Before I start I want to mention that any words underlined like this are words that have an explanation on my glossary page so you may want to have a look at that if you don't understand those words.

So I've wanted to do this for a while, that is write about anime and manga, but it doesn't really belong as an article, nor does it exactly fit in with the theme of the rest of the site. Eventually it occurred to me that it would be perfect for a blog. And I recently started watching the perfect series to kick this off for this site since even if your not a fan of anime or manga if your on this site you're probably a fan of The Elder Scrolls series (which are fantasy RPGs) or your a remnant of the old Runescape Clan (which is an MMORPG) so Sword Art Online is a good fit.

Sword Art Online was initially going to be Reki Kawahara's competition entry for ASCII Media Works' Dengeki Game Novel Prize, but he ended up exceeding the word limit so he published it online instead and ended up writing more volumes and a few short stories. He entered the competition again with a different work called "Accel World" and won the grand prize. ASCII Media Works asked to not only publish Accel World but also Sword Art Online, and so it was published as a light novel and was no longer available online. It has since been adapted into several manga series and an anime and even a game. At first I was confused by the order of the different versions and what differences in the story they had. It turns out its not that complicated. Basically the novel currently consists of 6 story arcs (across 12 volumes), there is a different manga series for each arc and the anime covers the first 2 arcs. The game is an original story on what might have happened if the first arc had turned out differently. Okay that sounds confusing, but its actually not as bad as it sounds especially once you're further in the series.

The anime (which I have watched through completely) consists of 25 episodes and is fairly recent, having only started and finished late last 2012. Its yet to be given an english dub (if it does end up getting one) however it has been subtitled in english and is being streamed officially by a few sites at the moment (I know crunchyroll has the entire series and madman, which has the distribution rights for Australia, has begun streaming before they have a DVD release) which is great because it means you can support the creators of the anime (rather than getting it illegally) without having to pay huge anime prices for the DVD, in fact it shouldn't cost you a thing.

So the story starts in the year 2022, when the worlds first Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (VRMMORPG) is released. If your like me you may have be thinking about how unoriginal the topic of Virtual Reality Games are, and how they've never really been explored that well, but bare with me, as I will explain in a moment this series actually does things quite well. Anyway Sword Art Online (SAO for short) is the worlds first VRMMORPG and has a very limited initial release to only 10,000 players after a beta test of 1000 beta testers. At the beginning of the first episode the main character Kazuto Kirigaya (more often referred to by his username, Kirito) is teaching another player how to fight within the game since he was one of the lucky people to be selected for Beta testing and has a better understanding of the game. Shortly afterwards they realize the log out button is missing. For a moment they assume this must just be a bug, and reflect on how such a big bug could impact on the future sales of the game, until there is a system announcement and they are force teleported to the center of the the Town of Beginnings along with all the other players. The creator of SAO, Kayaba Akihiko, appears and announces that its not a bug and that the system was designed to trap them in there, and the only way to escape is to clear all 100 floors and pass the game, furthermore if you die in the game you die in reality as well.

Real life death in a virtual reality game isn't exactly a new concept, in fact its been the plot of several movies and books etc but I've always found those stories quite poorly thought out or at least poorly explained. For example they rarely do a very good job of explaining how death in the game causes death in the real world, however in this series they explain very clearly how the same system that reads and blocks signals from the brain (so that you can run in the game without running into a wall in the real world for example) and that sends signals to the brain to show the world, can just as easily trigger certain parts of the brain to deactivate it, thus killing you. The other issue I've always had is why doesn't someone in the real world just notice somethings wrong and remove the player, and sometimes they explain this by something like time isn't moving in reality (which is stupid) but again they explain in SAO that attempting to remove the device triggers the same response that kills the brain. Okay again, not exactly new, similar stuff has been done before but how do people in the real world know that removing the device will kill you and the thing is in Sword Art Online the general public don't initially know, but as Kayaba Akihiko announces 200 people had already died this way within the first moments of the game so people quickly learned.

So basically I really enjoyed the way they explained the theory behind everything that's going on in SAO, but I also really like some of the themes they explore. Firstly I think its quite obvious that the author understood games on a personal level. There's also issues of prejudice (similar to racism) towards the Beta players by other players for supposedly not sharing information. Then even in this world where death is real there are still Player Killers (PKers) and people gradually work out how to exploit the system to do things like kill people in safe zones without them being able to put up a fight. The other thing is despite being a fantasy game, SAO doesn't allow players to use magic and they even mention in the series how risky that is for an RPG but it works perfectly and its something that is eventually explored in later story arcs.

The graphics and design of the characters as well as the SAO world is amazing heck even the way the menus look and work is awesome. I was very quickly reminded of all the praise Skyrim got for its amazing expansive Mountain landscape when I saw all the landscape of SAO and just how massive that world is. The buildings and towns and even the dungeons all look amazing and like they really fit in as well as looking realistic and you can tell a lot of work has been put into it.

One issue I had was that a lot of time seems to be skipped between episodes, they seem to clear about 10 floors between most episodes and within 15 episodes 2 years has passed. But its also understandable why they did it to quote the anime "Every gamer knows how boring it is to watch someone else play an RPG". This is possibly more an issue in the anime, rather than the novel and manga. I've only just started reading the novel but I feel like it's quite possible that it fills the gaps in a bit more.

Something I thought was quite interesting was although SAO is such a short anime it used the extra side stories (which don't necessarily fit in with the rest of the series from what I've heard). Usually I really hate fillers but in SAO they work. They don't stand out from the rest of the series as being different like most fillers do and they actually add to the character development.

Anyway I really enjoyed this series and highly recommend it.