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REVIEW: Sword Art Online episodes 1-7

The very first episode showed that the villain announced his plan on the news. It's widely known. The problem is that there's no easy solution to the problem because it's a hostage situation where the kidnapper can easily kill all 10,000 hostages. Hostage situations have been known to go on for years in some cases, so that part isn't particularly implausible. Although if you're a computer security expert or a real life hostage negotiator I'm sure you could find some holes in it.

This show wants viewers to take it seriously by trying to make a MMO with"death" as the hook, yet these time skips quickly diminish the possibility of the deaths being real. If the author is intelligent and is doing what I think he is doing thanspoiler[ this is all just a sick plan to achieve some social experiment through the use of a "time moving x times faster gimmick with no actual deaths"] which would make sense given how much time he skipped and the number of people that died.

Fencedude5609 wrote:

ChibiKangaroo wrote: The problem is, I haven't seen anything from him yet which justifies this conclusion. Why is he still pretty good? Because he can save some cute girls in distress? Because he is uber powerful and looks cool in a black outfit? I just haven't seen anything from him to justify him being a good protagonist. In fact, he seems almost like he's really just a recurring character at this point and not the real protagonist. What do you want from him, precisely? Especially considering that we're only a third of the way through the series.

To answer your question, that is why I gave those examples of good character development, so that I wasn't just kvetching about the show without explaining what would make it better. How about some kind of backstory to Kirito which explains why he's a loner? How about some scenes where he is having flashbacks about his 'little sister' and remembering times where he saved her from a bully or something, or where they worked together on a game, or something showing their strong connection. How about showing him struggling under some kind of harsh circumstances in the real world before he joined SAO, to build the audience sympathy for him? How about giving him some more consistent personality traits/quirks? (For example, Natsu Dragneel from Fairy Tail or Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece) This kind of stuff would help a little...

ChibiKangaroo wrote:

Fencedude5609 wrote: ChibiKangaroo wrote: The problem is, I haven't seen anything from him yet which justifies this conclusion. Why is he still pretty good? Because he can save some cute girls in distress? Because he is uber powerful and looks cool in a black outfit? I just haven't seen anything from him to justify him being a good protagonist. In fact, he seems almost like he's really just a recurring character at this point and not the real protagonist. What do you want from him, precisely? Especially considering that we're only a third of the way through the series. To answer your question, that is why I gave those examples of good character development, so that I wasn't just kvetching about the show without explaining what would make it better. How about some kind of backstory to Kirito which explains why he's a loner? How about some scenes where he is having flashbacks about his 'little sister' and remembering times where he saved her from a bully or something, or where they worked together on a game, or something showing their strong connection. How about showing him struggling under some kind of harsh circumstances in the real world before he joined SAO, to build the audience sympathy for him? How about giving him some more consistent personality traits/quirks? (For example, Natsu Dragneel from Fairy Tail or Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece) This kind of stuff would help a little...

Hmmm... Kirito's backstory... Why is he a loner... Try these on for size:

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Episode 1: "To be honest, during the beta test, SAO was all I thought about, day and night. In this world, a single blade can take you anywhere you want to go. It's a virtual world, but I still feel more alive here than I do in the real one."

Then, after the game is explained, he offers to guide Klein to the next town, since he knows the dangerous spots, he figures he can get there safely, even at level 1. When Klein wants to wait for his buddies, Kirito calculates that, at level 1, with that many newbies to protect, it would be too dangerous and someone could get hurt, so he declines to take all of them.

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So, when he bata tested the game, he got really into it and it felt more real than his life. that suggests a lot about him as a person. He probably doesn't have a lot of close friends and may be a loner by nature or by lack of social skills. He is also worried right from the start about his actions causing other people to get hurt. He knows that his advanced knowledge of the game can lead to situations where he can handle the danger, but other, less experienced players can't.

Then in Episode 2, we find out about the general bias against the bata testers, and particularly the ones that were successful, the "Beaters". He still demonstrates a great desire to help people, in that he joins the group going after the boss and teaches Asuna about the game and parties up with her for the boss battle. We also find out that, in the beta test, he had a reputation as a "sniper" of sorts. Someone that worked himself into position to get the last hit on the boss so he would be the one to earn the special item that came from defeating him. The other beta tester knows this and is concerned about his character because of that.

Then episode 3 shows him joining a guild with a group of people he becomes friends with. Because of the bias against beaters, he hides his true level of ability from them. When they all die because they walk into a trap that he is able to defeat, but not save his friends, it cements his loner status. Joining a guild means putting lower ranked players in danger. The show doesn't say this explicitly, but I expect that the trap they walked into was so tough because the game reacts to the overall level of the party and presents a challenge based on the overall skill level of the characters present. Since the other reasonably high level player wasn't there, the level of the challenge was such that it was one that he could defeat single-handedly, but his level skewed the difficulty high enough that it was beyond the other players ability to survive until he killed all the monsters. If he joins with others, he fears that this will happen again.

Sounds like an explanation for why he is a loner.

Then in episode 4 he helps Silica, partially because she looks like his little "sister". (She is really a cousin or something...) It doesn't explain about their relationship, but the fact that mere appearance is enough to spark the desire to help her suggests that they are relatively close and that he misses her. Not a ton of backstory about him and his sister, but it is there.

zensunni, that still doesn't at all explain why he's a loner.

Veers wrote:

zensunni, that still doesn't at all explain why he's a loner.

...because he is? We don't need to know "why" we just need to know that he is, and have him consistently portrayed that way.

]Except, as dtm42 mentioned, the time lapse makes your theory the more implausible. You're asking us to believe that the game could go on for so long after the lack of consequences got out; shouting "it could go faster than that!" has a limit and I doubt the human brain can handle even the 1000x dtm42 used. Accepting the presented scenario, on the other hand, only requires believing in instant-kill microwave emitters and the guy thoroughly testing the lethal codepaths.