Sword Art Online II

Episode 21

There's always a disconnect in reviewing Sword Art Online. As a fan of storytelling in general, Kirito's absurd power flies in the face of basically everything I know about dramatic structure. But as a reviewer of Sword Art Online, I'm well aware that Kirito being awesome is one of the central appeals of the show I am critiquing. This episode only started with a Kirito-being-awesome sequence, but that sequence was very reflective of my thoughts on the whole. Though this episode of Sword Art Online was solidly produced, it was also extremely reflective of everything that makes SAO a critic's kryptonite.

We started this week with the aforementioned Kirito power-montage. I enjoyed the animation of Kirito applying his GGO bullet-dance to Alfheim, but when the show's spouting off lines like “Even you can't fight this many people at once, right?” “I don't know. I've never tried.”, it's more than a little hard to take it seriously. That trend continued in the next big fight sequence, where Asuna, Yuuki, and the Sleeping Knights took on the twenty players between them and the boss room. This scene's first exchanges made me a little worried that this would be another “our heroes attack enemies who just stand there and take it” fight scene, but fortunately Yuuki ended up stealing the show. There was a wonderful sequence of cuts of her bouncing between enemies, laughing as she flew from one exchange to the next. There's a great rhythm and beauty to her fighting style - she makes combat looks more like a dance than a battle, and that was strongly conveyed through the animation. There was a bit of a stutter to the fights that made me feel they were sometimes lacking in fluidity, but the dynamic key frames kept the motion of the characters parsable and engaging.

And then Asuna performed a flying dash through the entire group, blowing enemies away with the force of her speed before slaying all the healers at once. As I said, sometimes it's kind of hard to take this show seriously.

From there, the characters moved into the actual raid fight, which was again a fairly solid action setpiece. It's a strange thing to be reviewing this show and Log Horizon at the same time, as their approaches to conflict could not be more different. Where Log Horizon takes great pains to make sure the audience can parse raid conflict as a series of actual intelligent decisions, Sword Art Online relies entirely on its animation highlights and your attachment to the characters. In the context of SAO's prior fight sequences, even the addition of “the jewel is its weakpoint!” added a new level of tactics - that's not much focus, but between that and the overall solid animation, this fight still resolved reasonably well.

The last act of this episode was significantly more shaky, and reflective of one of SAO's other consistent problems - its serious difficulties handling emotional drama. I mentioned last week that Sword Art Online is generally at its best when it's simply trying to offer fun adventures, and this week's last scenes offered a strong example of why. The entire episode, and this arc overall, has been constantly hanging the guillotine over Yuuki's head, with lines like “once this battle is over, tell me about yourself” basically screaming that Yuuki is not long for this world. The last sequence of this episode was the first where the show tried to actually convert that threat into emotional resonance - but the problem is, we don't actually know Yuuki. We've seen about ten minutes of her character, and we know she's carefree and a good fighter, but pretty much the only thing we've learned about her personally is the tonally-obvious fact that there's some tragedy waiting in her future. And SAO trying so obviously to evoke sympathy through these heavy-handed emotional cues actually generates the opposite effect - if I feel like the show's trying to “cheat” and manipulate my emotions without earning my emotional investment, I'm even less likely to care about the fate of its characters. GGO was actually very good about earning its emotional payoffs by fully articulating its characters, so it's unfortunate to see Mother's Rosario stepping back into the Old Ways. I'm hoping this arc manages to earn my sympathy and end with the dramatic catharsis it's seeking, but given SAO's very checkered history, I can't say I'm optimistic.

Rating: B-

Sword Art Online II is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.