Sword Art Online - Where it all went wrong

  When the title Sword Art Online (or SAO for short) is heard or spoken I am reminded of two things; a genuine rip off of the .Hack franchise and an anime that had so much potential to be regarded as one of the best anime's of 2012, but instead shortly after the show peaks it declines fast into a overdone love sick boy meets girl storyline.

  The story of SAO is about a young gamer named Kazuto Kirigaya or better known as Kirito, he buys the new SAO virtual MMO game that can only be played by using Nerve Gear, a head set devise that transports your subconscious to a digital world. 

  As billions of people around the world enter this game the head game designer Akihiko Kayaba the creater of SAO appears before all of the players and informs them that as soon as they entered the game they can no longer leave it and if their nerve gear is removed in the real world they die and if they die in SAO the nerve gear thus kills them. 

  The only way out of SAO is to complete all one hundred levels and beat the boss. This leads panic among gamers, many die due to removal of nerve gear and others simply commit suicide in the game. Kirito and many others stay vigil and start trying to complete the levels, Kirito becomes a lone wolf going solo and becomes one of the strongest players through out the series, after playing the game for two years he meets a woman called Asuna, a very powerful warrior who he briefly teamed with at the start of the game. 

  The two soon inevitably fall in love, soon after they discover that Kayaba has been hiding as a player. Kirito challenges Kayaba to a final fight but loses and both Kirito and Asuna die, or so we were led to believe but in actual fact they are alive because Kayaba took pity on them (I think, it was never really explained). Kirito wakes up in a hospital and the series then continues into more VMMO's that have copied SAO i.e. using spin off story lines to keep the love story going but the I'm talking about the main story. 

  As much of a let down as this series was were some positives that made this series bearable, to begin with the animation is something behold, it vibrant colours really make think they're actually in game and the way its show pixels instead of blood is a clever touch, the fight scenes are very well played out, when your watching each strike of the sword and spark fly in different angles and each weapon has its own colourful aura that makes SAO a very colourful anime to watch. 

   As greats as the visuals are in SAO it can't make up for the severe flaws in this anime starting with the concept of the show, its literally a rip off of .Hack. This franchise was first put adapted into an anime back in 2002 and then went to have three other spin offs that all had separate story lines and new characters, but this is not the first time a winning concept has been used by another franchise but I think that this is the first direct carbon copy of a concept I ever seen. 

  What made me irritated by this anime is that it even goes against own 'unbreakable' rules, Kirito and Asuna are killed by Kayaba but then suddenly they are alive and they have won SAO and all of their friends live (WHAT!), Kayaba specifically states at the beginning you die in the game you die for real, so instead of killing off one of the main characters and leave one alive to use the experience to further the character, nope they kill both off and bring them back with weak loop hole in the game just to keep all the love puppies in the audience happy. 

  On the subject of love and romance, this is the very element that over takes the entire anime and bogs it down so much the pace is destroyed entirely. Everything up to episode 11 is fantastic, each episode is paced well and has meaningful message behind it. 
  But then suddenly everything that was built up is brought to a stop and the intense story of adventuring and survival turns into a romantic drama, don't get me wrong I am a firm believer of romance making a story stronger and giving it more depth. Romance can only work if you establish it strongly from the get go or you add it as a sub plot to the main story, SAO simply tries to change the story all together hoping to make it better but actually damaging it as a whole. 

  This anime actually upsets me because it forces me to hate it and talk so negatively about it, it was going in such a good direction and then it just swerves into a different one. When I was first told about this anime I was given a bad review of it but I still decided to watch it and I was enjoying, it proved the my preconceived expectations wrong and I was happy about that. 


  Sadly I reached the eleventh episode and I almost felt betrayed by it because I held it in such high regard and then bad story writing and originality brought it crashing down. I know not many SAO fans will like these words but at least .Hack stuck with its storyline and didn't divert to make more money.