"Sword Art Online" Review

Hi!  Flatware Moth here, reviewing something that he just found new in the Graphic Novel section of his local library.

Sword Art Online has apparently become majorly popular for some reason, but, frankly, I just don't see it.

The story itself is an odd mix of the cliched and the stolen.  Anyone remember .Hack?  The one with the really realistic game that people could log into?  Well, that's about half the story.  The other half (or some other fraction of it, because the whole thing just feels like a big mishmash) is sort of "Battle Royale" -ish, in that the game's designer made it without a Log Off button.  The players are now trapped inside the game and must battle their way through 100 levels of a floating castle-world-thing in order to escape.

And, true to video-game-becomes-real-life cliche, if you ever die in the game, you die for real.  It's the price you pay for being hooked up to in neurologically and made to feel and taste every aspect of the game world.

The story itself is told in a very odd way.  We start with a flashback of everyone logging in and being told the story by the game's enigmatic creator.  We then flash forward to two freakin' years later, when everyone in the game is now coming closer to achieving their impossible task.  (And, also in accordance with the falling-into-another-world cliche, some people in Sword Art Online are quite content not to go home.)

Kirito, the hero, is a loner with a dark past who falls in love with a moderately attractive female knight named Asuna.  Their interactions are yet another facet to this confusing story, where they fall deeply in love (almost entirely off-screen) and come together to find their way out of the game.

I was never really a fan of .Hack, and this series only seems to be a sappier, somewhat darker version of that.  True, The World was in certain danger in .Hack, but at least the players could log out whenever they wanted to.

Here, people die by the thousands, we wallow our way through pages and pages of angst and regret, no real answers are given, lots of time is skipped, and all the action sequences go by too fast for me to really understand how the characters pulled off some of their moves.

As I said before, it all just feels like a weird mishmash of fantasy, sci-fi and romance, mostly made up of ideas stolen from better works.  There's a sexy scene of Asuna in her underwear, but that didn't really seem like enough to really try and undo the overall suck factor of what I've just read.

There's a novel out there too, I think.  But my advice: go read something else.  Black Butler just put out its 17th volume; go read that.