Sword Art Online, Offline, Waste of Time.
Story - 3/10
Set up like an informational news show, each episode is broken down to the same format. First our anchor Asuna gives us a goofy look at a “Breaking News” event that happened in that DVD’s episodes. Following the news Yui introduces us to a bit of trivia about the S.A.O. or A.L.O. game, such as stats or different types of legendary weapons.
The longest section of the show has our host, and co-host Kirito, interviewing one of the player characters from the game, as they review scenes from that DVD. Often the scenes will reveal something embarrassing about Kirito or the way he acted.
The last part has Klein giving advice to various anonymous characters about different problems they might be trying to overcome. The big joke is that the characters are extremely recognizable, even though they’re in silhouette, and many of the times their problem has to do with falling in love with Kitito, which makes Kirito very shy and nervous, as Asuna gets increasingly angry at him. In the end, Klein ends up being absolutely no help to anyone.
Midway they switch things up a bit just like the show did. Leafa takes over for Asuna as the show’s anchor. As Klein doesn’t play A.F.L. yet, he was fired from the show, and his segment was replaced by a slot machine that picks random topics for the group to talk about.
Animation - 4/10
Each episode is a mix of cell shaded chibi characters, along with footage from the series itself. The characters are all cute representations of their main series look, but nothing too spectacular.
Sound - 7/10
These extras weren’t translated over for the American market, so we get to know what each character’s Japanese VO sounded like.
For the most part the voices do match the characters very well, except for Klein, who comes across much much older with this voice actor, but his acting it top notch and pretty hilarious.
The music used during the show is actually pretty cool, it sounds very much like improvised jamming at the end of “Sweet Home Chicago” during the Blues Brothers movie.
Characters - 2/10
Every character is pretty much boiled down to the more cliche of jokes you can make about them. The three co-star females all just come on and talk about how they love Kirito, while he either acts embarrassed and aloof, while Asuna gets angry. Klein becomes nothing more that a dumb perv.
Overall - 2/10
One major problem with this DVD extra is that it works best as a companion to each DVD’s set of episodes, but the way it’s set up there may be a few spoilers for the show as a whole. But if you wait until after the series to watch it, it’s just kind of useless and not really that entertaining.
The other issue here is the length, especially for what we’re being given. S.A.O. always had a horrible way of managing time, and this seems no different. They created nine, eleven minute episodes that really don’t add much to the story.
Even as someone who tends to like these extras, and who wanted the series to give us more story about the MMO itself, these were just too long and not very entertaining to be worth the hour and half it took to watch them.
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