So as of recently my friend managed to convince me to actually watch through the rest of the Sword Art Online series to try and convince to me to change my opinion on the show (it’s alright but not any better then that) so that I’m caught up when he takes me to the new movie coming out. Originally I had thought that some of the plot elements were a little stale but after giving it a second look through I realize what I didn’t like about it, the way they build their worlds or their “games”.
One of the things that’s been constantly thrown around after SAO was released is that all these newer anime about blank being trapped in some gaming world is just a clone of SAO. They may be right but where SAO managed to make appealing characters for every different person, they didn’t as hard on the world. When SAO was released gaming was becoming ever more popular and a show about an MMORPG seemed like an easy thing to do, however the creators of SAO didn’t create an MMORPG they simply created a single player game with restrictions of how your character should play. The key thing in any MMORPG such as WoW, Wildstar, or The Secret World is that the player can put themselves in the world with little to no restrictions. You can cast spells, command nature, shoot a bow and arrow. This is where the appeal of an MMORPG lies, in it’s world and how the player can shape that world to fit their needs. No if we go back to season 1 of SAO, we get no proper variation. Yeah you are you but what if you wanted to use a crossbow or fling some fireballs, you’re stuck with some crappy sword. This is probably why I consider season 1 to be really bad, the story was pretty good but the focus they put into building a world was nearly non-existent. Season 2 did kind of fix this with the introduction of flight and magic, and season 3 did a fairly decent job at building a proper game. Plus there were hundreds of floors and all we got was a lot of skipping between floors and backtracking to previously explored floors when it was implied that each floor is different.
Now let’s look at the opposite side of this coin, Log Horizon. In my personal opinion it tells a much better story of gamers trapped in game because rather then telling a story about the main character and him traversing through this world, it’s a story about how a bunch of players interact with the world they are now stuck in. We get to see how these players actively shape and interact with the world so they can understand their situation, get out if they can, or live a life in this world if they can’t get out. Now before saying that gamers wouldn’t do this, let’s look back at 2005 a moment that would become prominent in gaming history. The corrupted blood plague incident, if you don’t know about this long story short a bug in WoW caused a debuff that was only supposed to happen in a raid carry over to the overworld and infected everything. Rather then gamers just throwing up their hands and waiting for the devs to fix this, players actively worked to heal and quarantine people until the bug was fixed. The players treated the whole thing like it was an actual plague and took the steps to ensure that it didn’t get even more out of hand. This is another reason why SAO does a poor job at showing people trapped in a game, we see many players commit suicide at the very beginning and only small handfuls of players talk the situation out. This is why building a world is just as important as making appealing and relatable characters. Both can downplay your story to the point where people like me are just disappointed, and by world I don’t just mean the land and the trees I mean the characters as well.
It’s not a very good comparison for a couple of reasons. For one the sword art online anime adaptation does a pretty poor job of presenting the series world building. You can’t use magic as you say, but the way you can build your character in the game is practically limitless. There are thousands of skills and most of them have little to do with combat. The first arcs scope is merely on combat, because the focus of the story is escaping the game. In log horizon there is no notable way to escape so the focus is on how they’re going to live in their new world. That isn’t to say the first arc of SAO doesn’t have this. The series focuses on the clearing of the game, but only 300 of the 6,000 remaining players are trying to do so. The remaining players are living their lives in the game world, creating it’s own economy, running shops, fishing etc.
Secondly Log horizons world building is limited to the world of one game, where as Sword art onlines world building is much larger consisting of multiple games, the real world and how they all interact. Being trapped in the game was only ever a means to an end. To show what happens when people are forced to treat virtual reality as reality and how the lines between can be blurred. So of course Log Horizon has the better world building for it’s game, it only has one to build on. If you want that type of singular focus for SAO I suggest the progressive sub series, which is a rewrite of the Aincrad arc going floor to floor.
The problem with comparing SAO, Log Horizon, and other similar series like .hack, is that they all have different themes and ways they’re attempting to explore them.
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