in your hands now was my first novel, written for the Dengeki Game Novel Prize in 2002.” He actually never submitted it, due to it being too long to enter, and instead published it online. The web version of Sword Art Online, which ran from 2002 to 2008, had popular support, but it wasn’t what got it published as a light novel. He won the Dengeki Novel Prize in 2008 with his story Accel World, allowing himself to finesse his way into also have SAO published as well. So basically, what we’re reading is the most juvenile writing that Mr. Kawahara had to offer. Due to it being not how he got his foot in the door, SAO was left on the back burner for Accel World. That being said, the web novel had LOADS of content, which made it more feasible for Kawahara to be able to publish both it and Accel World at the same time, even if the writing quality wasn’t up to Kawahara’s now-seasoned standards.

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The second volume of Sword Art Online contains four short stories–stories that were sorely missing from the first volume. For the theoretical person in my head who has only read the first volume, and knows nothing else about the SAO universe, this volume gives some life to Aincrad and the society that formed in-game.

The first story, titled The Black Swordsman, starts on the 35th floor of Aincrad. Our hero runs into Silica, rescuing her from a mob of NPC monsters. Kirito and Silica go on a quest to revive Silica’s Tamed Monster, Pina.

This story introduces the concept of ‘Kirito, the older brother’–something that those who’ve seen the later half of the first season of Sword Art Online know full well about (many would claim that they know ‘too much’.) While Kirito admits that he’s helping her because she reminds him of his real-life sister, their relationship is nowhere near as weird. I have to say though, there were still some ‘sus’ moments. The one that comes to mind is Kirito saying “Level is just a number”. I cringed at least a little reading that, even if the context is way less insidious than expected.

Other than that, it was an alright story about the difficulties of being a young girl trapped inside Sword Art Online. While Kirito is also young (he’s only two years older than Silica), he’s had years of prior gaming experience before SAO, along with also being a beta tester. Silica, being only thirteen (and a girl), for better or for worse, has a constant stream of fellow players wanting to play with her. Her naivety gets her into trouble, being only saved by Jes-...I mean Kirito. This story also gives us a more in-depth look at the mid-level players of SAO. Silica, being ‘mid’ herself, doesn’t fight on the frontlines, and instead makes her living exploring already cleared dungeons in the lower levels of Aincrad. It’s a pretty good gig if you want some excitement in your life, but aren’t crazy (or strong) enough to be on the front lines. Probably beats subsisting on apples and being harassed by Army assholes in the Town of Beginnings.

The second story, titled Warmth of the Heart, features our hero with the blacksmith Lisbeth, who both go on a quest to the 55th floor to obtain a new mysterious metal–a metal so rare that it has not been dropped in-game yet.

This story was by far the worst. I feel bad for Lisbeth, because the entire reason for her existence is to be another girl to pine after Kirito. Yes, as you would expect, Kirito’s Law1 is in full force in this story–Lisbeth, swept by the enigma that is ‘Kirito’, falls for him in no time. Are there really no other honorable men in Aincrad other than Kirito? Well, of course, there’s Agil and Klein, but they’re adults. Lisbeth, while older than Kirito, is still a teenager. Not that age has ever stopped someone in Sword Art Online, but you’d think that there’s at least one other Japanese teenage boy stuck in the game that is as honorable, or even as nice, as Kirito. Guess not, considering that most male players in the game that aren’t Kirito and friends turn out to be huge sickos most of the time. Guess being trapped in a video game world with little hope of ever coming back gets to you after a while. Cabin fever did a number on more than a few men in Aincrad.

Anyways, back to Lisbeth–this story kinda rubs me the wrong way due to the way it establishes her character–someone who will only feel unrequited ‘love’. In scare quotes because it’s a ‘love’ that comes from being stuck with him for a day. Replace her with any other female blacksmith, and the story would’ve gone the same. Because he’s Kirito, and you’re supposed to want to be with him forever. It isn’t like Lisbeth is bland or anything. From what little we know about her, I like her. It’s just disappointing that her purpose (for now) is to be a side-piece of Kirito’s theoretical harem. She’ll never get what she wants because she’s not Asuna. Her fatalist interpretation of Kirito’s and Asuna’s relationship combined with her inability to move on traps her in Kirito’s ‘friendzone’, for a lack of a better term. Needless to say, this story doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test.

The Girl in the Morning Dew is the third story, featuring Kirito and Asuna shortly after they got married in-game. They come across a little girl named Yui, who collapses near the two while they’re venturing out to a remote part of the forest on the 22nd floor to look for a rumored ghost. Yui, not a ghost, nevertheless lacks a Color Cursor, something that every living object has in Sword Art Online. Kirito and Asuna, never one to not help someone in need, help Yui try to find where she came from.

Out of all of the chapters, this one is the best by far. The worldbuilding is a good thing to see. I mean, we gotta know about Aincrad first if we’re expected to care about it. A lot of the chapter is set in the Town of Beginnings, the starting town in Sword Art Online. It’s still the most populous town in all of Aincrad two years after the ‘game’ started. Most people who still live there are those who’re afraid to go outside the town’s walls. There’s also the Aincrad Liberation Force (known as the ALF, or simply as ‘The Army’), the largest guild in SAO with more than a thousand members, who make the starting town their base. It was nice to come back to where it all started, since Kirito stayed in here for all of one day the first time he was here.

This chapter delves into the conflict within the higher rungs of the Army and offers a very interesting insight into what happens when leadership breaks down. One faction of the ALF has turned to ‘taxing’ (extorting) the citizens of the Town of Beginnings–who’re probably the least well-off out of all of the people trapped in Sword Art Online, considering most of them haven’t even left the town. In typical SAO fashion, these ‘taxers’ are unnecessarily evil–they would take candy from a baby and laugh about it. Another victim of cabin fever. Caught between this is an orphanage run by a woman named Sasha, who houses twenty kids that’re stuck in SAO without a parent or guardian. There’s a lot about The Army that could be expanded, but since this is a series about Kirito, all we need to know is that they’re the closest thing Aincrad has to a form of government. Did you know that ‘The Army’ is actually a combination of two guilds, the ‘Aincrad Liberation Squad’, a front-line clearer guild, and ‘MMO Today’, a mutual aid organization that aimed to spread info about Sword Art Online and resources equally.

The final story, titled Red-Nosed Reindeer, is also the earliest story chronologically, taking place in December 2023, almost a year before Kirito and everyone else finally broke out of Aincrad. The story is also the only one where Kirito is the lone narrator.

This story hearkens back to an earlier time in Kirito’s Sword Art Online playthrough, when he briefly joined the ‘Moonlit Black Cats’, a small guild whose camaraderie was a welcoming surprise to the lone-wolf Kirito. Kirito hides his actual power level, pretending to be only two or three levels higher than the rest of the guild, while in actuality he’s Kirito, the all-mighty slayer of bosses and wooer of around half of the women he talks to. Nevertheless, things go horribly wrong one day when one of the members accidentally sets off a trap in a labyrinth, ending up killing four of the guild members and driving the remaining member to suicide. This memory still haunts Kirito months later, believing that he is the reason why the Moonlit Black Cats were killed. He’s especially guilty about Sachi, who Kirito was mentoring and teaching sword skills to.

While it’s woefully the shortest, Red-Nosed Reindeer is easily better than the first two stories. It’s the only insight that we get to see of the ‘early days’ of Sword Art Online, with all of the other stories in the book taking place in 2024, the year after. Our visit with the Moonlit Black Cats is only brief, getting only a little bit more than the cliff notes on them, but at least we got to meet them.

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These four stories add some flair to the Sword Art Online universe, but still leave a lot to be desired. Aincrad is a vast and wonderful world, filled with ten thousand people’s stories–two volumes are better than one, but there’s still tons of meat on that bone. Mr. Kawahara agrees as well, regretting that the Aincrad storyline is only solved in one volume. To correct this, he started the Sword Art Online: Progressive series in 2012.

The Progressive series starts from the very beginning. I mean, the very beginning. The first volume only covers the first two floors. Kawahara, in his afterward for the first volume of Progressive states that “I wrote the story [Sword Art Online] as a submission for the Dengeki Novel Award, so I had to finish the story with the game being beaten, right in the very first installment.” Wow. So that explains why it was wrapped up so soon. The first volume quite literally was what he was going to submit in 2002. In a sense, it’s actually very cool, since what we’re reading is pretty much the first thing he wrote. One of the payoffs of reading the series is seeing the growth in Kawahara’s writing.

Continuing on, he also says that “Later on, I wrote a number of shorter prequel stories that filled in gaps (see Volumes 2 and 8), but they’re more like little episodes, and don’t focus on the meat and potatoes of the players advancing through the game.” Okay, so we did read Volume 2, but I’m not going to read Volume 8. This review is already long enough as it is. Moving on, I’m so glad that he gets that what supplements he wrote are substandard, especially for a great concept like Sword Art Online. They just don’t quite scratch the itch for people like me.

Moving backward, it’s pretty absurd to see an author so freely critique and criticize his most known and successful work. It was popular enough to have people begging him to write more when it was a web novel. It was somehow impressive enough to have it published as a light novel, which then had an anime adaptation that blew up in popularity, and since then has had several sequels and even a spin-off. It’s a staple ‘starting anime’ to this day, nearly a decade after it aired. It makes me respect him a lot to admit what he really thinks, and try to ‘rectify’ it in a sense. The Progressive series contains many ret-cons of the original novel. The biggest to me is when Asuna and Kirito meet–in the first volume, Asuna and Kirito are just kinda together forever already, and we’re supposed to care about it–but in Progressive, they meet a lot earlier. On the first floor. This change is for the good, because we get to see their relationship from the start. We get to see them slowly become lovers, rather than be dropped off via timewarp to literally a week before they get married. There are also characters from the original novel, like Agil and Kiabou, along with new ones.

So, is it worth it to read the Sword Art Online series? To be quite honest, I think it’s only worth reading the Progressive series, and that’s if you’re into the concept of Sword Art Online. I’ve only read the first volume of the Progressive series, and while it's miles better than the original series, it still wasn’t great. That’s only the first volume though. Kawahara has written a total of eight Progressive volumes–usually releasing them once a year. The funny part is that the SAO light novel series didn’t have an original arc until 2017. The guy got 18 volumes of content from what was basically something he wrote for fun. I know light novels aren’t the longest things, but that’s a lot of words! So basically, this arc up to the Alicization arc was already written by 2008, and Kawahara was only able to write new arcs when the light novel caught up to where his web novel was when the series was originally published. That’s quite a mind boggle. It also pieces together why it became big enough in Japan to warrant an anime adaptation. Since there was already a web novel, Japanese readers had the opportunity to read past where the light novel is, if they didn’t ready before reading SAO. The context it was released makes it suffer from poor-quality writing and bad pacing, but those gaps could be filled by the web novels, which were only ever released in Japanese. The light novels began being translated into English in 2014, two years after the anime aired. Most of those who bought the light novel had already watched the anime. This means that my theoretical person whose first experience with SAO is with these light novels was likely a larger minority than I originally thought. Sword Art Online really is a weird series!

It might be worth a read of the main series–only after you’ve read all of the Progressive series that is. I mean, it’s up to you. The anime series has adapted the light novels up to the end of the Alicization Arc. You could either watch it or read it. That is, if you wanted to in the first place, which I highly doubt.

‘Kirito’s Law’ is a slight deviation from the more well-known ‘007’s Law’–basically, any woman who interacts with Kirito for more than four hours has a fifty-fifty chance of falling in love with him. Unlike ‘007’s Law’, these women pass away ten times less often. These two terms were made up by me at the time of writing this.

#sword art online #sao #anime #light novel

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