Why I HATE Sword Art Online
(This is the first part of a two-part review of another property entirely. I’m publishing this here because it is a fully fledged topic in it’s own right and deserves the wider audience than Part 2 is meant for. If you have no interest in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, this article can easily be read as a standalone. If you’re interested in the rest of my thoughts on this, follow the link at the end of the article. No matter what your choice, thanks for reading!)
So I happen to happily embrace several stereotypes of being an old-school computer geek; I like tabletop role playing games, I like comic books, and I like anime. I was watching cheaply imported anime back in the early ‘80’s when most people on Medium weren’t even a twinkle in their parent’s eyes.
Of course, as with all things, most opinions are subjective. One of the earliest Internet reviewers, 2 the Ranting Gryphon, is pretty typical of the case against anime, and I can’t fault the majority of his reasons, even if I am of the opinion that most/all of his reasons are trivial or simply stylistic elements of the anime art form.
I’m very clearly in the camp of anime fans that prefers the story-driven, relationship-centric anime. Sure, I love me some Macross, but I also geek out over Love Live. Consequently, when someone asks if I like Dragonball Z, I have to fight the urge to toss my cookies because…OK, this isn’t a rant about DBZ, so I’ll stop there.
There are, however, some anime that are objectively bad. As in, there’s just something so inherently wrong with some major aspect of it, usually a plot device, that makes the entire thing fall apart at the seams.
I’m willing to be “the bad guy” when I point out that Revolutionary Girl Utena falls apart because “where the f**k are all the ADULTS?!” because the series does remain a fantastic gender-role breaking girl-power piece. I’m OK with being the outlier when I decry any property related to Metal Gear to be horrible because American special forces don’t act like that because pretty much everything else in the series is pretty (heh) solid.
SAO, however, is just plain wrong, bad, and it sucks, and yes, I can prove it.
Don’t get me wrong; I love the premise. A huge swath of the population is locked into a MMORPG using VR helmets with built-in death switches if they attempt to leave the game prematurely and with the added evil twist that if they die in-game, they die in real life. OK, so far, I’m with you.
I also like the setting and character arcs. Take a bunch of people from 21st century culture and drop them in the middle of a fantasy setting where their very survival is dependent on killing that world’s god. Nicely done, could easily be used for social commentary or some meta-message. Still with you.
Even combining the two wouldn’t be a stretch. That’s the very point of SAO, after all.
This whole sh**-storm falls apart after episode two, though. Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you hanging, let’s step through this:
Spoilers ahead
OK, so let’s lay this setup out in it’s entirety so we’re all on the same page.
Prior to the start of SAO, an employee (an important distinction that I’ll get to later) of the game company Argus named Akihiko Kayaba has created, designed, and proposed a VR-based MMORPG called “Sword Art Online” (hence the show’s title) that would use cutting edge tech to allow the players to be completely immersed in the game. No need for extra controllers, because the headset, called a NerveGear, has everything built into it to interface directly with the brain, allowing even for taste and touch to be transmitted to the player’s mind without the need for any surgery to insert brain probes or direct neural linking. All the player’s desired motions are transmitted through the headset directly from the brain via the pickups in the headset.
(Keep in mind that there is nothing directly connecting the player to the headset, the interface is surface contact only, this is critically important to something I’ll bring up later)
Unknown to anyone on the later design team, anyone in the corporate QA at Argus, completely missed by every single engineer, tech, executive, tester, beta tester, etc., NerveGear included massively overpowered microwave transceivers with no hardware safeties into the design.
Yes, I said microwave, the thing that you have in your kitchen to cook your food that EVERY radio-tech, nuclear engineer, RADAR jockey, pilot, cook, ship’s captain, astronaut, Mythbuster, and ameteur scientist will tell you do not expose your tender fleshy human bits to because it will cook you.
And an ENTIRE corporation and several nation’s regulatory bodies somehow completely missed it.
So, plot hole number one. Keep count, ’cause this will show up on the test later.
So the game goes into production, and a beta test group does there thing to put the system through it’s paces.
It’s thanks to this beta test group that we’re able to bring up another aspect of this that nobody seems to have thought about in the writing of the scripts; this is a large and complex MMORPG.
Numerous times in episode one we get to see one of the protagonists, who was a beta tester, reference the fact that the full game seems to be a richer experience than the beta test. This makes sense, because “beta” isn’t even GM…sorry, for those of you who aren’t hip-deep in the computer industry, let me explain:
Software, and everything that’s not the physical device you’re holding or staring at when it comes to computers is software, goes through several stages before it’s released to the public. First is pre-Alpha. Technically, this phase doesn’t even have a name, as it covers everything from, “Hey, I have an idea…” to a fully working prototype. That’s not enough for production, however, as a single person, or even a single team, can’t anticipate all possible scenarios, circumstances, possible conflicts, etc. that the software will encounter in the wild. Next up is Alpha builds, which are then distributed to an Alpha team, almost always consisting of a core group of people within the development company who are just as competent with computers and code as the pre-Alpha developer(s). Their job is to hammer on the software like it’s a POW in a North Korean prison camp. They break into it as much as possible, the tear it apart and put it back together, they are that software’s worst nightmare. The software will ping-pong between the Alpha and pre-Alpha teams for a while until the Alpha team can’t make it cry anymore, and that’s when the Beta testers come in. Beta testers can be entirely in-house, but more often companies will farm out their beta testing to their intended audience, selecting people whose primary use case is the purpose for which the software is built. Often times, these folks will do their damndest to stress the system, but usually they just do as they’d normally do and report any problems back to the developers. After several rounds of Beta releases (which can last for months at a time), the software is released as Gold Master (GM) to the distributors. This usually happens just a few weeks before the scheduled release date. At larger development companies, there’s often a separate team of Quality Assurance people who’s job is to intervene every step of the way.
So go back to the pre-Alpha part there. Pre-Alpha doesn’t require a team. Pre-Alpha is all about the creative vision of the person who had the idea. A larger team can be pulled together, especially for a project that the company knows will be really damn big from the outset, but often time the company doesn’t even know a developer has a project in pre-Alpha because until the product is ready for Alpha it’s just collection of ideas that don’t even necessarily fit together properly.
Here’s where plot hole two comes in. The Alpha team for an MMO of any type is going to be big. There’s going to be a repository and there’s going to be people inspecting every…single…jot and tittle of the code. Anything that might be out of place will be inspected or commented out. The very first instance of even an incorrectly used semicolon and there’s going to be some editing with extreme prejudice.
I’m just imagining the conversation in the chat app for the Alpha team:
KYasuki: Hey, guys, just checking in here… Can I get another set of eyes on notanevilplot.c, specifically lines 457–899?
MYamaha: Not sure what you’re looking for here, it looks like it’s properly formatted, nothing that’s going to throw a compiler error or anything like that.
JSmith: I was on board with Murito’s line of thinking, then I took a closer look and HOLY FUCK I saw what you mean Kai!
MYamaha: What do you…
MYamaha: Apologies, I just saw what you guys are talking about. What’s this code that completely disables all the software safeties on the microwave transceivers?!
KYasuki: I’m getting Kayaba into this chat, it’s his code…
AKayaba has joined the chat
JSmith: Kayaba, notanevilplot.c ….WTF, Mate?!
AKayaba has left the chat
OK, so let’s pretend that Kayaba has managed to slip all this past the dev teams and the code gets into the GM release, which is where we have the opening of the series.
Here’s where the entire plot of the series is completely f**ked.
So Kayaba has managed to trap 10,000 people in the game. OK, good, so let’s keep going. He kills 2,000 by the time the game is one month old.
And that’s plot hole number three, and Kayaba’s biggest mistake.
See, up to this point, it was one psychopath on a mission managing to keep one step ahead of a bunch of people he had decided he was smarter than. Let’s just say, for the sake of getting the plot this far, that he is smarter than the Alpha team, the asset team, the hardware team, the numerous factories the company would have to deal with and the regulatory and oversight bodies that would have prevented this shitstorm from happening in the first place. A good story often needs a good villain, and such a villain would be a good one indeed.
HOWEVER, now it’s one psychopath vs. the whole world.
Let’s start with the first responders: The EMTs, police, and other emergency workers who would be arriving at the homes of the owners of the NerveGear systems. It would take all of two hours for word to spread among all the emergency services around the world to NOT take off the helmets after the first wave of 300+ fatalities because there’s a battery backup.
It would then take about five minutes for one of these EMTs who’s a gamer on the side that wasn’t able to get one of the 10,000 copies of the game to figure out how to pop the helmets open and cut the internal battery from the loop while simultaneously cutting the power to the helmet. Remember, there’s absolutely nothing in the connection that would be fatal to the player. Eliminate the threat of the microwave transceivers and the player is completely and totally safe. These things only work through contact, so there’s no issue of brain injury or accidental death from the disconnection, it’ll merely be (extremely) jarring to the player to be in a fantasy realm and then suddenly they’re in a bed surrounded by worried EMTs or medical staff.
Let’s say that the system was more complicated than that and said EMT (or similarly knowledgeable and trained computer geek with tools and a friend trapped in the game) doesn’t exist. OK, so by the time the first day is out, there are over 300 units with working SAO software no longer under the control of Kayaba.
It would take less than one day for government agencies, competitor corporations, and hackers of all shades (black, white, and every shade of gray) to get their hands on these units and start pulling them apart to come up with a way to defeat the system.
And then there’s the fact that Kayaba is an employee. (see, I told you I’d be getting back to this) He’s not some CEO with Evil Overlord ambitions, he’s not even a high-level executive. He’s not even middle-management. Before fatality number one happens, the entire damn company will be emergency call, all hands on deck, “get the F*CKING press and the cops and the NPASB and the god-damn dog catchers on the line because we need to get ahead of this thing NOW.” It’s a Japanese corporation, so actual action would be slow, but you can bet your ass that everyone in that company will be cooperating with the authorities as much as possible to save face. Every piece of code Kayaba has ever written, the keys to his desk, every piece of electronics he’s ever touched, and if they can pull it off a bottled sample of the air he breathed is going to be handed over to the government, if for no other reason to show the public that this isn’t the company’s fault and they’re cooperating fully.
Best case scenario, the entire situation is diffused within 48-hours, the death toll caps out at about 400 (still tragic, but nothing like the 3,000+ by the end of the series) Kayaba is arrested and publicly dragged out of his hide-out (probably just his apartment, he’s a salaryman with delusions of grandeur, probably cut off from his family, most likely zero friends) and after a well publicized trial where he receives pretty much zero sympathy is promptly executed in the first internationally televised state-sponsored execution ever.
But then that brings us to the next plot hole: How many of the 10,000 people trapped in the game are from countries other than Japan? The release of the game was done by a corporation, after all, not just Kayaba. Let’s say one third of the games are released to the U.S.A. As soon as the 20th or so death happens to some unfortunate American kid in an upper-class household (the NerveGears are going to be expensive after all, look at the cost of an Oculus Rift and you’ll have an idea where the price of these things starts) and it won’t be long before the US government decides to say, “F**k national sovereignty!” and start busting down doors in Japan looking for the C&C server and Kayaba.
OK, so I’ll skip the test and just wrap up all my complaints about the show itself; the vast majority of the plot-holes have nothing to do with the actions of the players in the game. The problem is, they’re not the only people involved. There’s absolutely zero chance that the players are left alone… it’s canonical to the series that they have friends, family, and government agencies on the outside taking care of their bodies while the players are trapped for months in the game. This means there’s absolutely nothing keeping said non-player interested parties from ripping into the NerveGears, the game of Sword Art Online, and Kayaba’s hidey-hole apart with extreme prejudice.
Sure, in the end Kayaba is the most successful individual serial killer in the history of mankind. It would still make for a fantastic story. So why do I hate this show so much?
Because it banks on two things:
1.) The ignorance of it’s audience regarding computers and tech
2.) The inherently Eastern culture of honor and the hero
If you have the opportunity, I strongly suggest you take a look at an early entry in the YouTube series Extra Credits:
There’s numerous other sources I’m drawing on for the statement I’m going to make next, but that video is a fantastic start to any tangential learning you should choose to embark on in search of the differences between Western and Eastern cultures. That statement is this:
Sword Art Online gained traction and an audience almost entirely because it plays into the Japanese notion that the hero, and by extension his hero quest, is an honor-based journey of enlightenment, improvement, and sacrifice to the greater society. The Japanese concept of a good story doesn’t stem from a clever hacker managing to find a weakness in a piece of software that lets them pwn the code for the kill switch in the headsets, it relies on the sacred journey of the hero being completed within the specific and narrow constraints of what is considered a properly Japanese story arc, with a sword if at all possible.
Oh, and the hero is male and masculine, but I’d rather not turn into an SJW for this, so I’ll hold off on my inner Sarkesian and spare you all that particular rant.
This also brings us to an inherent weakness to the story (and plot hole number four, if you’re still counting), nobody in-game is trying to break out. I’m not talking about the hard-coded “if the user tries to remove the helmet, nuke their brain” thing, I’m talking about figuring out how to hack the game from within.
Because the characters are all Japanese, it doesn’t even occur to them to find any solution other than what has been dictated to them by the “god” of that world.
Contrast that with the average gamer in a Western culture. Even without the threat of death, you’d have people trying to clip through the environment just to see if they could. Then you add the death threats and that’s just going to make the hackers mad.
On a more personal sidebar: One of the actions that Kayaba takes when he announces his plans to the players is to change all the characters from their carefully and custom tailored avatars to digital recreations of their physical bodies when they put on the helmet. (Some nonsense about bio-scanners being built into the helmet allowing him to “default” the avatars to match the player’s IRL bodies.) I’ve made no secret of being a trans-woman in the past, and that moment was actually when I got emotionally invested in the show, enough to care about whether the big-bad got his comeuppance in the end. Trans-people nearly always wind up choosing avatars of our “chosen” gender expression when playing video games. The closer it gets to VR, the more likely we’re going to be using said avatar as a sort-of therapy crutch. Even with the best hormones and surgeries and treatments and exercise, we’re never going to look like what our brains are telling us we should, so we create our “perfect selves” in a virtual world. To have that stripped away and replaced with our IRL bodies, especially if we’re not transitioned, is as emotionally traumatizing as rape. I really wanted Kayaba to get what he deserved at that point, and what he deserved was not some honorable man-to-man fight to an honorable death, it was to be captured IRL, beaten black and blue, stripped naked, shackled, and be forced to march through Times Square (yes, naked), and then buried in a deep, dark hole, jacked into a NerveGear where the environment was just an empty, black plane without gravity, a floor, or any features whatsoever, and his IRL body strapped down and properly cathetered, IV’d, and treated so he’d be trapped there for a very, very long time. That would have been justice. (But, noooo, we gotta have some god-f**king damn STUPID “honor battle” as the climax of the story for the hero, ’cause Samurai!)
I pretty much stopped paying attention to the series at the point I realized that the players allowed themselves to be caught up in the virtual world and the show was never going to bother with IRL. I stopped the playback on Netflix, did a quick read-through on the Wikipedia entry to confirm my suspicions of the big-bad’s final fate (and the absolutely unsatisfying justice-dodge he manages to pull in the end), and gave the show a thumbs-down. I’m aware there’s more to the series than that story arc, I just realized I knew so much more about how the story would actually go down if some serial killer tried to pull a SAO, it’d be like a cop watching Law & Order or an emergency room nurse watching E.R. I’d spend so much time getting mad at the stupid that I’d never be able to enjoy it.
I suppose if a reboot is ever considered (and it’s a popular enough show that a reboot is practically inevitable) and the writers were actually aware enough to do a B-story about a plucky team of hackers assembled by some government agency to defeat the SAO kill switch system, (or a team of federal agents having to learn how to break into the game under a time crunch, or an International task force that uses the confiscated systems from the dead players to find a weakness and insert a task force into the game environment, or SOMETHING) then I’d probably watch. When you show a full awareness of the entire environment, you have a story worth paying attention to, rather than the formulaic dreck Sword Art Online turned into.
And, hey, the art is pretty fantastic! The animation is top-flight, and it’s clear the characters were really thoroughly developed. For the people who, until now, were ignorant of how computers and VR systems and microwave transmitters and such really worked in this kind of a situation (not to mention government oversight which would have killed the plot before it ever got to the first test unit because Bureaucracy), I can completely understand how you were taken in by this, and I don’t begrudge your enjoyment while you were in your state of ignorance. Now that you’ve been burned by badly researched, poorly thought out writing you’ll be able to recognize it when it’s trying to waste your time in the future.
If you’re Brony-inclined, you should now jump over to my blog on FiMFiction.net to read my review on Gunsmoke, a crossover fic between Gun Gale Online and My Little Pony: Equestria Girls
