Sword Art Online ~ Review
“Every gamers dream comes true in this fantastical tale of epic proportions!!”
If you’re a gamer (or a game lover), you’ve always dreamed of jumping into the world of your favourite game and experiencing everything that happens there like it was real, right? We all have at one point. Well, this epic masterpiece makes all those dreams come true, turning everything awesome about gaming and action/fantasy into an epic anime series.
Sword Art Online revolves around a high school student called Kirito, who has just bought a new virtual reality MMORPG called “Sword Art Online”, where players ‘dive into the game’ to experience all the fights and scenes of this VRMMORPG first-hand. However, on the first day of playing the game, Kirito, as well as all the players of the game, are unable to log out of the game. The game’s creator, Kayaba Akihito, has trapped all the players inside the game. The only way to log out and go back to reality is to clear the game, or else everybody dies. Now Kirito must fight his way through this death game in order to get back to reality.
The anime received very high credit from the online anime community; some even referring to Sword Art Online as being “the best anime of 2012”
The series ran for 25 episodes (finishing yesterday from the time of this writing) and aired during the second half of 2012 (Summer 2012 – Fall 2012). The series is based off a light novel series written by Kawahara Reki (who also wrote the well-acclaimed Accel World series), which according to Oricon, was one of the highest selling light novel series of 2012.
The TV series was animated by A-1 Pictures, which are known for animating such well-known series as Ao no Exorcist, Working!! and Fairy Tail. The series contains some well-known voice actors including Matsuoka Yoshitsugi who voices Kirito (and is also known as the voices of Kusanagi Godou from Campione! and Kanda Sorata from Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo) and Tomatsu Haruka who voices Asuna (and is also known as the voices of Lala from To LOVE-ru and Shizuku from Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun).
The series is credited as being a cleverly structured and well presented series, blending a mixture of different genres such as psychological, romance and drama into the epic action/fantasy of Sword Art Online. If you loved Accel World then you will absolutely fall in love with this series. And you’ll also wish when something like this will happen to us too; I know I did.
—————————————————–
The Final Judgement:
Recommendation Level: 5/5 – HIghly Recommended
Final Score: 9.5/10
THEANIMEMAN 