Review for Sword Art Online II - Part 1 of 4 - Collector's Edition

Introduction

I can’t believe I’m reviewing more Sword Art Online! If you read my reviews of the first season, you’ll already know my complaints about this particular show. I certainly wasn’t a fan of the online virtual reality role playing game anime genre (there’s enough out there for it to be a genre!), while Manga Entertainment’s treatment of the first season, overpriced single volumes (not their fault but Aniplex’s who stipulated the release format), and poor authoring with dodgy subtitles, random extras, and faulty discs (no one’s fault but their own), made Sword Art Online a tricky proposition. That’s before the storytelling flaws that turned the first Aincrad arc into an uneven and randomly paced adventure, while the second Fairy Dance arc was a misogynistic disaster.


So why am I reviewing more of this stuff? Just what has changed? Well, for one thing, I’ve become a little more acquainted with the genre, having watched shows like Accel World, Btooom!, and Log Horizon in the interim, and I’ll even admit to enjoying some of them. I no longer concern myself with trivialities like long term medical care of those who don VR headsets to venture into games for months at a time. The second thing is that the second season has been licensed and is being released by All the Anime. They may still have to obey the stipulations of Aniplex, and release the show in four parts, but All the Anime do know how to give value for money. Manga released their Blu-rays as single disc releases in Amaray cases at £29.99 RRP. All the Anime’s Sword Art Online Season II Collector’s Edition releases are £39.99 RRP each. But these are combo releases, with Blu-ray and DVD discs, in a digipack, held in a rigid case. You get a 52-page booklet with info on the series, translated from the original Japanese. And for a limited number of this first volume, you also get a collector’s artbox to hold all four volumes of the series. And you’ll also get it without the subtitling goofs and wayward extras, and questionable authoring of the Manga release. All that’s really left to fix is the storytelling that for me blighted the first season.

It’s been a year since the events of the first season, and Kirito and Asuna are building a relationship in the real world as well as the online world. Kirito’s also working towards an education, and a career in virtual reality that will allow the three of them, Asuna, Kirito, and the AI from the games, Yui to be together. It all seems to be going so well. The dangerous Nerve Gear Interface technology that so threatened them in Aincrad, has been superseded by the more benign Amusphere technology, and virtual worlds and games continue to proliferate.


The latest craze is Gun Gale Online, a cyberpunk world where players meet to engage in gunplay, racking up kills to earn status and even money. Some players are even good enough to turn professional and make a living at it. And then a mysterious masked figure, calling himself Death Gun, shows up and shoots the two top players in the game. And in the real world, two players wind up dead of heart failure, something the Amusphere technology should prevent. The government asks Kirito to investigate, and while he can transfer his ALFheim skills to Gun Gale Online, he’s still starting as a beginner. Fortunately he runs into the legendary sniper Sinon the first time he logs in, and thanks to a rather androgynous avatar, quickly gains her trust. But you can’t take the fantasy player out of Kirito, and he finds a weapon better suited to his skills than a simple gun. If he makes a big enough splash in the game, he might be able to draw Death Gun out, but Death Gun has already decided on his next target, the legendary sniper Sinon.


This first release collects the first seven episodes of the Phantom Bullet Arc, and it’s also available on single disc DVD.

1. The World of Guns
2. Cold-Hearted Sniper
3. Memories of Blood
4. GGO
5. Guns and Swords
6. Showdown in the Wilderness
7. Crimson Memories

Picture

Sword Art Online gets a 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p. I could pick plenty of nits with the Manga release of Season 1, but the image quality wasn’t one. All the Anime’s release of Season II matches the first in terms of picture quality, with a transfer that is clear, sharp, with strong colours, and smooth, flawless animation. There’s also minimal banding that I could see, even on the scene fades where it’s most likely to occur. Once again, the beauty of Sword Art Online comes in its animation, its world design. The characters are consistent with the first season, and the real world sequences are agreeable enough. The imagination comes in the online worlds, and for this arc, it’s the Gun Gale Online world that we get to explore. Its burnt orange, post apocalyptic cyberpunk design aesthetic certainly stands out against the mediaeval look of Aincrad, and the pure fantasy of ALFheim. What will really impress are the action sequences, which are better even than before.

The images in this review have been kindly supplied by All the Anime.

Sound

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 2.0 Stereo English and Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. Watching an action packed show like Sword Art Online makes you wish that Japan would produce more 5.1 Surround tracks for their television shows, but surround sound isn’t a priority in a country where living space is at a premium. The stereo is good enough to bring across the show’s music, and offers the action enough space to give some degree of immersion. The dialogue is clear throughout, the subtitles timed accurately and free of error, and as usual I was happy enough to listen to the original language track. I gave the English dub a try and found it to be a solid effort though. One thing I noted was a determination that people’s mouths shouldn’t be obscured when they are speaking, so subtitles will switch to the top of the screen on several occasions during playback.

Extras

I got a silver DVD disc, and a white labelled Blu-ray check disc, so I can’t speak for packaging, artboxes, or booklets, and I can’t even comment on label art.

The Blu-ray disc presents its goodies with an animated menu. On the disc you’ll find Special Animation “Sword Art Offline II” – Part 1 (12:41), and Part 2 (11:08), both presented at 1080i 60Hz. These are the bonus animations, Flash style, which have SD versions of the characters offering news reports and chatshow segments about the episodes just past (these mirror the Japanese release format of three episodes to a disc), and they are a nice bit of fun. Manga Entertainment’s release of Season 1 should have had Sword Art Offline segments on each of their discs, but only put two of them on disc 2, and those at the wrong speed.

You get 3:37 of Original Web Previews for the episodes, and you get the Textless Opening, both in 1080p.

The DVD disc in the collection presents the episodes again on a dual-layer disc, with DD 2.0 English and Japanese, subtitles and signs, with a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC progressive transfer. It’s adequate presentation if all you have is a DVD player and a small screen to watch it on, but it isn’t a patch on the Blu-ray presentation.

The only extra on the DVD disc is the Textless Opening.

Conclusion

That was totally unexpected. I really enjoyed the first quarter of Sword Art Online II. It may just be a fleeting thing, it might just be these first seven episodes of the second series, but I have to admit that I was glued to the screen for the duration, and this actually might be the best show out of the four that I’m watching for review right now. That’s after my indifference and eventual loathing of the first season. The Aincrad arc was terribly uneven, while I found Fairy Dance to actually be offensive. This Phantom Bullet arc goes a long way to addressing the issues I had with the first season, and it even builds positively on what has come before. There’s even a scene, when Kirito is about to embark on his mission in Gun Gale Online, where he turns up to the hospital, meets the nurse who will be monitoring him during his online session, is wired up to a bunch of machines that keep an eye on his vitals all before he actually goes on line. Admittedly he is deliberately putting his life on the line, unlike all the other unsuspecting players, but I never thought that Sword Art Online would address this particular niggle of mine.


There certainly isn’t any of the misogyny that so put me off the Fairy Dance arc, and it’s nice to see Asuna and Kirito actually enjoying their happily ever after at the start of the story. The new protagonist in the show, Sinon a.k.a. Shino Asada offers a bit of a dichotomy at the start of the show, in that in Gun Gale Online she’s a kick-ass sniper, one of the strongest players in the game, while in the real world, she’s a somewhat timid girl, bullied by her peers in school, and who finds guns such a trauma that the mere implication of a gun (someone playacting with two fingers as a gun barrel) will make her sick to her stomach. It turns out that she has a tragic past that has informed this trauma, and the Gun Gale Online virtual reality game was something she approached as a form of aversion therapy, but which she subsequently became good at. It doesn’t look as if it’s working, as she’s practically divorced the real world from the digital.

But her trauma does give her something in common with Kirito. That’s another strength of Sword Art Online Season II at this point, as it’s actually developing Kirito based on what he has experienced thus far in the two previous arcs. He too is suffering a form of survivors’ guilt following his time in Sword Art Online, and the actions he was forced to commit to just to stay alive. And he starts to work through his trauma here.


It’s the appearance of Death Gun that triggers this process, and it’s why he agrees to take on the mission at the start of the arc. While the Nerve Gear interface was a flawed design that could kill its users, its replacement, the Amusphere visor has no such lethal aspects. Yet Death Gun appears, shoots his victims in the online game (one of them at a remove on a screen in the online game), yet in the real world his victims die immediately of heart failure, something that should be impossible. Yet when Kirito starts to investigate, the evidence suggests that he knows Death Gun, and he even recognises a symbol that he wears, familiar from Sword Art Online.


One of the positive aspects I found about Sword Art Online was that its universe allowed for an infinite number of worlds to adventure in, each online game presents its own world design, its own story, its own challenges, and the sky is the limit. Kirito and his friends can adventure in all genres of fiction, which really opens up the universe of storytelling. The mediaeval world of Aincrad was a little clichéd and straightforward, but despite the eventual story, ALFheim’s world had a lot more imagination to it. The Gun Gale Online universe really changes things up with its design aesthetic, the post apocalyptic, burnt out cyberpunk realm with tinges of Westerns; its players simply focussed on death matches with all manner of weaponry really looks fantastic. The pacing of the story is good, the character development is excellent. The story blends its drama with action and comedy well. This is good character based narrative of the sort that I really appreciate. But you know what I like best about this story. Of all the guns that Kirito could choose when he started the game, all of the high calibre projectile weaponry, he picks Mace Windu’s lightsaber, complete with whmmm whmmm sound effects. It’s called a Photon Sword in this show just to placate the lawyers, but we all know what it is, and let’s face it, lightsabers are cool, they’re cooler than Fezzes.

It may not last, the series might go to pot with Part 2, this might just be a blip in the mediocrity, but after an utterly disappointing first season, Sword Art Online Season II Part 1 is really quite good, it’s quite good indeed.