Sword Art Online

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This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

Warning: Weeaboo shit ahead

Sword Art Online is a Japanese media franchise about a guy named Kirito and his adventures in VRMMOs. It is known far and wide for not being well understood, and being EXTREMELY Skubby for many reasons (real or otherwise). The series has quite a lot of problems and is pretty mediocre, all thing considered.

Background

SAO was originally written as a series of web novels by Reki Kawahara in 2002, just shy of .Hack//song's release date in 2003. This is rather ironic considering people often accuse SAO of ripping .Hack off. Kawahara based the "game" of SAO on the MMOs he played at the time, so ones like Runescape, Ultima Online and the like. As such the game shares many things in common with them like a skill based system that improves with usage, no classes lots of grinding. An anime was released in 2012.

Synopsis

Kazuto Kirigiya, known on the web as Kirito, gets his hands on the newest game system, the Nerve Gear, and its launch title, Sword Art Online, for which Kirito was a beta tester. Shortly after launching the game and watching some typical MMO shit play out (as well as teaching some basic game mechanics to the Yamcha of the cast) everyone gets teleported to the 1st level town square where SAO's creator shows up and gives us the plot - everyone is now a hostage in the game and if they die in the game they die in real life as the Nerve Gear fries their brains like a microwave. Oh, and the only way to escape is to beat the game.

A month or so later, everyone is mad at the beta testers, since they believe them to have an unfair advantage and call them "Beaters" for some stupid reason. Eventually some people get to the first floor boss and get wrecked, as it turns out the boss doesn't use the same weapon he used in the beta version. Kirito defeats the boss with the help of Asuna (his eventual love interest) and Kirito gets a badass coat from the boss, revealing himself as a Beater. He then tells everyone that the other beta testers were scrubs and most of them died already. This gets him a lot of hate which Kirito sees as being good for him since everyone will leave him alone.

Later still, Kirito comes across a small guild called The Moonlit Black Cats, joins them, but hides his level. Everything is fine until most of the members are killed by a trap in a high level dungeon. This seemingly gives Kirito a mental breakdown which somehow gets better on Christmas when he gets timed mail sent to him by one of his dead teammates basically saying they kinda guessed she was going to die anyway.

Kirito then starts rising through levels hyper fast since he solo grinds high level encounters, but he eventually joins Asuna's guild, Knights of the Blood, but almost gets killed by Asuna's bodyguard after Kirito beat the shit out of him for being a creep.

Finally after a lot of shitty filler, two things are discovered - Kirito can dual wield swords (something only the player with the highest reaction speed can have for some dumb reason) and that the leader of Knights of the Blood, Heathcliff, is actually the creator of the game, Kiyaba Akihiko. He and Kirito fight, Asuna sacrifices herself and Kirito is almost killed but has an epic main character moment where he kills Kiyaba. Before his avatar shatters, Kiyaba takes Kirito to the top of SAO's tower where he also transported Asuna to and they have a pointless chat about nothing important as SAO is completed and everyone wakes up in real life. However, 300 people (including Asuna) are still trapped in the game by some creepy fucker who is getting adopted by Asuna's parents so he can inherit the company (this is actually a lot more common in Japan then you'd think).

Said creepy fucker is trying to develop mind control technology to sell to foreign militaries and is using the 300 people trapped in the game still as guinea pigs for his mind control tech. He also wants to use the mind control technology to make Asuna his submissive wife and this obviously doesn't fly with Kirito so he invades the new VRMMO the creepy fucker is running, Alfheim Online, along with his cousin-sister, who wants to be a lot more then just cousins. We then learn that Kirito was actually adopted by his uncle and aunt when he was young as his parents died, but he found out the truth when he was very young so his only way to cope was to play MMOs which gives us an explanation for his attitude towards working with others. Eventually he beats creepy fucker, once in the game using admin powers as Alfheim was built using the same engine that powered SAO, allowing Kirito to use Kiyaba's admin powers, then once again in real life after creepy fucker confronts him in a parking lot and fails his stealth roll to backstab. After all that, Kiyaba's ghost or some shit comes in and gives Kirito SAO's source code allowing a new generation of VRMMOs to be made, all open-sourced. The season ends with Kirito and his harem and friends watching as all of the new VRMMOs come online, apparently linked together, and they rush towards the Sword Art Online servers to play on them again, this time without the risk of getting mind-fried because they all have PTSD and want to relive that horror apparently.

Shit That Doesn't Make Sense

• Kirito more-or-less allows the Moonlit Black Cats to die because he didn't want to expose his level
• The ending of the Aincrad arc is extremely confusing without rewatching it a few times, as to the average viewer it looks as if Kirito resurrects himself
• There is an emotional support AI named Yui who shows up in some filler and doesn't show up again until the start of the Alfheim arc, when she could have been used to great effect at the end of the Aincrad arc
• There's quite a bit of filler. Truth be told at least most of the filler introduces characters and concepts used later on, but some of it is just outright awful and serves no purpose
• Kirito, for some reason, gets a harem of girls. Honestly the harem is entirely pointless anyway as none of them are even given consideration as actual competition for Asuna

Shit That Makes Sense, But People Are Too Dumb To Pay Attention

• There's a fight on a bridge that has Kirito just power through the attacks of 5 different players. This is often pointed to as proof Kirito is an OP Mary Sue, but remember that Kirito is around level 80 and is fighting guys level 25 - 30 Frankly, Kirito's Battle Healing skill sucks ass since it only heals a 28th of his health every 10 seconds, but apparently people didn't listen as this point is dragged around the internet more times than Hector was around the walls of Troy
• In the Aincrad finale, Kayaba explains his motive but people act as if he really forgot his reason for making Aincrad because of a single out-of-context line which probably just meant something like "I've been playing the role of Heathcliff so long, I forgot where it all began". In reality, he explains right after that he made Aincrad because wanted to create a world that exceeded the limits of reality (ie: an escapist fantasy born from his dissatisfaction with real life)
• In the Alfheim arc, there is a scene where Kirito uses illusion magic to make himself look like a giant monster. This is of course only an illusion, with one of the guys in the ambush party that attacked him even telling them it's an illusion, but people still act like this scene paints Kirito as even more OP

Where'd This Come From Anyway?

One day a mildly popular YouTuber named Digibro made a video criticizing SAO. Despite the video being utter shit in almost every way, with a million different problems with his analysis, (with Digibro himself even admitting the video was bad), people clung to the video and eventually other people started making their own shitty analysis videos, with many of the same problems as did Digibro's video, giving SAO a sullied reputation it honestly doesn't deserve

Relevance to /tg/

While the series as a whole leans more towards /a/ and /v/, plenty of people on /tg/ are massive weebs and the series has spawned a whole slew of homebrew systems and hacks of existing games (typically D&D) to try and let people play in the world that was established from the web novels and anime.

There is a board game as well but seems to have mostly middling reviews.