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REVIEW: Sword Art Online episodes 1-7

How does an excerpt from the song Crawling by Linkin Park have anything to do with the expiration of a sandwich?

Echo_City wrote:

How does an excerpt from the song Crawling by Linkin Park have anything to do with the expiration of a sandwich?

In 4chan (and apparently elsewhere since /a/ hates youtube comments) that song is associated with annoying emo-ness and grimdark. Kirito wears all black and is a loner for no good reason that's why the song has been kinda attached to him and stuff that happens around him.

Also lurk moar.

The very first episode showed that the villain announced his plan on the news. It's widely known.

He created a whole virtual world, I think it is reasonable to say that he could fake a few articles and videos. I also don't remember any players commenting on the sudden deaths of the 200-some-odd people the creator reports were killed when family members of those SAO players ignored his demands and ripped off the NerveGear. Perhaps he just made that up for dramatic effect?

In the first episode, the creator also says that "once your HP drops to 0, there is no way to revive you", something we now know is false thanks to the one-off episode dedicated to finding the "Phoenix Down" that can revive a character as long as it is used within 10 seconds of their death. If he lied once, who is to say that he didn't lie twice?

In 4chan (and apparently elsewhere since /a/ hates youtube comments) that song is associated with annoying emo-ness and grimdark. Kirito wears all black and is a loner for no good reason that's why the song has been kinda attached to him and stuff that happens around him.

My memory's pretty bad, but I thought that the Phoenix Down could only be used spoiler[to revive character pets?]

Echo_City wrote:

He created a whole virtual world, I think it is reasonable to say that he could fake a few articles and videos. I also don't remember any players commenting on the sudden deaths of the 200-some-odd people the creator reports were killed when family members of those SAO players ignored his demands and ripped off the NerveGear. Perhaps he just made that up for dramatic effect?

Even if this is true, its completely irrelevant to the story at hand. Kirito and the others have no way of knowing the truth, and thus neither do we. It also quite literally makes no difference whatsoever.

That being said, you're gonna have to provide a plausible explanation for why things remain the way they are if your version is correct.

The show itself doesn't seem to shoot explanations like that one down, and IMO they make a helluva lot more sense than the "face value" one. I suppose that I could try and spoil the show for myself by checking the source material, but then I wouldn't want to watch the show as much, and there's no guarantee that the anime will be 100% faithful to the source material anyhow, is there?

I haven't seen anything in 8 episodes that rules out the possibility that people whose avatars disappear don't simply "wake up" in the real world. Have any of you?

I haven't seen anything to suggest they don't, and if they do, so what? What actually is happening is irrelevant, the only thing that matters right now is what the players in the game THINK is happening.

And maybe some of us think the story could've been better if the author didn't just focus on Kirito.

My favorite of those sort of explanations is that the creator lied about the whole premise, that no one truly dies, and that time passes much faster in-game than it does in real life, as in a dream, so the 2+ years of the show could be mere seconds of "real world" time.

Echo_City wrote:

My favorite of those sort of explanations is that the creator lied about the whole premise, that no one truly dies, and that time passes much faster in-game than it does in real life, as in a dream, so the 2+ years of the show could be mere seconds of "real world" time.

Even if everyone had Brain-Burst installed - and that's impossible, for reasons which are obvious if you know about Accel World and how the two series are connected - then the first year of game-time alone would have been over eight hours in the real world. After that amount of time many families would have forcibly removed the players from the headsets.

Given that almost two years have passed in the game that equates to over sixteen hours of real-world time. The authorities would have unplugged most of the players by then. Especially once it became known from those players waking up that the players still in the game genuinely believed they were trapped.

Think about it for a moment. If players who died in the game then woke up in the real world, don't you think they'd then say it was safe to unplug everyone? Two thousand "died" in the first game month alone, and they would have raised the alarm and gotten the rest of the players unplugged right then and there.

Given this, it is clear that you have not thought through your plan which has fundamental and extremely obvious flaws.

We have to assume that players who are being killed in the game are either being killed in real life, or transported to another server where they cannot interact with the players still remaining. Given the sheer implausibility of powerful microwave emitters being installed into headsets in the first place (not to mention the further implausibility that the emitters must kill instantaneously as otherwise headsets would just be whisked off the patient), the latter option is clearly superior.

There's nothing in SAO 1-7 that either overtly confirms or denies any set ratio between real world time and game time.

Whoa, what now?! You're bringing in tech from other shows and assuming that the tech in SAO follows its rules?! That makes 0 sense, and you know it. I don't remember Accel World being lauded for its plotting, so comparisons to it at this juncture do not foster hope for SAO.

There's nothing in SAO 1-7 that either overtly confirms or denies any set ratio between real world time and game time. I don't know where you're getting this 1 year in game = 8 hours of real world time equivalency, but nothing in episodes 1-7 of SAO corroborates this in any way, shape, or form and thus it is not germane. I don't recall ever even hearing "Brain Burst" in SAO, furthering its irrelevancy here. You, like me, can postulate about a time discrepancy using your ratio, though you seem to have already ruled it out as possible, but given the evidence presented you can't in good faith use it as a factual cornerstone of your argument, as you have attempted to do.

If there isn't a wonky time-perception discrepancy between the game world and the real world then there is no explanation for the continued premise that is anything short of shallow, contrived, and frankly insulting. Not only would the time discrepancy cover the implausibility of thousands being put on life support within a short time period and kept there for a very long one, it would also give a fine explanation for the complaints in the ANN review about not showing how people being trapped in the game affects the real world, as it wouldn't affect it at all. This could also help explain the poorly developed"villain", the game creator, otherwise known as "that guy who was forgotten about by everyone in SAO after he gave his speech for at least 6 episodes".