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Shokugeki no Soma is about a serial sex offender named Soma Yukihira who decided that actually raping people was too risky, so instead, he decided that he would then try to molest them with his food to cover it up. On the side, he runs a restaurant with his dad who one day abandons him and sends him to a school that he's so likely to flunk out of it's not even funny. Neglectful parents aside though, this is actually a pretty decent show. The food is so good that I immediately went to the nearest convenience store and bought a bag of Flamin' Hot ... Cheetos because those are my favorite snack food and they were the only thing that could keep me from salivating all over my computer. The girls are sexy, the food is even sexier, and it all comes together so nicely that you forget that this is a show about a serial rapist. All in all, it's pretty tight.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

“Hear me now. Oh thou bleak and unbearable world, thou art based and debauched as can be.”
- Don Quixote de la Mancha, The Man of La Mancha


Sword Art Online makes me regret my decision to become a critic whenever I think about it. Never before has a show made me so empty and angry inside. It just feels so unbearably wrong on almost every significant level that watching it just devolves into a game of, “find the respectable episode.” A show that should tap into my inner geek and provide insight into gamer culture when the gamers are exposed to a deadly ... situation is squandered in favor opting to show us the life of one teenage boy barely reacting to that deadly situation. As both an actual gamer and someone who would like to believe that humans on the whole are rational, thinking people who have some idea of common sense even at their lowest point, SAO actively offends me. When I watched this show, it was the first time that I actually needed to take notes on something I was critiquing while binge-watching it. No, scratch that, it wasn’t a binge-watching session, it was a massacre of everything I love about anime. So with that out of the way, I’ll get onto the... you know, you shouldn’t necessarily think of this as a review so much as you should think of it as an analysis of how Sword Art Online is wrong. It is one of the biggest wastes of a decent concept that I have ever seen, and only goes to show how anything can become popular simply based on its premise. I’ll be going on for a long, long while about this, so you better strap in, because I will not let up. I’m not good with mincing words, and the problems with Sword Art Online are so intricate that simply giving a broad idea of their badness would not do the show justice. Let it be known that I do not hate people who like Sword Art Online in spite of how long this review is and how angry I am at this show, but also let it be known that I am unwavering in my dislike for this show, and reserve my right to express this point of view.




Sword Art Online is A-1 Pictures’ ongoing cash cow based on the light novel written by Reki Kawahara. The show is directed by Tomohiko Ito, who also directed the acclaimed Silver Spoon, written by Himoru Arakawa of Fullmetal Alchemist fame. The first novel was originally published online in 2002 after it exceeded the word limit for a contest that Kawahara was hoping submit it to. Interestingly enough, the first novel was put on the net only a few months after .hack//Sign, another anime about being trapped in an MMO, had aired in Japan. This was also in the same year that Final Fantasy XI, the first MMO in the long-running RPG series, hit the market. FFXI would go on to be the most profitable game in said series. The novel series still goes on to this day, and while the novels may possibly explain some things that don’t make sense in the show, I will not be referring to them because 1. I haven’t read them. And 2. Any piece of media should be able to stand on its own without the need to refer to anything else, so to judge SAO impartially, the light novels must be left out of the equation. The series adapts the first four light novels, the first two being part of the Aincrad arc in Sword Art Online, and the next two being part of the Fairy Dance arc in ALFheim Online. I’ll tackle these two parts individually.


Chances are you already know the plot to the first half. Sword Art Online is the hot new virtual reality MMORPG that only about 10,000 people can get on launch day. Unfortunately for them, logging onto SAO traps them inside the game, and the only way to leave is to beat all 100 floors of the in-game castle Aincrad. If any player dies in the game, the microwave technology in the VR headsets that somehow managed to be deemed safe for the market will fry their brains and kill them IRL. For some indiscernible reason, the show decides not to focus on the people bravely fighting on the front lines or the culture of the game’s world, but rather the adventures of this one guy called Kirito (Bryce Papenbrook), and his eventual girlfriend Asuna (Cherami Leigh). And here comes problem number one in SAO: The pacing.


Since the original story of SAO’s first arc was told in two novels, one of which chronicled the very beginning and very end of the story and the other detailing several side stories, the creators decided to put these stories in chronological order. While this was likely the best they could do the make the story cohesive it absolutely kills any sense of a consistent tone. An incredibly dark episode detailing the death of several characters, many of whom aren’t given anywhere near enough personality for me to care, is immediately followed by Kirito going on a lighthearted adventure with a young girl. This contributes nothing to the overall plot whatsoever. The next two episodes detail a dark murder mystery that also has no relevance to the overall plot whatsoever and the episode after that is just barely relevant at all but still could’ve been cut without too much consequence. The actual plot finally resurfaces in the next episode, but by then the show is just dragging. And I use the term, “actual plot,” very loosely. As far as I can see the show clearly doesn’t know what to do with itself. Almost every episode serves to introduce an aspect of SAO’s game mechanics that never serves any other purpose after they're introduced, and the massive time skips between each episode don’t help, making the passage of time seem jarring at best and flat out perplexing at worst. This leaves Kirito’s progression with no real meaning since the audience is constantly being flung into the future with no indication of anyone’s progress, and the struggle to beat the game effectively becomes a side story for most of the show’s first half. One second Kirito will have average stats, then he’ll be a God among players. One episode he’ll be an unpopular player regarded as a cheater, then he’ll be a renowned front-line fighter with absolutely no explanation.


All of this could’ve been moot if there were good characters to be found, but unfortunately the world we live in isn’t so kind. Kirito himself is really bland, almost to the point of self-parody. And while that would be enough to make him just kind of “eh,” by protagonist standards what really brings him down to the level of “bad,” is just how inconsistent and idiotic he is. Kirito does a large deal of irrational or downright moronic things throughout the show that are meant to portray him as a complex character. But since they almost always result in people dying, he comes across as very unsympathetic. The inconsistency comes into play when one finds out that Kirito is seen as a “solo player,” by everyone else in the cast. Kirito is constantly referred to as being infamous for playing by himself despite tagging along with another player in every single episode without exception. Even the introductory episode pairs him up with a side character who has absolutely no plot relevance whatsoever by the show’s end (And somehow manages one of the best characters in the show despite this). The idea is that he’s supposed to develop into a more social person despite supposedly being bad with people, but this aspect of his character is barely present at all, even when he’s interacting with the people around him. He has decent conversation skills, he’s good with words, he’s not socially awkward in the least, and he generally comes across as a nice guy. There is technically a reason for why he’s supposed to be a solo player, but it totally falls flat and makes little sense. So not only is Kirito not a solo player, but he has no relatable reason to even want to be one in the first place. To make matters even worse, the message of Kirito becoming more of a team player is totally scrapped in the finale, where Kirito ends up in a one-on-one fight which ends in the most infuriating way possible. And for as interesting as the writers tried to make him, Kirito is just boring. I don’t remember a single thing about him aside from that he likes video games, Asuna, black coats, swords, and saying that he’s a solo player. Furthermore, the fact that he is undisputably the best player in the game removes almost all sense of tension from most of the episodes, since the enemies can barely even scratch him. And when he isn’t showing off what an unstoppable powerhouse he is, Kirito’s actual challenges are always overcome by him doing something that should by all means be impossible for him to do. He’ll either pull out an ability that was barely foreshadowed, or just break the rules of the game altogether with no explanation as to how he did so.

When I realized how long I spent writing about how bad the main character is before even getting to almost everyone else trapped in SAO, it dawned on me just how much Kirito was a true testament to how bad the show's writing is. While Asuna is just kind of a boring, overdone tsundere girl, I at least appreciate how she and Kirito do enter a functional relationship. This only serves to irritate me when I remember that the show tries to have a harem anyway. Speaking of the harem, Silica (Christine Marie Cabanos) and Lizbeth (Sarah Ann Williams), the first two members of Kirito’s not-harem, are so forgettable that talking about them feels like I’m giving the show too much credit. Some of Kirito’s other allies like Agil (Patrick Seitz) and Klein (Kirk Thornton) aren’t amazing, but since they’re at the very least “good,” that automatically elevates them to the position of the best characters in the show. Klein in particular should have been the main character, while Agil should have taken an authoritative position considering that he seems to be one of the only rational adults playing this game. The fact that neither of these things are part of the show depresses me to no end.


However, the entire collective of SAO’s players is a character all its own, one with it’s own story, behavior, and role in the plot. Sadly, it’s the worst character in the show as a result. The other players of the game are constantly alluded to by the main characters throughout the series, and these brief snippets into their thought process details just how asinine they are. The cardinal sin committed here is that everyone is playing Sword Art Online like it’s a normal MMO. Players set up businesses and charge other players money for their wares despite the fact that everyone’s best interest is to cooperate and help each other without hindering each other. The money they charge on those wares is money their customers won’t have to buy items from NPC’s that could save their life later down the line. In addition, while the front lines are off-limits to underleveled players, the idea that those underleveled players, almost all of whom are minors, are allowed to access high-level dungeons in the first place makes no sense. Since experience is hard to farm in SAO due to enemies not respawning quickly, the logical conclusion is to keep players who don’t intend to go to the front lines from doing anything that would keep potential recruits from gaining necessary experience. To this end, the adult players should have formed one organized militia that accepted potential recruits and kept players from going into dungeons above their skill level. The towns in-game are safe zones where the only way for a player to die there is if someone tricks them into accepting a duel to the death, so keeping them there is clearly the best option. Instead, the assault team is made up of various unaffiliated guilds, players are allowed in dungeons that will certainly get them killed, and the money made by players not participating in the boss raids is collected and given to the army through taxes. These taxes should have no way of being enforced since players cannot be killed in safe zones.

On the subject of player killing, the presence of any player killers aside from actual psychopaths makes little sense when one considers that if they were to weigh their options, they’d find that killing other players is an absolutely atrocious idea. Anyone who thought about it for more than a minute would realize that they would either be stuck in the game and nothing they’ve done will have mattered, or they’ll get out of the game, be responsible for killing people, and nothing they’ve done will have mattered. And despite the evidence that there is no good reason for any sane and rational person in SAO to even think that killing other players is a good idea under any circumstance, it plays a large part in several episodes.

On another subject, the fact that lower level players decide to ostracize beta testers in spite of them being the strongest players in the game becomes unbearably stupid when the show flat-out admits that the beta testers were helping the new players for no cost. Kirito’s exacerbation of this prejudice only serves to highlight just how idiotic it was in the first place. It would be hilarious if this was meant to parody how low-level players in video games often complain about more skilled players cheating, but since it's played totally straight in this kind of situation, it's dead on arrival. With all of this in mind, I can only assume that Sword Art Online is being played by the absolute dumbest 10,000 people in Japan if I want this story to make sense. And boy oh boy, this is only the first half of the show.


My biggest fear going into Sword Art Online was without a doubt the infamous second half, which even fans of the show absolutely despise. After getting through Aincrad, Fairy Dance filled me with a sense of dread the likes of which I’ve never experienced when watching a TV show. But alas, I flew towards the sun, and was punished for my arrogance. Be warned that this part of the review does have spoilers in it for part 1, so if you haven’t watched SAO yet you may or may not want to skip these next few paragraphs if you don’t already know how the ALFheim Online arc is set up. Ready? Go.


After Kirito; or as he’s known in reality, Kazuto Kirigaya; has beaten SAO and returned to the real world, he finds that Asuna still appears to be stuck in a comatose state, despite Sword Art Online no longer existing. One day while visiting her in the hospital, an employee of her father’s company drops by, says that he’s basically going to marry Asuna whether she likes it or not, and then says some shady stuff to Kirito. Kirito then finds out that a figure who looks like Asuna has been seen in an online game called ALFheim Online, which is basically just like Sword Art Online except it has magic and flying. Along the way, Kirito runs into a player named Lefea (Cassandra Lee Morris), who helps him on his journey, while trying to bond with his sister Suguha (Cassandra Lee Morris) back in the real world. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Leafa and Suguha are one and the same and Kirito doesn’t know it. This is then compounded by Suguha somehow not realizing that Kirito is her brother Kazuto despite how he looks almost exactly like her brother, sounds exactly like her brother, and acts exactly like her brother. And it’s all downhill from there.


The problems with the ALO arc are so numerous that it gives me a migraine just trying to start thinking about them. Let’s start by tackling the biggest aspect of the story, ALFheim Online itself. The game’s big draw is that a player can join one of several races who are encouraged to attack players from other races for items and money. They can fly for about ten minutes at a time, and unlike SAO, you have to actually know your way around a sword to get by. The races compete to finish the game’s final quest before anyone else does. Whichever race completes this quest will be granted flight without a time limit. Ignoring that permanently destroying the game’s balance would eliminate the need for a race system anyway, it makes no sense that there’s even a conflict at this point in time. Since Kirito’s chosen race, the Spriggans, are usually derided as being weak, it’s clear that there are tiers in this game, which logically means that one faction should have overwhelming numbers that give them a huge advantage over every other race due to players wanting to spec towards the inherently stronger race. It is stated that ALO is a highly competitive game, so if there are imbalances in it someone should have already completed the quest and realized the big twist behind it. This would make the race war component an absolute joke. To make matters worse, it seems like the people playing the game barely have any idea how it functions. Despite the Spriggans supposedly being only skilled at treasure hunting and illusions, Kirito is able to transform himself into a large beast using Spriggan magic that is very clearly not an illusion. Thinking about why he’s the only Spriggan to have ever done this is baffling enough, but he also only uses it during one battle with little to no plot relevance, and it is never explained why no one has used this before. If the Spriggans could use this en masse, killing other players would obviously be a cinch.


The overarching plot is somehow even more awfully put-together than the first. It is revealed at the end of the series that the grand quest that grants eternal flight takes the player to the tree which houses the antagonist's headquarters, and that said headquarters is inaccessible to normal players anyway. There is no reason whatsoever for the antagonist to situate himself here other than for the purpose of giving Kirito a focal point for finding Asuna. If the big bad doesn’t want people in the tree, why does he intentionally make it the focus of the game’s biggest quest? Kirito is able to get the furthest anyone has ever gotten in that quest through sheer numbers and skill and he realizes the truth behind it immediately.



On the subject of player killing, I want to pose a question. Do you know how to take all of the tension out of a show about an MMORPG where people die? It’s by only making that the first half of your show. No one in ALO dies for real when their character is killed, so whenever the show tries to actually play death for drama it just feels like the characters are LARPing in a video game. There is no reason to so heavily avoid death when its consequences aren’t even really fleshed out very well, which can be said of a lot of ALO’s mechanics, aside from flying. And despite so many additional factors, there really doesn't seem to be anything that really differentiates SAO and ALO when you get down to it, so the way in which the show desperately tries to convince the viewers that there is feels incredibly disingenuous.


However, what really broke my suspension of disbelief was the prospect that not only were ALFheim Online and Sword Art Online technically compatible to the point where Kirito is able to keep all of his skills but not his items, but the fact that ALFheim Online was made with Sword Art Online’s source code and put on Sword Art Online’s servers all while the Sword Art Online incident was still going in part 1. Considering that they only got the servers and the source code since the original company that owned them obviously went bankrupt as a result of the incident, it makes no sense as to why anyone would want these servers or want to make a game using SAO’s data. They would obviously face a large deal of public backlash that would prevent them from making any sort of profit. This isn’t even getting into minor infractions like how the randomly generated avatar system is a terrible idea for an MMO and it only serves to give Kirito a hairstyle that his sister wouldn’t recognize (despite being exactly the same as his real self in almost every other way and also despite the fact that no one would want to play an MMO where they cannot customize their character) , the lack of specs on the race selection screen, or the notion that faction leaders need to hold in-person meetings when they can just message each other. By now it’s pretty easy to see just how badly thought out the plot of the ALO arc is, but trust me when I say this is only the beginning.


And then we get to the new characters, and by new characters, I mean Suguha and Sugou (Todd Haberkorn) A.K.A. siscon bait and the villain. Despite an entirely new cast having been introduced, only these two members of said cast actually matter. The rest of them are unimportant and superfluous to a ridiculous degree. On the one hand, Suguha can basically be boiled down to one defining character trait, and that trait is, “Feels guilty about loving her brother/cousin, Kirito.” That is actually it. This is one of the single most tired and stock anime tropes of all time, the sister who loves her brother who isn’t actually his sister and/or isn’t even related by blood, and Kawahara relying on this makes me downright sick. However, the show makes it even worse because of the fact that Kirito already has a love interest in Asuna. So this can’t even really be called a love triangle. We know that Kirito is going to choose Asuna anyway, so Suguha’s interest in him just boils down to pandering to shippers. The purpose behind it is simply to reinforce just how much of a wish-fulfillment character Kirito is for teenage boys. He could have his pick of any of these girls if he wanted to, and since it’s intended for teenage boys to want to be Kirito, this is obviously appealing to them. Suguha is just here for the crowd that thinks that “incest is wincest,” and none of this would matter if Suguha’s character was done well. But the execution is so rushed, boring, and insignificant that the pandering elements of this not-romance are forced into the forefront.


The villain, Sugou, is terrible in the worst way possible. While I am able to enjoy characters who are total scumbags very often, they need to be done carefully, and Sugou, or as he likes to be called “King Oberon,” is a grim reminder of that. He’s an evil genius who rerouted SAO’s servers and managed to store the consciousness of 300 players in ALO in order to run brainwashing experiments. He has no explained motivation for this. Aside from that, his only other goal is having his way with Asuna, which is played up as being far more egregious than the whole brainwashing thing, and serves only as an excuse to make the audience hate him. Here, Sugou wanting to posses Asuna is clearly creepy and unethical, but the brainwashing aspect of it barely factors into how we perceive him as a villain. It’s not even really explained why he’s so obsessed with Asuna or why he has such a huge God complex. His evil plan takes such a large backseat that I have trouble remembering if Kirito ever found out about it. All of these factors put together make it impossible for me to enjoy Sugou in any respect. If I were to talk any more about the new cast members, I could only refer to them in the basest of terms. They would be Suguha’s clingy friend, the two leaders of different factions who both have the hots for Kirito as well, and the guy Kirito fights in episode 20. Since that’s about all the character I can ascribe to them, we should move on.


We now find ourselves look at the returning cast, and there are still a wide array of problems with all two of them. For one, Kirito is still far too overpowered. Despite ALO working on an entirely different set of rules, and only having the weak starting gear, Kirito is able to defeat three serious ALO players as soon as he starts playing the game with very little effort. Kirito then proceeds to absolutely destroy almost everyone else he comes across for the rest of the show. It just goes to show that Kirito could have gone through the entire game with his kit from SAO and nothing would have changed at all. There isn’t even the excuse that it would give him a reason to constantly dual wield because he had lost one of his swords in SAO. And speaking of dual wielding, despite the show explicitly telling the audience that dual wielding is the only skill that Kirito cannot use in ALO, he does it anyway later. But none of this compares to the finale, where Kirito once again pulls out yet another Deus ex Machina that may actually be worse than the one from the first half's finale. Furthermore, the seven day time limit Kirito has before the dirtbag who wants Asuna becomes a part of her family is never brought up after its initial establishment, almost as if he just forgot about it. This is made worse by Kirito’s constant detours and messing around doing things that don’t matter. Just telling everyone that something is going on that has real life consequences would probably get them to drop what they’re doing and help him. And if he thinks no one would believe him then he should just make a beeline for the world tree. But no, we have to fight these guys because they’re going to start a war that won’t matter because everyone is playing a video game. The only parts I liked with Kirito was where he was interacting with his adopted daughter, Yui (Stephanie Sheh), who is the only character in the show who I unequivocally like, but they're so few and far between that they might as well not matter.


Asuna on the other hand is majorly sidelined, turned into a damsel in distress who does only one useful thing and spends the rest of her time as a device to show us how evil the bad guy is. She gets whatever personality she once had drained out of her, and spends most of her time sitting around in a cage before escaping, only to get caught and put in the cage again. This in turn gives way to an absolutely insulting scene where she is groped by people working for Sugou who have tentacle slug avatars for no reason other than to grope her in a specific way. The notion that anyone would knowingly make these their avatars is bad enough, but since the scene in which Asuna is groped is clearly meant to be titillating despite how unnerving it is in context, I actually needed to take a break from watching the show. So yeah, that about sums up how utterly depraved this show's writing is when all's said and done. Let’s just get this over with.


All of this ranting may make it seem like SAO is devoid of almost anything of value. But lo and behold there are some good things about it. As I’ve previously mentioned, Kirito and Asuna’s functioning relationship is a refreshing change from the normal “will-they-or-won’t-they?” plot that shows like this usually take. The episodes where the two are just bonding together easily make up the best episodes in this show since they actually give the two a fair bit of characterization. I want to give props to the story that takes place right after they get married where they end up taking care Yui together for being surprisingly heartfelt. It produced the only episodes of this forlorn trainwreck that I unironically liked. Also, some of the occasional video game touches made the worlds of SAO and ALO seem more like the fully realized games I felt they should have been. Moments like Kirito’s first flight in ALFheim Online being given a distinct music track, which mirrors how many RPGs do the same thing, made for a genuinely nice scene, and when Kirito has to delete his items at the beginning of ALO, it feels brutally realistic and resonates with my gamer side. Unfortunately those moments are few and far between, and the only other parts of the show I enjoyed were Kirito’s other friends, Klein and Agil.


Now, in terms of animation and sound, SAO is nothing to write home about. The action scenes are decently animated but definitely not worth the slog one must go through to get to them, and their reused animation frames are incredibly distracting. I usually hear a lot of praise being tossed at them, but the way I see it the fight scenes just have a lot of flair and very little weight. Even though the animation in a show like Baccano! may be very rough, the show itself makes up for this by having each action taken in their fight scenes matter. SAO’s fights are just boring and unmemorable. The normal animation in the scenes where people are just hanging around and talking is fine and the character designs are appealing, but the art style itself is just kind of generic. While the soundtrack is provided by acclaimed composer Yuki Kajiura, known for her work on Fate/Zero and Madoka Magica, I barely remember any music from the show except for some obnoxious chanting that plays over 95% of all of the show’s fight scenes. And though the opening and ending themes sound decent enough, they’re not very entertaining from a visual standpoint. In terms of the performances given, most of them are just kind of okay. Bryce Papenbrook and Cherami Leigh do fine in their given roles, as do all the other cast members, but believe me when I say that no actor stands out in this show at all. The one who comes closest is Stephanie Sheh as Yui, Kirito and Asuna’s adopted daughter, especially in ALO, where she’s practically the only decent thing about it. However, Sheh still has to contend with her character being part of an awful script. I don’t blame these actors at all since the workable material is practically non-existent, but it still stings that such proficient actors have their talents squandered on such a bad show.


By the end of the series, my notes had devolved from detailed criticisms into incoherent bursts of expletives and insults. Knowing that such incoherent rambling came from my thought process worries me, but it also serves to remind me of how much I hated watching Sword Art Online. Everything about the show fails at the most basic of levels, mashing a great concept with terrible storytelling, atrocious characters, and only half-decent animation and music. When I remember that Baccano! has struggled to find an audience and that a lot of Sword Art Online fans that I talked to watched the show simply because they found the concept intriguing, it just reaffirms the idea in my mind that all one really needs to make something popular is a great concept. With that said, if you were planning on watching this show, watch Log Horizon instead. I haven’t seen it, and the author was arrested for tax evasion, but I still feel more comfortable giving his property more exposure than Sword Art Online simply out of principle. The only good thing to come out of this show’s existence is Sword Art Online: Abridged, the Youtube parody of the show made by Something Witty Entertainment. Otherwise, I will always keep my memories of watching Sword Art Online in the darkest depths in my mind in a folder labeled, “A show about an MMORPG written by someone who clearly knows nothing about MMORPG’s.” And the absolute worst part about all of this? I’ve effectively trapped myself in a cycle which predicates that I’m watching the second season, the movie, and any seasons to come. The ride never ends, and I wish to high heaven that it did.


Final Verdict: 1/10
Don’t believe the hype