Anime fans depending on where your reading this review you'll know that i've been on bit of an anime kick as of late and well I thought that i'd continue this trend. So I thought that i'd pick an anime whose storyline is a little bit easier to pick up on and where apart from the first twp episodes at least the stories are pretty much self contained and so here is my review of the first three episodes of "Sword Art Online" enjoy.
The plot of the first two episodes is Kirito finds himself stuck inside the new game Sword Art Online with thousands if not possibly millions of players and with the only way out being to beat the game and if you die in the game you die in real life. The plot of the third episode however has Kirito dealing with being in a guild and what means in this game. In all honesty I kind of prefer the plot for the first two episodes since it gives you a closer idea of the ideas and themes behind this first arc but with that being said the story in episode is also really nice and the fact that it's a more personal story to me seems about right since we just came of two episodes of setting up Kirito and not really seeing the true threat behind this world.
Starring in these episodes are Bryce Papenbrook as Kirigaya Kazuto (Kirito) and Cassandra Lee Morris as Kirigaya Suguha and Hosaka Tomo aka Argo . Also starring in the episodes are Kirk Thornton (Klein) , Cherami Leigh as Yuuki Asuna (Asuna) , Sean Chiplock as Diavel , Patrick Seitz as Andrew Gilbert Mills (Agil) , Derek Stephen Prince as Kibaou , Lucien Dodge as Keita , Xanthe Huynh as Sachi , Tyler Shamy as Tetsuo , Bobby Thong as Sasamaru and Erik Kimerer as Ducker.
In all honesty the acting in these episodes in my opinion was just OK at best which given how bad this show can get and does get with the second half of it's first season OK is the best that we could ever hope for. That's not to say that the acting is bad because it honestly isn't but the actors aren't really given much to work with in terms of the script and character and so they can only do so much with the stuff that there given.
As you can no doubt work out from the above picture the animation not only for these episodes but also the whole series was done by A-1 Pictures who most notably did work on Fairy Tail. I have to say that while the animation isn't that good in the dialog scenes or the scenes where the characters are just standing still when it comes to the action tho the animation is freaking stunning to look at with each strike and blow leaping of the screen.
Again for those that don't know this show originally started of a series of light novels (don't ask me what a light novel is I don't know) and has since been adapted into several manga as well as an anime series and anime film with a live action American TV series in development. I'm going to be honest I don't think i've read any of the light novels or the manga but I could be wrong tho and as far as I know the manga is still being published to this very day.
When this series first came out it was getting alot of hate from alot of anime fans and quite frankly i don't see why. Since these three episodes have alot of heart and the first arc due to concept has alot of stakes as such in every fight scene no matter how outnumbered our heroes are your always scared that they could die and that's something that you don't get from a lot of anime and I have no idea why that's the case since it's a great way to have dramatic moments but I was cheering this show on from episode 1 and even through the dreadful second arc I was still saying that it's a good show and so i'm not pleased to see that alot of peoples opinion's on the show have changed.
Episode three is in my opinion one of the best episode in this first arc simply because it really hits home how dangerous this world can be. All throughout the first two episodes we are told how dangerous this game is and are barely shown in but in episode three we see an entire guild who are all friends in real life get killed with the group's only female member telling Kirito that there death was not his fault and thanking him for helping them and for being a good friend.
That to me is such a heartbreaking thing to see because we're not seeing a game character talking to another game character we're seeing one human being telling another human being that it's OK and that there death wasn't there fault. That's why episode 3 is so heartbreaking to me and I have to wonder why more anime don't have more scenes like this since it's a really effective way to get people crying since hopefully they'll care for the characters.
Now then this is of course an action series and so that does mean that we have to talk about the action itself. Which I feel is so freaking good because like I said the animation in those sequences is so good every strike and slash leaps of the screen and that to me makes the action more exciting because that's when your going to see alot of the best animation in this series but that's just my opinion tho you guys might think that the animation in the action scenes is pretty freaking bad.
Overall these are a good set of episodes with there biggest issue at least in my opinion is that they don't give us a reason to care for or about Kirito. Which is a shame because the show gets to it's action sequences they can be quite entertaining to see and are in my opinion very well animated but either way i'm glad that I checked these episodes out since they gave me a chance to revisit Sword Art Online as such these episodes get a combined score of 7.5 out of 10.
All images used in this review were gathered from either the official Sword Art Online fandom wiki page or Google Images. I'll admit I had to idea that the official Sword Art Online fandom had high quality images or even existed for that matter and some of these images are nearly 3 MB each so that goes to tell you how high quality the images are and if you don't use either of these images i'll trap you not inside a game but inside The Last Airbender movie because i'm that cruel and I won't even think of letting you out of the film either.