A Strong Second Act Can't Save Sword Art Online II

roseofbattle

News Room Contributor
Apr 18, 2011
2,306
0
0
A Strong Second Act Can't Save Sword Art Online II

Welcome to Sword Art Online II: the show where everyone loves Kirito and nothing matters.

Read Full Article
 

circularlogic88

Knower of Nothing
Oct 9, 2010
292
0
0
I'm glad I jumped ship after the Alfhiem tentacle molestation scene. The villain at the second half of the first season was cartoonishly evil and they nerfed one of the most powerful and badass characters and made her into a damsel that gets molested both in the game world and implied in the real world in her hospital bed. The writer of this series is messed up.
 

AzrealMaximillion

New member
Jan 20, 2010
3,216
0
0
The first 9 or so episodes of this show really had promise. Then is just became a weird, sappy love story that removed many aspects of the world being a video game out of the narrative. Very disappointing.
 

Worgen

Follower of the Glorious Sun Butt.
Legacy
Apr 1, 2009
14,419
3,397
118
Gender
Whatever, just wash your hands.
I don't get why people like this series, I didn't enjoy it much when I saw it, it totaly wasted its mmo setting. Log horizon does everything better.

If you want to watch a good teardown of this series then check this out.

 

Aiddon_v1legacy

New member
Nov 19, 2009
3,672
0
0
circularlogic88 said:
I'm glad I jumped ship after the Alfhiem tentacle molestation scene. The villain at the second half of the first season was cartoonishly evil and they berfed one of the most powerful and badass characters and made her into a damsel that gets molested both in the game world and implied in the real world in her hospital bed. The writer of this series is messed up.
More like he's just lazy; rape is usually just the result of a lazy writer not being able to find another way to make a protagonist heroic or an antagonist villainous.

P-89 Scorpion said:
Free advice watch Log Horizon instead.
Or .hack//SIGN
 

WouldYouKindly

New member
Apr 17, 2011
1,431
0
0
Ok, disregarding anything about the show that I've never watched and have no plans to watch, I wish the shows I liked could afford half of the animating budget that obviously went into this one.
 

wooty

Vi Britannia
Aug 1, 2009
4,252
0
0
I stopped watching this show once I discovered Log Horizon. Better characters, better premise, MUCH better opening music!
 

Alexander Kirby

New member
Mar 29, 2011
204
0
0
Honestly I didn't like any of the arcs of this season:

Gun Gale had some cool concepts but most of it just annoyed me (why did he look like a girl? Why is he ignoring Asuna? Does he realise he's leading on all the girls?) The main villain started off interesting but when it became another Kirito saves the day from rapist it lost me.

What was up with that mid-season thing? It might as well have been called Kirito and Friends: Light-Hearted Adventures in Alfheim

Apparently lots of people like the Rosario arc. More power to them, but personally I laughed when Yukki died I just thought it was so cheesy. In fairness the high point of the season was when it just about grazed the surface of how being trapped in a life or death situation for 2+ years would have an effect on you and your personal relationships, but it seemed to drop it as quickly as it picked it up. I also thought Yukki was pretty 1-dimensional as well; she didn't seem to have any opinions or thoughts of her own, she was just nice and nothing else. Like the female equivalent of a "nice-guy". Being nice is all well and good but it doesn't make for an interesting person on its own.

I don't even know why I still watch it all it does is annoy me. I'm weird.
 

Crimson_Dragoon

Biologist Supreme
Jul 29, 2009
795
0
0
Flaws and all, I've always had a soft spot for this series. I didn't even hate the second half of the first season, even though I was supposed to. And yeah, the rape scene this season was awful, but the worst episode of anime? It wasn't even the worst anime rape scene this year .

That honor goes to Love Stage, a "rom-com" from the summer. This one feature one of our romantic leads attempting to rape the other three episodes in. Then all is forgiven and forgotten and we're expected to root for these two to get together. After that, SAO's scene didn't have the same impact to me.
 

KYoukai

New member
Dec 2, 2010
7
0
0
From what I've been reading on some SAO forums, fans of the manga are clamoring for a third season because the arcs that will be covered are considered the strongest of the entire series; so a third season could offer redemption from the "meh"-ness of this one. Here's hoping.
 

Quellist

Migratory coconut
Oct 7, 2010
1,443
0
0
Men, I gave up on season 1 halfway through the first Arc and this doesn't make me want to come back.

IMO they've been telling the wrong story from the start...I'd like to have seen a real world side with the investigation into the kids trapped in the game and a hunt for the guy behind it. I mean ok, it would have turned SAO into something more like Psycho Pass but that would have been no bad thing...
 

rbstewart7263

New member
Nov 2, 2010
1,246
0
0
I liked gun gale alright but when it started turning into "kirito got the best dick we luvs him!" kind of harem bs I couldnt stand it.

From reading this review it sounds like they are just responding to criticism's and trying to fix things here and there. Oh the womens have no agency you say? how bout we tack this on towards the end here. utter nonsense.
 

laggyteabag

Scrolling through forums, instead of playing games
Legacy
Oct 25, 2009
3,301
982
118
UK
Gender
He/Him
I watched all of SAO and I watched all of the first act of SAO2, but then I just kinda lost interest. The first arc of SAO was something that I really, really enjoyed as a premise, but I felt that it was really let down by the constant time jumps, and the fact that it was so short of an arc. It never really made much sense to me that the game that the show is named after only gets one half of a series. What I feel really needed to happen was for Arc 1 to span a whole season to allow for more character development and so that we could really get a feeling for the world of SAO, but instead they decided to cut it off and jump straight into the much less interesting fairy world in which Kirito's companion's only memorable trait was that she was secretly his sister/cousin and she had massive boobs. and they made Asuna, Kirito's girlfriend and companion from Arc 1, into a damsel in distress and they stripped her of all of her power.

SAO2 had a good start, and I was really starting to like the character of Sinon, but for whatever reason, the person who started out as a strong female supporting character soon devolved into yet another helpless character that had to depend on Kirito whenever they were together, and could hardly do anything for the latter half of the arc. What I did like was how it tied into Sword Art Online, or at least tried to, but I wish that the antagonist of this arc had actually been in SAO instead of just making him up during SAO2 and then showing a flashback of Kirito meeting him. I then watched Kirito get Excalibur in magical fairy world (AKA Act 2), and then I just stopped watching it.

I have no real need for a strong female character, but you don't build them up as strong characters only to have them stripped of it because Kirito is there (in the case of Sinon) or isn't there (in the case of Asuna). It just seems like they are backtracking on the original design on the characters just to create some form of forced drama.
 

Mumbly

New member
Dec 26, 2014
40
0
0
What I do like about SAO is how it's not forcing a harem anime, and there's no "romantic rivalry" except for Lisbeth blue-screening that one time, and Sinon teasing Kirito about it. Other than that, they're all friends, and they all have their own life, and the plot isn't forced into submission by trying to balance who Kirito likes today. I mean, okay, the ladies fall for Kirito rather blatantly at times, but they seem to get over it rather quickly.

Also I like how the official couple seem to have a rather natural relationship going, and have their own lives outside it, and trust each other to make their own decisions.

So on that note at least, the series is rather refreshing.
 

circularlogic88

Knower of Nothing
Oct 9, 2010
292
0
0
KYoukai said:
From what I've been reading on some SAO forums, fans of the manga are clamoring for a third season because the arcs that will be covered are considered the strongest of the entire series; so a third season could offer redemption from the "meh"-ness of this one. Here's hoping.
It's the same argument of when people were telling me that FF13 gets good and opens up 20 hours in. Why put up with mediocrity and frustration of the characters, story and setting for so long just to get to the good bits? Why not start off with the good bits and keep everything good thoughout?

More power to you if you want to see this thing get a third season. I just don't see any logic behind how this world works past the original first arc. Like, wouldn't a device that jacks into your brain and has the capacity to microwave it be instabanned? Or at the very least have a moratorium on such devices? How does such a device get put to market to begin with? Someone down the line had to have known the dangers a VR device such as this posed to its users.

Iunno, SOA gives me the creeps. It presents itself as typical shonen and then just takes really dark detours into subjects that its writer doesn't seem to understand how to handle narratively well at all.

Mumbly said:
What I do like about SAO is how it's not forcing a harem anime, and there's no "romantic rivalry" except for Lisbeth blue-screening that one time, and Sinon teasing Kirito about it. Other than that, they're all friends, and they all have their own life, and the plot isn't forced into submission by trying to balance who Kirito likes today. I mean, okay, the ladies fall for Kirito rather blatantly at times, but they seem to get over it rather quickly.

Also I like how the official couple seem to have a rather natural relationship going, and have their own lives outside it, and trust each other to make their own decisions.

So on that note at least, the series is rather refreshing.
How can you say it's not forcing a harem when pretty much every girl Kirito came across in the first season looked at him with admiration and lust? His not-quite-sister even shows an unhealthy obsession with him in the second half of season 1, with heavy implications that she's been fantasizing about being with him in a romantic way. It's one step removed from brother/sister incest.
 

Seracen

New member
Sep 20, 2009
645
0
0
In the books, both halves of season 2 were actually pretty good. I was always wary of how they'd make it work in animated form though. My solution would have been running both arcs simultaneously, and jumping back and forth (modifying the story a bit to fit). The pacing was also poor in this second season of the anime.

I don't understand why people somehow magically thought SWO sucked once Log Horizon came out. I didn't care enough about the central plot of Log Horizon (ie: it didn't have much of one) until the end of the first season. To be fair, I will totally look forward to marathoning the whole show once season 2 is done (assuming they resolve the series).

As for SWO, I am just hoping they have enough momentum to animate the next story arc, which was a very compelling read (shades of Escaflowne)!
 

hentropy

New member
Feb 25, 2012
737
0
0
I watched SAO on Adult Swim when it came out. I never watched it before because I didn't think it was a very new or interesting idea, and I could already predict some aspects and story ideas based solely on the promotional material. When I did see it on Adult Swim, it was just meh, I didn't see what others saw in the first half of the season as being so awesome and second half actually made me angry in a variety of ways.

I watched the first few episodes of the second season just to see which direction it was going in and it only disillusioned me more. It saddens me to hear that it went even more over the top and rapey with Sinon, who I thought was a pretty solid character. Maybe I'll look at the Mother's Rosario arc, but the big twist in that arc was already given to me so I'm not sure how much I'll enjoy it, considering how poorly the series deals with emotional topics. I know anime in general isn't known for its emotional subtlety, but SAO seems to be considerably worse and juvenile compared to most other dramas.
 

nodlimax

New member
Feb 8, 2012
191
0
0
I was very disappointed in SAO as well. The first episode in season 1 showed so much promise and then they rushed through the world like nothing. And they turned it into a Harem. I actually like good Harem anime as well (Highschool DxD for example has good story and I also like Trinity Seven) but I expected a different direction from SAO.

I was already disappointed in the mid season final of S1 but kept watching in the hope of it getting better, but it turned out meh....

Same happened with season 2. Hoped for the best and was utterly disappointed with the result. What the hell were these 4-5 episodes after GGO? I have to admit though that I actually liked the mothers rosario part. Decent pacing and the characters were ok.

I don't get why some people call it the best anime. It's average at best and Log Horizon is much better.
 

Mumbly

New member
Dec 26, 2014
40
0
0
circularlogic88 said:
How can you say it's not forcing a harem when pretty much every girl Kirito came across in the first season looked at him with admiration and lust? His not-quite-sister even shows an unhealthy obsession with him in the second half of season 1, with heavy implications that she's been fantasizing about being with him in a romantic way. It's one step removed from brother/sister incest.
But it never gets there and it's resolved quickly. Those girls don't compete for Kirito's affections, they're not each other's romantic rivals as they would be in a typical harem anime. Hell, even Klein who was jealous of Asuna (because now his buddy Kirito will be spending more time with her than with him) gets to terms with it.