Review for Sword Art Online Part 2

Introduction

I’ve learnt my lesson for the second instalment of Sword Art Online. When I reviewed the first seven episodes, I found my suspension of disbelief wrecked by the utter stupidity of this show’s premise. It may actually address these concerns when it comes to the conclusion of the arc, but that’s beside the point. If you spend more time thinking about the shattered fragments of your credulity instead of thinking about the episode you’re watching, then the show has lost you. So this time I am not going to think about any of that stuff. I’m erecting a credibility filter, instructing my brain to issue forth static the moment the characters start talking about the outside world, and otherwise just take these episodes at face value. From now, until and unless the premise actually makes sense, this show is Sword Art, and nothing else to me. No Online about it!

In the year 2022, Kayaba Akihiko revolutionised the world of gaming by creating the Nerve Gear interface and a genuine virtual environment, the most realistic virtual reality system ever created. The first few attempts to take advantage of the system weren’t great, but that was before Kayaba Akihiko released his own game, Sword Art Online. After a period of beta testing, the first 10,000 copies of the game sold out immediately. Kirito was one of the lucky beta-testers, and he’s also one of the lucky ones to snag a copy of the game, and he thinks that he’s got a heads up on all the other noobs that will be playing the game from scratch. He gets comfortable, puts on the headset, and enters the world of Aincrad to play Sword Art Online. But when the real world calls in the form of hunger, there’s an unexpected problem. The log-out button is missing!

The 10,000 players are all transported to a Colosseum where the figure of the creator, Kayaba Akihiko appears. The game has suddenly turned dangerously real. No one can log out. The only way to escape the game is to beat all 100 levels. If anyone from the outside tries to remove the Nerve Gear interface, the headset will emit a burst of microwave radiation that will kill the player, and even as they learn of this, it transpires that over 200 players have already died in this way. They’re all going to have to play their way out of the game, and it also is revealed that if they die in the game, they’ll die in the real world too. It’s no longer a role playing game, it’s a full on survival game, and as Kirito learns, being a beta tester is no advantage when the rules have been changed.


At the start of this second instalment of Sword Art Online, 2 years have passed since the players first logged on, and the situation in Aincrad has changed, with many having given up on escaping and instead settled down to living out their lives online. Some do still battle on at the front lines, looking for a way out, Kirito among them, but as with any social grouping, online or in the real world, politics and personalities begin to get in the way. Asuna is second in command of the Knights of the Blood Oath, and even she feels that the organisation is getting too big, too monolithic. When she decides that she would rather leave them and party up with Kirito, the Knights aren’t willing to let her leave.

The next 7 episodes of Sword Art Online concluding the first arc are presented on this dual layer Blu-ray from Manga Entertainment. On day of release, you’ll be able to buy it as DVD only, or Blu-ray DVD combi pack.

8. The Sword Dance of White and Black
9. The Blue Eyed Demon
10. Crimson Killing Intent
11. The Girl in the Morning Dew
12. Yui’s Heart
13. Edge of Hell’s Abyss
14. The End of the World

Picture

Aniplex US threw everything at Sword Art Online, including disc real estate. They actually put their seven episodes on 2 discs in their limited edition release, whereas Manga Entertainment put them on just one dual layer disc. Still, Manga Entertainment’s release looks pretty fine at 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p. The image is clear and sharp throughout, with the minimum of digital banding and no compression visible to these eyes at any rate.


Sword Art Online has had some serious effort put into its animation. The character designs may be pretty generic for anime, but they are consistent throughout and animated exceptionally well, particularly in the action sequences. There is a lot of detail to the characters and especially the costumes, but the real value comes in this anime’s world design, which given the RPG connection, is rich, lush, and vivid. There is a lot of colour and depth to the backgrounds, and the animation makes strong use of light and shadow detail to establish mood.

The images used in this review are sourced from the PR and aren’t necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

You have the choice between PCM 2.0 Stereo English and Japanese with optional translated subtitles, and a player forced signs track. You’ll only see the single subtitle track if you use your player’s remote to access the options, but turn it off, and the signs only track appears as default. This boils down to it being impossible to watch the image without any captioning at all, which is a tad disappointing. This appears to be a Manga authored disc, and so you get the old problem of an inability to show more than one subtitle caption at a time. When you get a confluence of dialogue and on screen text to be translated, the captions flick by at an accelerated pace, and a fast finger on the pause button might be necessary to catch it all.

I went with the Japanese audio, and found it to be a decent enough experience, although the dialogue was a little low in the mix for my liking, especially in the earlier episodes. There was a tendency for speech to be drowned out by background music. Otherwise the actor performances were suited to the characters, and the action sequences were given fair treatment in stereo. I gave the dub a try and found it to be rather mediocre, unexceptional at best, clichéd at worst.

Extras

Sword Art Online’s UK Blu-ray release looks to be authored by Manga Entertainment in house. Certainly the subtitling issues are one tell-tale, the other being a lack of chaptering for the episodes; there’s no skipping credit sequences here. The disc boots up pretty quickly after a single Manga logo to an animated menu screen. This time you get more than just the textless credit sequences. You also get the Episode 9-11 Web Clips, and Episode 13-14 Web Clips (there’s got to be a typo in there somewhere).

These are the Sword Art Offline clips from the US releases, and you may think that it’s pointless presenting them to us now, having missed them out altogether on the first disc. They last 14 and 16 minutes respectively, and are fifty percent longer than they should be. Seriously, they’ve been slowed down on this Manga release, all of the characters now speak in deep, distorted voices, and the animation judders in slow motion. I could get it running closer to the intended speed by pressing fast forward on my Blu-ray player, but that does nothing about the pitch of the audio. Asuna sounds like Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, after Arnie is given that truth serum. It’s a screw up that I found rendered the Sword Art Offline extra unwatchable.

You’ll take a look at the US Limited Edition release from Aniplex, and weep at the sight of soundtrack CDs, bonus DVDs, booklets, illustrations, artboxes, audio commentaries, bonus animations and web previews. Then you’ll look at the price tag, close to £300 RRP for the series and breathe a sigh of relief. Then you’ll look at our UK release, and consider its RRP of £120 for 25 episodes on barebones discs, where the average 26 episode series on 4 Blu-ray discs in the UK will RRP for around £70, and you’ll have another cry.

Conclusion

Once again I was served with an indication that my antipathy to this particular genre is a view shared by few others, when during the wait for this release, the announcement was made that Sword Art Online would get a second series this year, adapting more of the light novels to the anime format. And much as I tried to give this second release of the series a fair try, attempting to push its more ridiculous aspects out of my mind, I found that it’s just not possible. Its episodes are just too tied up with its ridiculous premise to be able to enjoy at face value. There’s always this constant reminder that behind Sword Art Online’s flashy visuals and big-budgeted action is one of the dumbest stories of the year.

Part 2 of Sword Art Online isn’t quite as dumb as part 1 though, as the big problem with the first seven episodes was an apparent lack of continuity. We covered nearly two years in the game, with each episode leaping ahead months in Kirito’s online life to catch up with his latest adventure, dipping in and out of the characters that he encountered, the adventures they shared, then forgetting all about them and moving on to the next episode. It made it difficult to engage with the few characters that did recur, and it always felt as if major life-changing events happened to Kirito during the hiatuses between episodes, offering no real continuous character arc.

In Part 2 at least, this approach is forgotten, and instead these seven episodes really follow one major, concluding storyline all the way through to the conclusion, and central to this story is the relationship that develops between Kirito and Asuna. In this respect at least, the second part of Sword Art Online is a radical improvement over the first. Finally we get characters who grow and adapt naturally, we get characters that we can engage with, and empathise with, and we get a story that at least satisfies emotionally, if not intellectually. For Asuna and Kirito fall in love, and for an anime, it’s surprising in that the love is requited, with few awkward moments, or accidentally tripping over and grabbing a boob. This is as close to a real relationship as anime usually shows, albeit a relationship that takes place wholly online, in an imaginary world. We get a courtship, a romance, even a marriage and honeymoon, and to top it all off, a child to complete their family, although the arrival of Yui in their lives is far from conventional, and actually starts the final story arc when her true nature is revealed.


This is actually a pretty interesting arc of Sword Art Online, character focused, and an arc which actually references what has come before, as Asuna and Kirito become close because of their shared pasts, and because of the experiences that have shaped and scarred them since they started the game. In Kirito’s case, the show actually refers to some of those early random episodes, and helps them make sense in the show’s context.

Then the final two episodes happen, and it all goes downhill again, as we race headlong to the Aincrad story’s conclusion, the final boss-battle of the game. Everything’s up for grabs, the final escape from the game, confronting the villain of the piece, and finally getting some answers. Except that nothing is answered in the conclusion of the arc, just why Kayaba Akihiko created Sword Art Online and trapped 10,000 people in there, just what the point of it all was. One of my whinges from the previous review is addressed in this collection of episodes, but none of the others are, and the ending is hollow and uninformative. Part 2 of Sword Art Online is better than Part 1, but ‘better’ is a relative term. You may hope that the next instalment of Sword Art Online delivers more in the way of explanation, but apparently the Aincrad arc is the good bit of Sword Art Online, and people are less enthusiastic about the Fairy Dance arc.