Shockingly, the rest of the cast is even worse. His only flaw is that he sometimes worries about not being flawed enough. To Kirito, all games are single-player, and no problem in this universe gets solved without his intervention. At the tender age of 14, Kirito is 1) a Kendo expert 2) a genius computer hacker, and 3) the greatest, fastest video gamer to ever video game. Kirito, the protagonist, is a Mary Sue to end all Mary Sues, a perfect paragon of author-insert wish fulfilment fantasy beyond reproach. For the life of me though, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to see more of these characters. This thin plot basically exists to propagate fan service and allow popular characters from later arcs to bounce off each other. The trouble with this is that, canonically, Gun Gale didn’t exist before Kirito obtained The Seed from the digital remnant of Kayaba Akihiko, so Sinon wouldn’t exist yet and oh god, why do I know this and not calculus? Someone please kill me. See, the glitch also brings Kirito’s sister Suguha and his future gunkata teacher Shino into the game, dressed as their respective avatars from different games in later parts of the series (Alfheim Online and Gun Gale Online respectively). That might seem like gibberish to you if you haven’t seen the first half of the anime, but don’t worry, it makes even less sense if you know anything about SAO. With nothing else to do, they decide to clear the next 25 floors of the game and seek the exit, but along the way they’re beset by further glitches and become aware of a strange conspiracy. Sword Art Online Hollow Fragment takes place in an alternate version of the SAO universe where Kirito defeats Heathcliff without dying and a subsequent glitch prevents the game’s players from logging out. Yet somehow, despite being irredeemably awful, the show is strangely watchable (part of that may owe to the excellent animation and direction by superstar Sony division A-1 Pictures). Initially, SAO differentiated itself with a dark pseudo-horror aesthetic, but that was quickly pushed to the wayside in favor of harem anime nonsense and tentacle rape.
SAO’s basic premise – people getting trapped in an MMO – is so clichéd that Bandai Namco (publisher of the licensed game we’re talking about today) has made use of it in two different games (If you want to see the concept done right, check out Log Horizon). Say what you will about Attack on Titan, but at least that show has a personality. Of all the anime to attain mass popularity in the last few years, Sword Art Online is probably the worst.
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