Accel World

TV (24 eps)
3.765 out of 5 from 25,016 votes
Rank #2,516

In a world where everyone connects to an online network, pudgy Haruyuki Arita can't seem to catch a break. Constantly bullied, afraid to face reality and paranoid his two childhood friends pity him, the teenager uses online games as a way to escape his problems. But things change one day when Haruyuki's beautiful upperclassman Kuroyukihime approaches him with a mysterious time-decelerating program known as Brain Burst - there‘s just one catch. To keep the ability, he must defeat other Brain Burst wielders in Accel World, an exclusive, virtual MMORPG, and the newbie player will need all the help he can get. Eager to prove he's not a pathetic weakling, Haruyuki joins forces with Kuroyukihime to challenge fierce competitors and discover just how incredible Accel World and he truly are.

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Reviews

ThatAnimeSnob
4

Accel World presents an intriguing premise that expands to all sorts of metaphysical and psychological concepts regarding the meaning of life, and the pursuit of happiness. In the hands of an incompetent writer, though, it devolves into pandering videogame nerds while hardly offering scant substance of value. All you get is a mediocrity that doesn’t take itself seriously, contradicts its own themes mere minutes into the narrative, and wastes all its promising elements on superficial entertainment. Even worse than that, despite constantly claiming to be better than the author’s other work, Sword Art Online, it failed to garner the same widespread acclaim by the exact same demographic it panders to.SCRIPTThe story unfolds in a future epoch where people are given neurolinks soon after they are born. With them they have wireless access to the internet for sending and receiving messages, keeping notes or looking for information without actually reading or writing anything on paper. Practically, they all have a virtual world in their heads, which appears as pop-up windows in front of them and only to them. You thought seeing a guy talking to thin air because he has a hands-free cell phone is weird? Wait to see a guy who seems to read and write while looking at seemingly nothing.The protagonist is a dork whose is ridiculed and bullied by the other students for being short and fat. For that reason he finds comfort in an online game, where he constantly escapes from reality. His life takes a momentous turn when (drum roll for contrived twist) the hottest chick in school grants him access to a fighting game, where you can accelerate a thousand times faster than normal. At that game he has to prove his worth or be thrown out. The reward for the top players is to be in command of the online world, and possibly to find some sort of existentialist meaning behind its creation if you manage to reach the level cap. While this premise holds promise on paper, its execution completely fails at everything.1. The setting of a wireless world, as elaborate as it seems at first, ends up being used only superficially.- It’s there only for dressing up videogames. You hardly see them doing anything more than sending a few messages ethereally before they switch to options for playing videogames.- It’s there for cheap erotic humour. For example there is the option to share private information and applications with others through short wired connections. In the hands of the makers though it became nothing more than a sleazy way for people to assume you have a girlfriend, or an excuse to drop on a girl like you are about to have sex with her.- No elaboration is given regarding how they control what they say without talking. How do their inner thoughts don’t mix in with what they superficially want to say? If someone has impure thoughts for a girl (something the hero does) how does he filter it out when it’s close to telepathy?- It ends up being an excuse to save money in animation. They just stand still without moving their mouths when they talk via linking instead of being in a cool virtual environment.- There is absolutely no security against hacking in an otherwise hi-tech world where everybody has wireless access to it all the time. Many use the videogame to freeze normal time and cheat in school exams and sports by “checking out” the answers or the moves of the opponent. And nobody ever questions, doubts, looks into that, or has some sort of protection against such tactics.- Basic uses of technology are never used despite the hi-tech setting. Recording discussions for example. It is so easy to do it today so it will be child’s play to do it in a few decades. If you can record a guy that is threatening you and you don’t do it, you are just not living in your era.2. Information regarding exposition of setting and characters is offered through the most boring way imaginable, which is hardly acceptable with the technology they have in their hands.The basic method all writers use in order to flesh out story and characters is to show them on screen whenever possible. If they are really lazy, they have a few characters sitting on a table and talking about stuff without ever showing us anything. In this anime they do the latter and they don’t even bother to move their mouths. It’s absurd to settle for that when they have the technology to show anything they want in their minds. They can easily show to someone flashbacks of their memories or they can replay recorded events. Instead of that they stand still like it’s a picture drama. As if that wasn’t enough, in the game they all wear helmets so you never know how they feel. They look like lifeless puppets instead of people.3. Shitty plot twists and asspulls.- Imagine being able to reach to an epiphany without any sort of foreshadowing or deduction procedure. The fat guy magically knows the real reason the girl chose him for the game or finds out who the other stalking player is with absolutely no explanation. And that black king chick just has a hunch that by destroying the virtual world she will find the meaning of life. They jump to conclusions!- Things suddenly happen for the sake of happening like a guy you barely saw in the show trying to kill you out of nowhere with a car, but after the accident nobody cares about that. Or being thrown 6 floors down by an attack and all by accident you end up in a room where an important person is in.- Sudden power ups exactly when you need them, and being miraculously saved at the last second by someone else? Bring it on. Screw tactics.4. Fillers.Because that is what you resort to when you don’t have enough material to fill a full season. And make sure to add as much fan service as possible before you throw in a convenient solution as well as amnesia. This way you can make it seem like it never happened.CAST5. The protagonist takes the dorkness of his stereotype to a whole new level.- Rather than recycle yet another iteration of Generic Slim Japanese Guy, this one is very short and very fat. A typical show would use this body type for a comic relief character but in this case the comic relief “is” the main hero. As original as that sounds, he is still a big failure of a protagonist and barely more interesting than all the rest of his brood.- He looks like a meatball with eyes and a mouth, and the only one who is so cartoony compared to all other characters. Even his virtual avatar is a goofy little pig. He is always scared, crying, yelling, and running away like a total pussy. He also hates reality and escapes it by playing videogames. He is always passive to everything that happens. He never takes initiative and only runs after people who force upon him their issues. That makes him even lamer. Even the videogame was forced upon him by a hot chick. Thanks for not trying to do something yourself, dork. Just wait for an unrealistic harem girl to jump in your life to give you a shot at it. The only people who may like such lame attitude are those who are fat, gamers, and cry-babies. The rest will hate everything about him right away.- And despite all this dorkness, he has a dozen hot chicks being madly interested in him. And typically, he is crying and yelling and running around panicked. Instead of appreciating their kindness he is acting like a complete jerk or is completely oblivious to the feelings of a girl. What is so attractive that makes him so hot to all the girls? The answer is nothing; he is wishful thinking for all the losers out there who want a lame guy who gets all the girls without doing anything to deserve it. This also trashes the whole theme of the show, since it makes reality to feel like a stupid harem videogame when it’s supposed to be about a guy hating reality for being too harsh. It would be fine if he would get all the girls in a virtual game where he is doing everything right. Instead of that you get a worthless fat jerk who has his own harem in real life just because.6. The far-fetched presentation goes on by having the person who gave him access to the game being the most beautiful girl in the school. Her motivations make absolutely no sense.As expected from the people who offered us porn dolls such as Inori and C.C., characters who get rewritten anyway it suits the plot every 2 episodes, we get this bimbo with an equally slutty uniform and a brain that is virtual. Meaning, it doesn’t really exist.- She has the hots for the protagonist because he is very good at videogames. Ok, don’t mind at all how he is crying all the time like a girl and looks like a meatball with eyes.- She wastes who knows how many months in trying to be one of the top players in the game and when the rest ask for a truce she just backstabs them all and runs away because she felt like it.- She has this hunch that if she gets to meet the secret developer of the game, the meaning of life will be revealed to her. Just because of a hunch! It’s just a videogame you dumb broad; there is nothing more to it!- She has another hunch that another player is going to blackmail her in the game. For that reason she is running away from a guy with half her levels when she can otherwise smash him to bits. She instead uses the protagonist to go spy on someone she can simply confront herself.- She constantly risks her well-being to protect the protagonist. Although it can be excused as being in love with him, she never seems to have enough speed or power to save both of them and just deliberately lets herself get the hit intended for the other guy. That is a direct contradiction of her supposed vigilance.- Later in the story she just turns into a walking wet dream by being just a bimbo in a swimsuit who doesn’t even fight anymore.7. And then we have the other chick in the show, who is the typical childhood friend who has the hots for you but you don’t get it. She makes no sense either.- Was she born with that damn head accessory? She always has it on, no matter where she is, what she wears, or how old she becomes.- She is so in love with the dork hero to the point of making his best friend her boyfriend.- She goes berserk after she sees him with another girl, although she cheats on him with his best friend.- She acts like a complete slut to him, as if she wants to make him horny and jealous. But at the same time, she only sees him as a friend. Make up your mind, bitch!- She goes completely insane after she finds out her love interests exploited her, and trashed her trust and feelings. But she forgives them immediately after they buy her some ice cream. Cheap slut!- Later on she betrays them all by getting high because of how important she becomes in the game. She even teams up with their worst enemy for not much of a reason. Cow!- And then double crosses even their worst enemy without telling her friends beforehand, so they can at least prepare better. And they just forgive her. Right…8. And then we have the token loli of the show; an elementary kid which also makes no sense.- She organizes this really complicating, time-consuming, high-failure-probability, effort-costly plan, where she pretends to be the protagonist’s cousin, fakes his mother’s messages, and is even willing to seduce him, bathe with him, and even take his virginity. The pretext for her elaborate ruse? Just so she can ask him to help her beat a cosmic threat in the game. DUH!- What does anyone think would have happened if she had revealed a cosmic threat is about to destroy the virtual world? He would have agreed to help her without this convoluted plan, just for the sake of protecting the virtual world he loves to escape to.- Later on she is revealed to have a superpower she keeps secret from everyone. Technically an asspull, since she never used it while her life was threatened. She otherwise had no trouble to teach it to others when the show was in need of a power up. Because of this secret, her actions up to that point made no sense.VISUAL AESTHETICS9. Not even the videogame, the very main attraction of the whole show, is impressive.Despite trying to look all cool and dangerous, in practice it is quite silly and hardly exciting.- You do not choose your looks or abilities. I am not kidding, you enter the game and it chooses for you, supposedly based on your subconscious preferences. Although in theory this way you get what suits you best, you still feel like you don’t have a choice. So what if you subconsciously like horns and giant swords? What if you like to look and fight entirely different for a change? You can’t! The game doesn’t even allow you to customize your avatar; you are forever stuck with the exact same shape and abilities. For how long can you keep playing a game where you have no freedom in customization and every battle always has the exact same procedure? There is absolutely no appeal in that, no person in real life would play it for more than a few days before getting bored and giving up.- The game is supposed to be doing all that so you can focus on what you are better inclined at; meaning it helps you improve at what you excel at. So what happens if you don’t want to excel in what you are good at? What if you want to improve in something you really suck at, just so you can be versatile instead of a narrowed specialist? The game doesn’t let you do that.- Regardless of what your abilities are, you should still be able to realize what your potential is. You just need to experiment on your own and find what you like by yourself instead of having your role imposed on you. Or at least to try something new just for the sake of doing something different. The game doesn’t let you do that.- But let’s take an ideal situation where you get what you deserve and have no complaints about it. It still sucks. Seriously, is the hero’s avatar supposed to look awesome? He looks like a stupid faceless robot. In a similar fashion, almost every single avatar in this show looks lame. I would never agree to play a game that forces me to look like a clown or a little girl, even if deep inside that is how I like to look. What if I am a dick with everyone in real life and that is how I should look in the game? Would anyone dare to play a game looking like that even if that is what his subconscious is all about?- Furthermore, the animators hardly care to give interesting robotic shapes to minor characters. So imagine how terrible it looks to have the main characters looking bad and everybody else looking horribly simplistic.- Let’s take again an ideal situation where you look as you like and have the abilities you love. There is still no justification to why the game is kept secret from the rest of the world. What harm would it do if it were public?- The excuse for why it’s kept a secret all this time is because the losing players get amnesia and forget the whole thing. They expect you to believe none of the hundreds of players who were kicked out of the game had any problems with entire years suddenly being erased from their memories. Their personalities change entirely and they don’t remember what they were doing all this time, but that is somehow not suspicious.- How about the fact that in order to get in the game a player needs to yell “Burst Link”? For 15 years nobody suspected anything while every day thousands of kids yell those words a dozen times per day for no apparent reason.- There is no strategy in battles. It all comes down to the usual stuff we see in shounen; the protagonist getting his ass served on a plate, yet magically finds a new super move in the last second just for the sake of winning. He finds enough willpower to magically heal his wounds, throws out a friendship monologue, and his enemies all of a sudden realize their mistakes and become his allies. In the meantime, game mechanics mean absolutely nothing.- They also do a shitty job at showing field tactics. Supposed each character has elements that make him stronger or weaker against certain attacks. It makes no sense how you can find means to nullify them. Imagine for example an electric attack that keeps you pinned to the ground. You can cancel it by simply stuffing your hand in the ground and “grounding” the electricity. That is pure bullshit if you are already lying on the floor.- There is no power balance either as all duels are unfair from the start. The players have life bars that show how much damage they receive from an attack and if you pay attention, it is completely croc. The enemies do extremely small amounts of damage to the hero, even when they have far more levels and attack points than him. But as soon as he gets to the offence? He hits them a couple of times and they are defeated in one second, even when they have been hitting him for around a hundred times. Many times a normal attack will even do far more damage than a super attack.- Heck, why are we even talking about fairness when the hero is the only one who can fly, a power nobody else in the game is allowed to use? He is the only one who can travel so fast and avoid all land obstacles, thus having an unfair advantage over anyone else who needs to walk towards somewhere.- There is an extremely easy way to cheat in levelling up. You can just have your friends allowing you to defeat them without fighting back. You cycle like that each day and freely get points without ever fighting. I bet a pop idol can get to level 10 in a few minutes by using this method. Yet they try to convince us it is very hard and nobody wants to risk going to the level cap.- There is another hole in the rules. A player must fight whoever challenges him without being able to refuse. What the hell does that mean; you are forced to fight whoever feels like it? What if you are not in a mood to fight? What if they gang up on you? What if you are asleep? How is this even called a game if you are forced to play it even if you don’t want to?- There is even more injustice if you think how there isn’t any restriction to the level of the players that fight. A level 1 can freely fight a level 9. What if you are constantly challenged by high levelled players? What if you are high level and feel like becoming a player killer? Who is going to stop you? There are no moderators in this game!- And for crying out loud, they have guild wars every week where all players must compete at arranged hours. After the Black King returns to the game, there should be thousands of players going after her territory, since she is the most hated person in the game. And yet she casually expands her territory even when her guild is made up of only three low level people! Where are the other kings to attack her if they know where she is and when she fights?- Speaking of territories, the game world is separated into sections, each one ruled by a top rank player. The totally fake thing here is how each one of these leaders is called a king, named after the prime colour of his avatar. So you have the red kind, the blue king, and so on. Are we really supposed to believe they all just happened to have a different prime colour? There is only one top player for each one! And even if it was a coincidence, at one point one of the kings gets defeated and replaced by another top player who just so happens to have the EXACT same colour. This is no longer luck; it is damn fake. And no, as I said they can’t customize their avatars so they can’t recolor their avatars to match their king status. Oh, and another thing; every leader is called a king, even if “he” is a “she”. The lead girl for example is called Black King. Chauvinistic bullshit or what?- Not even the whole acceleration thing makes any sense. If time moves a thousand times faster in the gaming world, it means that you can miss a lot of events just by going for lunch. Yet nothing seems to ever change in there, even if a cosmic horror is on the loose and kills players for 3000 gaming days.- There are also lots of scenes where the characters will be waiting in the real world for an opponent of theirs to make his move. For example, they may intend to ambush him after he gets off the train. Why the devil would they do that when it will cost them years in gaming time? They could just go into videogame mode and wait a few seconds for him to not be careful. For the same reason, they don’t need to say or do anything in the real world; they can just be in the game all the time and talk all they like without wasting much time at all. And you also see at one time the videogame version of the train moving at a normal speed, when it should be running as fast as light if it corresponds to the real thing.- As if the game balance wasn’t broken enough, later on they trash it even further by introducing a reality alteration technique that allows you to do all sorts of hax things that are otherwise impossible to perform. Effectively, there are no limitations after this and everybody can do anything he likes regardless of his statistics or elements.10. Fan service for the sake of shallow pandering and further trashing of the show.Plot-wise useless bath scenes? Sure, why not? Girls with short skirts shamelessly flashing you their pantsu? Sure, bring it on. Accidentally tripping and falling on boobs? Sounds reasonable. Your parents leaving you alone for days with a cute kindergarten girl who is willing to fulfil all your wishes? Happens all the time. It’s not like this show is quality material or something. Also, videogame propaganda. The whole show stinks of a ridiculous ideology of the sorts of “You may be fat and worthless, but if you are good in videogames then hot chicks will love you.” It’s pathetic when you see him playing like a god compared to other players who in the real world are handsome and talented. “You may be better in everything than me but I own your ass in videogames.” And although a normal person would laugh at this statement, those charismatic people he taunts are actually taken aback by being bested in an unimportant videogame.11. Completely immoral messages.The game is not designed to help children reach the heights of their abilities, as it claims. In the contrary it turns them into merciless criminals and junkies.- First of all it is a war game, so the goal is to exploit other players’ weaknesses. That takes away the emotional bond you can have with others. Instead of people you just see them as statistics. Even when you are forming teams, the leader is always the strongest and the others get roles like a meat tank or a healer. They are not people but machines. Furthermore, the leader of a guild has the ability to delete the account of anyone in his team, thus he feels like a tyrant instead of a noble leader.- The game also gives you the privilege to use acceleration even outside the game, where you can abuse that power in any way you like, like cheating in tests and sports, or brainwashing people to do your biding. Hell, you can freeze time and go peep at the woman’s bathroom for all we know. These are things most of the players will definitely be doing since they are not responsible adults but immature teenagers.- It is an addicting game. Since every time you use acceleration you spend one point, the game forces you to keep playing it, so you will keep having more points to cheat and sink deeper into deviance.- It also turns you to a liar and a manipulator. Since the game is supposed to be kept a secret, you constantly need to lie or hide the truth from your family and friends. You are also taught to exploit people’s good intensions for your personal gain. Just think about every player in this show; they are constantly trying to trick you and take advantage of your kindness. So not only you manipulate others but you yourself become too suspicious of everybody else. Since you never know if the guy next to you is a player trying to trick you, you become angry and bitter with everybody. That is just mean and misanthropic.- Finally, the show never tries to question the game’s motivation and inspiration. It doesn’t try to make you think this is wrong and never makes it look like it’s a bad thing. It almost presents it like it’s a natural thing and even tries to water it further down with fan service and people forgiving each other extremely easy despite getting backstabbed. The issue is still there and is hardly meant to make you think.CONCLUSION- A passable mediocrity for casual viewers with minimum demands and videogame dorks who want a world where the fat idiot gets all the glory for the lulz.- Augmented reality has been presented in better ways in shows like Dennou Coil, and the SAO movie.- People trying to escape reality in videogames has been done far better in Welcome to the NHK and SE Lain.- The comedy and action aspects are quite typical and dull.

Riko
8

[Spoiler Free Preview] "The year is 2046. Haruyuki Arita is a young boy who finds himself on the lowest social rungs of his school. Ashamed of his miserable life, Haruyuki can only cope by indulging in virtual games. But that all changes when Kuroyukihime, the most popular girl in school, introduces him to a mysterious program called Brain Burst and a virtual reality called the Accel World."   An anime that aired from Apr 7, 2012 to Sep 22, 2012 so it's still quite new, yes, it is made from the same person that created Sword Art Online otherwise known as SAO so it might get a lot of mixed feelings of judgement depending if you're a fan of SAO or not, if you are, then you might just be disappointed,  however, that's not to say that the anime itself is bad, although it has to do a lot with virtual games however they no longer use Nerve Gear or anything that looks like a helmet but instead use a collar or "Neuro Linker", not only that but they're not stuck in a game at all, they choose to go to the game each time they activate it, were they get to battle and be challenged almost anywhere if not careful, a really nice thing I enjoyed is how the place they activated the game at is used as the arena in the game, although it may change how it looks physically, you're not actually moving at all, what happens when you activate Accel World is that it seems to make time slow down, it does this because of a helpful secret application which allows a person to make time seemingly stop by "accelerating" their brainwaves.  Other than that they don't get to choose their characters, the game chooses them from the person's worst fear, another thing I appreciated is how almost each character had an unique ability and are separated to groups due to what colour(color) their characters is, like let's say your suit was blue, you'd be set with team blue, etc. I really liked it despite it not having such an appealing Main Character but it truly is an unique anime, which I wouldn't mind rewatching~.

noname0302
6

Hit and a miss! Too bad.  The whole review will sound like I hated this. Its easier to talk about mistakes. Anyway, ill start with the plus sides. Accel world has a lot of good ideas. I liked the whole way they introduced the VR thing in everyday use. Its cool, its fresh. The music is also pretty good and most of the character animation is fine(In the real world and not in the accel world. I dont really like the mecha genre, but here compared to its importance, the robots dont look too impressive. ). The humor is also very good sometimes.  And now lets plunge into the depts of human stupidity. First thing: main character. I understand that hes short and fat, but this is ridiculous. Hes barely a meter tall. Hes a midget. Also: his evolution: whimp-less whimp-badass-whimp-badass-whimp... rinse and repeat. One moment he gives a majestic speach, the next moment hes crying like a baby. By the last 3-4 episodes he gets somewhat better(menaing at least he stops crying faster).  Fights: they are horrible. No choreography, only talk, talk, talk, oh look, a new ability, talk talk. Bad guys talk a lot. We get it. But seriously. Sometimes they actually show some talent for fights scenes. But these usually last a few seconds than its back to nothing. Our main character is supposed to have great reflexes  and be smart. We see those good reflexes in maybe his second fight and thats all and we see his smarts for 2 occasions.  Fanservice: Im not into ecchi, I consider usually fanservice a lazy way so they dont have to write a better story, but if you want fanservice, do it or dont do it. Not this semi-intended-almost fanservice thing. It was like they couldnt decide to include some nudity or not.  The whole love thing: How can you fall in love with someone from seeing a highscore in a game?! Seriously. The writer of the manga needs to get laid fast if this is his concept on love. Also: Black Lotus isnt even consistent with his love: "Stop staring at my leg", she actually shows off her bikini, she says that Pudgyboy is the only one she ever loved, then she gets shy again the our main characetr asks her to stay with him. Ok. So.....wat??? You express your feeling without a problem, then youre shy again?!  Story: good ideas, bad implementation. The ending is very weak. 5.5/10 Animation: Lazyness, but usually good animation. Still, nothing special. 7/10 Music: probably the best feature. 9/10 Characters: Kuroyukihime is the best by far(even with the groundless love interest), other characters tend to change too fast: Takumu for example. The evil charcaters are only evil, because they are, they dont have a logical agenda, they are just there to be evil. Overall, the characters are not bad, but Arita is just horrible. 5.5/10 Overall: Accel world has its moments, but failes to deliver on most occasions, it also has an originality problem: SAO and Bleach should hire a lawyer. Its pretty action packed, but the action is not too special. 6/10 If you have nothing else to do, you can watch it, its good to pass time, and shut off your brain, but compared to other animes in the same genre( SAO and Log Horizon- season 1 of both) its far inferior. I could rant about it for another hour cause of the army of small mistakes, but there is no need. You get the idea. Dont think about it too much and you will have some fun. Just watch somethign else if you want quality fun!

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