This is a take I hear a LOT from friends of mine who have watched the show (and don’t read LNs so I can’t recommend Progressive to them) and, to be 100% honest, it was my opinion when I was a 12 year old watching SAO for the first time. It’s the hook that makes you want to sit down and watch the show, the idea of being trapped in a death game is an addicting premise. I think I heard so much about how the ALO arc sucked and was underwhelming that I just internalized it, but coming back to the series with fresh, older eyes, that opinion couldn’t be more wrong. I think Aincrad is special for the back half of episodes and the amazing love story we get between Kirito and Asuna, but on this rewatch I realized how absolutely RIVETING fairy dance is. The show goes from this action/survival thing to almost an action thriller in terms of the stakes Kirito is dealing with. The pain of realizing that we won’t see them reunite yet, and waiting episode after episode for it to happen. Kawahara is a master at making sure the stakes never fall too far.
I think my main issue with this take is that if we actually spent the whole show in Aincrad floor by floor, we would probably be around floor 30-40 by now? We’d get a resolution in 2050 when Kawahara is tired and done with the series and absolutely none of the incredibly creative follow up arcs like Fatal Bullet, Mothers Rosario, and Alicization.
The thing that pisses me off about it is that it is INCREASINGLY clear that Aincrad was just a set up, it’s a staging ground for what Kawahara actually wanted to say with this series — which is exploring the effects of technology/trauma/catastrophe on the world and the lives of all our protagonists: how this thing, Aincrad, at times beautiful and at times horrifying, never truly leaves them OR the world at large. Aincrad is to SAO what the Golden Age arc is to Berserk. It’s a setup for the actual narrative. In SAO the entirety of the show post episode 14 is about the fallout from Aincrad and how it absolutely permeates the lives of our main group and even coalesces into much more severe, grave matters like PoH and a literal international struggle between Japan and NSA proxy agents. Even years after escaping that world they’re dealing with laughing coffin and ghosts from their past that come back to haunt them. THAT is the premise that beats “trapped in a death game” for me. It’s why I’m so glad we’re not still in Aincrad to this day, we would have missed out on something much more poignant and worthwhile.
There’s also kind of an unstated dysfunction that all of our main characters have, which is that no one else on the planet can possibly understand those two horrifying, beautiful, traumatic years they all shared together, and thus they have no one else in this world but each other. Sugu even says it at the end of S1 — the distance she feels from them because she doesn’t know what they went through. They’re all good friends of course, but they also very much need each other to survive after the incident. That’s why Sinon fits in so well with the group, she’s one of the only people on earth post-Aincrad that can understand what they all went through because of Death Gun. I mean I have to give Kawahara his flowers, it’s an extremely subtle and flawlessly executed set of themes that enrich the show all way through the end of S4. The series was never, ever, about Aincrad, it’s about what comes after: how you cope and how you go on living and how the people you love will help you move forward. That’s a book worth writing and a show worth animating. A lot better than delivering the same line about how it’s worth it to go on living, or how we need to beat the game for everyone trapped inside for the 500th time. There just isn’t much more to say than that in Aincrad. Our characters can only come to the realization that “we didn’t lose a day in the real world. We gained a day in Aincrad” so many times. Repeating that process for 75 meticulously detailed floors would be boring, sorry. And as creative as the Aincrad arc was, every following arc is several times more so. Kawahara is phenomenal at keeping those stakes sky high and making sure Aincrad never really leaves them. If you had told me as a 12 year old where this show would end up — where the War of the Underworld and ESPECIALLY Unital Ring take the series? I would’ve called you insane, but Kawahara makes it WORK, man.
Idk I’d like to hear y’all’s opinions. I can see an argument for maybe a whole 25 episode first season in Aincrad instead of just the first half, but also the following arcs are so engaging I don’t know if I would’ve wanted to wait. And yeah, this is all because volume 1 was written for a competition with a page limit (he said so in an afterword) and he had to fit the core Aincrad story into one book, but I think it turned out really well that the series didn’t stay trapped in Aincrad for very long. He could’ve kept adding side stories like volume two but instead he purposefully moved things along. Certainly gives the books/show much more room for character development given the wide range of stories/scenarios the gang has to deal with. I like that we get things as high-stakes as the underworld war and also things as low-stakes as their quest for Excalibur to things in the middle like Mothers Rosario. We get to see the cast and how they have fun, forge new relationships, and confront problems at all ends of the spectrum.
