Sword Art Online, the best first season that then ruins itself
A show about people trapped inside an MMO, where dying in the game means dying for real. The opening arc hooked me like an old WoW raid. Then it swapped the whole world out for fairies.
Spoilers ahead.
I started watching Sword Art Online during its first season, as it was airing, and the opening stretch felt like the best thing that had ever happened. Then, almost immediately after, it takes a massive nosedive. I’ll be honest up front: I don’t remember the back half in much detail, mostly because I checked out once it changed into a completely different show.
The premise that hooked me
Thousands of players log into a brand-new virtual reality MMO called Sword Art Online, and then the creator pulls the rug out: nobody can log out. The only way to leave is to clear all hundred floors of a giant floating castle called Aincrad. And if you die in the game, you die in real life. So everyone is suddenly stuck inside the thing they signed up to play for fun, and now it’s life or death.
That setup is exactly why I loved it. It tracks so closely to World of Warcraft: the floors, the grinding, the boss fights, the guilds, players slowly leveling up and getting better gear, the whole social world that springs up inside a game. Except here the stakes are real, and these people are genuinely sucked into their situation with no way out. The main character, Kirito, is a solo player who’d rather go it alone, and watching him work his way up floor by floor scratched the exact same itch raiding used to.
What I loved
The combat. The combat is great. The character growth is great. And I loved that the characters have a real purpose driving them, which is just to survive and to free everyone trapped in there with them. Kirito teams up with Asuna, the female lead, and their partnership turning into something real is the heart of the early show. There’s weight to it, because any fight could be the last one. That first arc, the trapped-in-Aincrad arc, is genuinely fantastic television.
Then everybody turns into a butterfly
And then it just falls apart. The Aincrad story wraps up, and instead of ending there, the show resets into an entirely new game world. Suddenly it’s all wings and fairies, everybody fluttering around like butterflies, and the tone goes from this tense, macho survival story to something I could not take seriously at all. It’s so weird. (For the record, that second world is a fairy-themed game called ALfheim Online, which is why everyone sprouts wings.) The thing that made the first arc work, the no-escape, die-here-and-you-die-for-real pressure, is just gone, and it never gets it back.
That’s the whole shape of my experience with it: a near-perfect opening, and then a show that took a great premise and immediately squandered it. I’d tell anyone to watch that first arc and feel completely free to stop right there.