Sword Art Online - Review

Background

I first watched Sword Art Online when I was in middle school well over a decade ago. It was one of the first anime I had watched knowing I was specifically seeking out anime as a medium. The show seemed unbelievably hyped up from other kids around me as one of the biggest shows that will be coming out. I was also beginning to watch YouTube videos more often and I had also saw several talk about Sword Art Online.

Then I watched the anime and was confused. I enjoyed the premise of it. Characters enter a video game world and subsequently become trapped in it. They must defeat the final boss of the game in order to escape. I had the assumption that the entire anime would lead up to the climatic final battle between a hero and a villain on the top floor at the very end of the show.

This was not how it worked out.

The first season of the anime was split between three of the novel with the first thirteen episodes split between the first volume and a side story volume which do not mesh to a single narrative. The vast majority of the tension was held in the Aincrad arc which is the first volume. But after this, the second half of the season focused on a different game and volume felt very confusing to me. With this, the anime felt unfocused to me as a middle school viewer.

Several years later, I found the printed book and decided to give it a read to compare it to the anime. Below are my thoughts.

Impressions

In this review, I will provide a summary of the novel including spoilers, compare the novel to the anime adaptation that I was introduced to the story with, then finally a commentary on reading the story in the year 2026, well after the original printing.

Let’s begin.

Summary

Sword Art Online as a novel is a romance story focused on the characters Kirito and Asuna. Their adventures together build their relationship and test their desire to stay together as external forces push against both of them. They must put their trust in each other to overcome those external forces, a difficult feat for both of them as they have moment of not trusting one another.

The story begins with Kirito as a loner narrator in the video game Sword Art Online fighting off various monsters alone well into the game’s progression. The game is set in a world called Aincrad which is a castle suspended in the sky of the video game world with one hundred floors. After the boss of a floor is defeated, a stairway will lead to the next floor. We as readers start with Kirito on the seventy-fourth floor, the majority of the game already having been completed. Kirito recounts to the reader how he got to the video game and the melodramatic circumstances which are that the players are trapped inside the video game and that if the characters die in the game, they will die in the physical world as well. Kirito captures the meat of a rare rabbit but can't cook the meat himself due to his in game cooking statistic being too low. He considers selling it and goes to a shop he frequently visits to attempt to sell the meat. This is when we as readers are introduced to Asuna, the main character who drives the plot of the novel. Though Kirito had met Asuna before and there is some implied history between them, this is the most interaction Kirito recalls having with Asuna and is the reason for the novel beginning here. She is a strong-willed player who is set on completing the game. As we follow these two characters, Kirito will open up to working with other characters and Asuna will become more comfortable with the video game world as Kirito points out its beauties. The first act ends with Kirito weighing if he should hide a special skill that no other player knows about or should use it to protect Asuna. He chooses to use the skill to protect Asuna, coming to her rescue, and defeats the boss of the seventy-fourth floor with his secret dual wielding sword skill. From this point onward, there is no going back to his normalcy.

The middle of the story, features Kirito and Asuna exploring the seventy-fifth floor after having beat the boss of the seventy-fourth floor. Kirito and Asuna talk about going off together on their own without being involved with other player’s guilds but Asuna being a member of the guild called the Knights of Blood, the guild leader refuses to allow Kirito and Asuna to leave. Instead, the guild leader Heathcliff requests a duel with Kirito because of his recently received special skill. If Kirito wins the duel, he and Asuna will go free with one another. If Kirito loses, he will join the Knights of Blood guild despite being a solo player.

During a training expedition, a member of the Knights of Blood poisons the other members of the group, killing two of them despite Kirito recounting that no players have resorted to this action before. Asuna now comes to his rescue and defeats the other Knights of Blood member. She stops short of killing the member, but Kirito does. Asuna and Kirito request a leave from Heathcliff and this time, he approves of the leave, ending the midpoint of the story.

Kirito and Asuna declare their love to each other and go to the twenty-second floor, a mostly peaceful area where they by a cabin together. They get married in the game and live together on their honeymoon. Despite having everything they want together, Asuna dreads staying in the game too long and says that their bodies in the physical world are atrophying. She says that they have to get out of the game and find each other in the physical world which reignites Kirito’s interest in beating the game.

The final act of the story features Kirito and Asuna rejoining the Knights of Blood for a raid against the boss in a labyrinth on the seventy-fifth floor. During this raid, all known characters take part in a final battle. They do defeat the boss after heavy losses from the unnamed side characters though no known character is killed in battle. Kirito is especially suspicious of Heathcliff having a high health bar and tests a theory that Heathcliff is special compared to the other players and attacks him, prompting an “indestructible object” warning from the game system, proving to Kirito that Heathcliff is not an ordinary player at all. In fact, Heathcliff is actually the lead designer of the game they were trapped in. The game designer, Akihiko Kiyaba, announces his plan to be the final boss of the game and will set all players free if Kirito has a final duel with him right then and there. Asuna unlike her past self is against the duel because of the risk of losing Kirito. Kirito unlike his past self is in favor of ending the game as fast as possible on behalf of the other players by defeating the Kayaba. During the duel, Asuna unexpectedly to Kirito sacrifices herself by taking a strike from Kayaba, her character dying. Kirito and Kayaba both strike each other simultaneously, both of their character dying as well, though with a final message from the game that the final boss had been cleared.

Asuna and Kirito embrace each other in a purgatory-like area outside of the game’s castle Aincrad is crumbling and the video game servers are shutting down. Kayaba tells the two of them that unlike the other players who had died in the game and died in the physical world as well, he is making an exception for Kirito and Asuna. The couple embrace each other, saying they will find each other in the physical world.

Finally, Kirito awakes in a hospital room, immediately wondering where Asuna is, hoping to find her, wherever she may be.

Comparing the Novel to the Anime

I had watched the anime back when I was in middle school in the early 2010s. By that point in time, anime was fairly new to me and was mostly comedic series. Sword Art Online was the first anime I had watched that was dramatic, in fact, it was melodramatic. I did have an amazing time watching the anime during the arc that took place in Aincrad which would cover the first two volumes of the light novels. However, I was confused when watching the anime because something about the pacing felt odd. I didn’t quite understand that a show about defeating all one hundred floors of the video game Sword Art Online started with the first floor but seemed to have abruptly ended on the seventy-fifth floor. I was confused about the lead up to this conclusion of the arc around the tenth episode. Following this conclusion was yet another different arc in the same season that took place outside of the video game the series was named after. This prompted even more confusion from me about what the series was. Later on, the show became more of a haram comedy show as the party of women that follow Kirito became larger and larger which completely lost me as a viewer.

Returning to the series as an adult reading the novel, I was expecting the novel to be similar and was pleasantly surprised with the differences I encountered.

The novel taking place in a more narrow period of time exclusively within the video game Sword Art Online was a far more focused approach that I appreciate. Initially, I was confused about why we as readers are joining Kirito as late as the seventy-fourth floor but for a story centered on his relationship to Asuna, this is the most logical place to begin. Both of the characters are well established within the game and know it well and can explain it with ease to the reader. The characters have become used to the game as their ordinary life for the past two years which provides a prime starting point for them to develop into different characters without showing the reader every single adventure they would have been on independently of each other.

The novel being from the first person perspective of Kirito provides internal dialogue that was not present in the anime. You do need to like Kirito as a character to like the novel I believe but he is more of a narrator explaining the mechanics of the game. I did not find myself annoyed with him during the story unlike the anime. Additionally, his perspective being in first person allows for him to narrate any past scenes and special knowledge that he would have that other characters would not. This is particularly important to the conclusion of the novel when he figures out Heathcliff is Kayaba.

A different aspect I also wanted to cover was the action scenes. Fights between Kirito and monsters or Kirito and other characters were harder for me to conceptualize in the novel’s prose than seeing the visuals in the anime. This is by the nature of literature regardless of this exact novelization.

Another difference between the novel and the anime is the cast of characters is more focused. The main characters featured throughout the novel are Kirito, Asuna, a friend named Klein, a shop keeper named Agil, a Knights of Blood antagonist named Kuradeel, and the video game developer Akihiko Kayaba.

At the end of my read of Sword Art Online, I was more satisfied with the story than I had been when I watched the anime series. The focused approach on Kirito and Asuna’s relationship held more tension than the completion of the game. I went into the novel knowing it was a melodramatic adventure but the surprise of the focus on the romance between the characters and how they deal with external forces pushing against them as well as their building of trust with each other held my interest throughout the entire read. At the end, I was left imagining that they would find each other in the physical world, date, and marry. I was satisfied with this ending and felt that the character arcs of Kirito and Asuna were complete. I did not want the story to continue further but it did and caused my gripes with the anime after this story arc concluded.

At the end of the novel, I did believe that the story was edging toward a profound cautionary tale about adoption of new technology without weighing its risks as seen with the NerveGear device which is used to enter the video game of Sword Art Online. However, I know the device would be used again to enter other video game worlds even after the melodramatic trauma endured by the characters in this particular game where they were trapped inside of it for two years. That cheapened the tension of this novel. I believe this came from the author not knowing the direction of the later volumes by the time this one concluded which led to the later stories diminishing the payoff of this one. I want the characters to have permanent changes in their development. Kirito at the end of this novel commenting that he would likely never wear the NerveGear again and Asuna pushing Kirito to finish the game as quickly as possible so they can meet in the physical world led me to believe the theme of the story was about appreciating the things we see in daily life rather than falling into escapism in video games. However, Kirito using the NerveGear in later story arcs goes against this theme which saddens me because it is a hard blow to the story in this novel.

Reflecting on the Story in Current Time

Lastly, I want to reflect on reading the novel in 2026, well after its original printing in 2009 and the time I watched the anime around 2012. The novel featured technology that seemed unimaginable at the time. The NerveGear headset enabled users to travel into a digital world with their senses intercepting the game world rather than devices in the physical world such as speakers and displays. The players connect to a single massive MMO world where thousands of players can all chat with each other at the same time which has its origins in video games such as RuneScape.

In the time since the release of the novel, real world organizations such as Meta have pushed for the development of virtual reality in their headsets such as the Meta Quest. The goal seems to be to create a headset for the user to have an augmented reality where digital assets are overlayed over a real-world display. This has been shown in videos as avatars of users appearing in meetings. Another organization that has been moving toward the technology of the NerveGear has been Neuralink which has been developing brain to computer interfaces. Their media showcases individuals with traumatic brain injuries using the Neuralink device to communicate directly with a computer. In this situation, the individual will see the display of the computer and interact with it through thoughts in a similar manner to a keyboard and mouse interface. This is not done in place of the senses of the individual being overwritten by the computer.

The video game of Sword Art Online connecting players from around the world in a single large world has been the aim of video game franchises such as Battlefield, Fortnite, Minecraft, and many others which rely on dedicated servers for connecting many players through a computer of some kind to their platform. This had existed at the time of the release of the novel but was less pronounced than it is now. Many more players can be part of the same digital map at the same time than was previously possible however this is still far away from the portrayal in Sword Art Online in which ten thousand players all cohabited the same environment. With client computers with enough processing power and a data center with enough network bandwidth to handle multiple thousands of simultaneous connections to the same shared environment, the framework of Sword Art Online as a video game would be possible in today’s time. The NPC characters having advanced interactive states is more feasible in current times as algorithms for the characters has become more intricate in single player AAA video games in current times.

Shifting from the technology to other real-world factors that play into my reading of Sword Art Online, the novel taking place over the span of two years in which the characters were locked solely into a digital only world mirror’s the real-world COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the world had migrated from in-person interactions to digital only interactions for a period of time that was dependent on the exact organization and the circumstance it was under. In my case, I was studying in university and the classroom environment switched from the physical classroom to a primarily digital environment for just about two years. The exact circumstance between the real-world pandemic and the video game of Sword Art Online are vastly different but the length of time was similar which creates an eerie feeling when reading the novel. The span of time in which the characters were locked inside the game being the same as the span of time in which I was locked into a hyper digital world where all entertainment seemed to be through a screen made the anxieties of the characters feel more potent than when I watched the anime without additional efforts made by the author to do so.

Now I want to switch to the implications of permanent death in the story. The characters being locked in the video game of Sword Art Online is tense and I as a reader want the characters to be able to escape because the implications of the characters being unable to perform basic bodily functions is terrifying. However, this had made the story feel melodramatic to an extent that feels silly as an adult reader. When I watched the anime as a kid, the permanent death of characters if they died in the video game was an unheard of approach that drew me in as a reader. As an adult, this approach makes me laugh. The game designer Akihiko Kayaba locking the players inside the video game and effectively murdering four thousand players for no justifiable reason beyond “life is precious so we must cherish it everywhere” felt extraordinarily weak. For a novel in which the romance and relationship between Asuna and Kirito is the focus, the main source of tension should be in the trust of each other rather than an external force such as the video game environment in my opinion. We as readers know for the most part that Kirito and Asuna will need to live by the end of the novel because it is the driving force of the plot. The tension regarding if the characters will survive the dangers of the video game is already suspended. A stronger source of tension would have come from the mistrust Kirito has for Asuna initially and vice versa.

Asuna and Kirito are in a zero-sum game in which they both want something from the other but neither of them are willing to say it directly to each other. We as readers are trying to figure this out throughout the novel. The tension of the story is stronger for me in the moments where one character gives a hint at interest in the other character, but that other character does not understand because it is not explicitly stated. For instance, Asuna proposing that the two have a dinner together appears to Kirito to be an attempt to persuade him to join her guild in which he overreacts which prompts her to second guess his intentions when they are paired together which results in her drawing a knife to Kirito despite the dinner being her idea.

When the source of conflict comes from within the characters in a story about their relationship, this is far stronger than an external force because we as readers know that the characters will need to change in order to build their relationship but how they do so, we do not know, and we do not know if they will be successful by the end of the novel. This uncertainty creates an even stronger tension for me than the combat of the video game.

I imagine if the permanent deaths of characters was removed from the story but Kirito and Asuna were less trusting of each other initially, this would have had even more tension than the story had as is. As an adult reader, I could have done without the permanent deaths of the characters and had a more character focused drama than a circumstantial drama.

In my final thoughts on the novel, I did enjoy it more than when I watched the anime. I still have critiques for the novel as featured above but it is because I do love the story that I am harsh on it. I want it to be as best as it possibly can be which results in me picking apart its pain points. Though I have comments on the novel being dampened by later entries in the series and missed opportunities for stronger tension, these are ultimately my opinions and I would rather have read the novel than not.

For the tradition of creating a review, would I recommend the novel?

I would to anyone who enjoyed the first arc of the television series. The novel had more depth with the characters than I recall from the anime and interior dialogue explaining the world building of Aincrad that I enjoyed quite a bit. I would not recommend the novel to anyone that is not interested in angsty teenagers in a melodramatic circumstance of being trapped inside a video game. The novel is very clear about this early on. The story being told from a first person narration by Kirito may also be unappealing to anyone who does not like his character from the anime or who is searching for a different narration approach.

I hope everyone that reads this review can use it to see the story in a different way long after the original printing.

End transmission.