Review for Sword Art Online Part 3

Introduction

It always seems to come down to value for money with Sword Art Online and me. Given that the US release of this 25 episode series comes packed with extras both on disc and physical, but retails for genuinely silly money may in some quarters mitigate its treatment in the UK, but expecting over £100 for a 25-episode series at RRP is still pushing it in my book, especially on discs which are next to barebones. The way that the show is split probably won’t make things easier to stomach. The Aincrad Arc was 14 episodes, and split evenly to 7 episodes per disc. The Fairy Dance Arc on the other hand is 11 episodes long. For your £29.99 RRP, you are getting just five episodes on this disc. Of course the mathematical crudity of simple division and multiplication means nothing if a show is not good, and conversely fans have been known to pay a whole lot more for a whole lot less. I paid £5 last year for a 15 minute DVD, High School of the Dead OVA. Scale those numbers up, and this Blu-ray is a bargain in comparison!

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 few. He got comfortable, put on the headset, and entered the world of Aincrad to play Sword Art Online. But when the real world called in the form of hunger, there was an unexpected problem. The log-out button was missing! The game had suddenly turned dangerously real. The only way to escape the game was to beat all 100 levels. If anyone from the outside tried to remove the Nerve Gear interface, the player would die. Kirito had to play his way out of the game, a full on survival game, but the last thing that Kirito expected was to fall in love as well.

That was Sword Art Online: The Aincrad arc, which concluded when Kirito and his online girlfriend Asuna managed to beat the game, and escape back to the real world, or so they thought. At the start of this second, Fairy Dance arc, two months have passed since then, and it turns out that only Kirito managed to come back to the real world. Asuna is still lost in the digital realm, despite Sword Art Online having ended, and is trapped in a coma in hospital, still wearing her Nerve Gear interface. Then the worst happens, one of her father’s employees, Noboyuki Sugou, announces his intention to marry Asuna, comatose or not, and with her father’s blessing. That’s one way to climb up the career ladder! With just a week to go, a lifeline is thrown to Kirito when a friend from SAO shows him an image of Asuna, grabbed from another MMO. She’s apparently trapped in the ALfheim Online game. It’s time to put the Nerve Gear interface back on and venture into the digital realm once more, and save his one true love. Only this time it looks as if the game has been rigged against Kirito. But he gets some unexpected help as well...

Five episodes are presented on this dual layer Blu-ray from Manga Entertainment.

15. Return
16. Land of the Fairies
17. Captive Queen
18. To The World Tree
19. The Lugru Corridor

Picture

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.

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.

We do get extras again for this disc, but it becomes apparent that Aniplex simply grabbed a handful of video files, disdainfully cast them in Manga’s direction, and never bothered to check on what they had offered before in the hopes of consistency. What you get here maintains no continuity with what you got on the previous disc, and the titles given to them in the menu mean nothing.

There are 5 Web Trailers on this disc. They aren’t web trailers. They are 30-second long, next episode previews for episodes 2-6 of the Aincrad arc.

You might be forgiven for thinking that the Ep 15-16 Web Clips, and Ep 18-19 Web Clips might be more of the Sword Art Offline extra features that were listed as the same but given screwed up playback on disc 2. You would be wrong. These are the next episode previews for episodes 16, 17, 19 and 20, again running to 30 seconds apiece.

Conclusion

After watching the first arc of Sword Art Online, and coming away less than impressed, and then hearing less than stellar opinions about this follow up Fairy Dance arc, I made sure to approach this collection of episodes with even fewer expectations. To say that it failed to meet even those limp hopes is an understatement. I didn’t think that Sword Art Online could get any worse... It did! The fundamental structural problems with an anime about an immersive multi-player online game are still there. Questions left over from the Aincrad arc are simply ignored, and the Fairy Dance Arc starts off by setting up its story in the worst possible way.

This time it’s all about Kirito rescuing Asuna from the ALfheim Online game, which is built on the same game engine as Sword Art Online. Red Flag #1. Asuna, who was a kick ass warrior in Sword Art Online, is a damsel in distress in this arc, meekly trapped in her gilded cage, frequently molested by the bad guy, and tearfully waiting for Kirito to rescue her. Red Flag #2. The bad guy is such an obvious villain, a champion moustache twirler , announcing his intention to marry Asuna even if she is unconscious so he can get in sweet with her dad (who incidentally approves of this, Red Flag #3A), then molesting her with Kirito in the room, laughing in his face and calling him ineffectual, before going online and molesting Asuna’s digital avatar in her gilded cage, that you don’t want Kirito to defeat him, you want him to throw the bastard out the hospital window there and then and hang the consequences. Subtle characterisation this is not. Red Flag #3. Then there is Kirito’s sister Suguha, who despite having had her brother in a coma for years through playing online games, straps on a VR helmet four months before he wakes up so that she can start playing ALfheim Online. Riiggghtt... Red Flag #4. So Kirito’s ALfheim avatar doesn’t know that Leafa is actually being played by his sister, or vice versa, but the two wind up teaming up on his quest to save Asuna (although he hasn’t told her this yet), and Leafa develops a crush on Kirito. This might be the set-up for a big punchline for when the reveal happens, except in the real world Suguha really does have a crush on her (adopted so it makes it alright) bigger brother. Okay, you’re pulling that sibling incest crap in yet another anime?! That’s Red Flags #5-10 right there!

You have to put up with all this bollocks before you get to the actual fun bit of the story, the online game bit, which is actually pretty nifty. For one thing, this arc isn’t going to take years, with almighty narrative gaps and character growth black holes getting in the way of the story. Kirito has a deadline of less than a week, to go online and save Asuna. ALfheim Online’s mechanics contrast really well with Sword Art Online. The latter game was about fighting skills and battling all the way to the end level. ALfheim Online on the other hand is about magic, there’s supposedly a mix of combat and co-operation involved, the players get to choose between various breeds of elves to play, and everyone has the ability to fly for a certain length of time in this game. The point of the game is to reach the top of the World Tree, out of range for the elf flight stats, so that they can unlock infinite flight abilities. The top of the World Tree incidentally is where Asuna is whimpering at the moment.

I’ve gone past simple dislike for Sword Art Online, and am now approaching this show with contempt. There could have been a good idea in here somewhere but the execution continues to insult the intelligence, even more so in this Fairy Dance arc. I’m coming to the opinion that it’s a show written by morons for morons, which is a horribly snobbish position to take. But no other show in recent memory has caused me to consistently yell at the television, vociferously exclaiming that this show should go forth and multiply, although obviously more crudely. I may be wrong, I may be an ass for not getting this show, my disbelief that it justifies that mega budget release from Aniplex, and this not inexpensive release from Manga may be completely misplaced. For those who think I’m an idiot, here, have some points in the overall score.