On November 6th ten years ago, the game “Sword Art Online” officially “opened”

Excuse me, what day was last Sunday (November 6)?

Many old two-dimensional elements may have a blurted answer after listening to it.

That was the day when the large-scale brain-computer, fully immersive, online role-playing game SAO ( “Sword Art Online” ) in the classic animation “ Sword Art Online” was launched.

In the story setting of “Sword Art Online”, on November 6th ten years ago, SAO made the protagonist Kirito trapped in a “different world”.

The reason why the audience is obsessed with this day is not only because the “Sword Art Online” is good-looking, but also because it has a pioneering position in the history of animation development.

Some people think that although Sword of Swords is not the first animation to play time-travel, another world, and game elements, it provides a simple and perfect story structure and elements, which inspires many practitioners, and makes the other world conditionally become a kind of campus. The “mainstream genre film” of love and machine war animation.

The Q-version animation “Quartet of Another World”, which gathers many protagonists of different world animations

But even without the packaging of another world, Sword Art Online can be called a literary social fable with its rigorous story and value proposition.

(minor spoiler warning here)

Dimension breaking game

According to the settings in the play, when 2022 arrives, VR and brain-computer technology are highly developed, and the game can already achieve a fully immersive experience of the senses, allowing players to feel like they have traveled to a different world.

And SAO is this epoch-making game work.

The protagonist Kirito, a 14-year-old junior high school student, has always been obsessed with cold but controllable computer games because of his disgust with complicated family problems in reality. This made him an IT master who could assemble a computer at the age of 6, and obtained the SAO’s internal test qualification.

But immediately, his sense of control completely disappeared.

More than 10,000 players who just wanted to play games were suddenly told by the game developer on the first day of login:

You can’t get out, and the button to exit the game was pulled by me. In addition, the game console has controlled your brain, when your health in the game is zero, the real body will also die.

If you want to get out alive, someone must clear the customs.

Anyone who has played RPG games knows how easy it is to game over. Only one month after the game started, 2,000 people could not wake up.

In this game of racing against time, it is impossible for the player’s body to survive the years of vegetative life.

“Sword Art Online” tells the story of Kirito encountering all kinds of people and witnessing himself and others struggling and growing during a difficult adventure that lasted for several years.

Another world is often regarded as a cool article, and the protagonist can easily obtain an ideal life through the fantastic conditions of another world.

But the sword is not “cool” at all. After all, no matter how dissatisfied with real life, few people want to travel to a place where the failure rate is close to 40%.

The author Kawahara Reki’s creative starting point is exactly the opposite of the other world that was popular later, and the theme of blurring the boundary between reality and virtuality is more attractive to him.

The game of survival in a closed environment, the flow of human nature under extreme pressure, the impact of life changes on human morality… For novelists, these can be called a creative experiment that makes dopamine go wild.

Thinking beyond the dimensional wall, Reki Kawahara and Akihiko Kayaba, the SAO developer he wrote, should be the same kind of people. They both regard the world they created as a test bed, and they all look forward to unexpected developments in it.

strong but weak

The creative level of “Sword Art Online” is still amazing today.

Many people look at it, and they will feel in the barrage “I almost forgot that this is a battle.” The depth of the narrative makes it impossible to be simply defined by a certain symbol.

On the day the rules of the game were announced, young Kirito immediately faced the first important choice that would affect his outlook on life.

Are you enjoying the convenience of the experience of the closed beta players and passing the level alone with high efficiency? Or team up with a friend’s team, helping them but lowering your own security?

The lighting and composition of this episode is very interesting. Walking alone means abandonment, a simple but dark path.

The friend who refused to abandon the team’s trust stood in the light and watched Kirito walk into the shadows.

The contradictions that run through the whole play, strong but weak, small but stalwart, are laid down in this way.

The same composition method appeared once again, and Kirito was faced with the same choice. But this time, he chose to help the team of the girl named Xing.

Fortunately, he was always afraid of the death threat brought by the adventure, so Kirito, who had been brushing levels and equipment at a high intensity, stood on the bright side this time.

Kirito is not an arrogant and narcissistic character, he helps Yuki, stemming from his careful reasoning and guilt for once betraying his friends.

But an accident, which is not as good as the sky, also happened unexpectedly.

Because Kirito’s level is too high, the game mechanism of the labyrinth is triggered, causing the monster’s level to rise.

His own existence directly led to being beaten to death by monsters in front of his eyes.

After Xing’s death, Kirito got the props that stored Xing’s last words. When playing it, a picture of Xing’s memory appeared.

In the part of the song recorded by Xing, the camera captures Xing’s shadow reflected on the window. As this long shot continues to approach the window, Xing’s shadow gradually overlaps with Kirito, and is eventually replaced by Kirito’s silent figure.

The use of the lens here is fantastic.

Originally, it was necessary to change the lens here, but the existence of the window allows the audience to see two characters at the same time in one shot, which is a very skilled film and television language.

The coincidence is because the two hearts match each other, but it is also a metaphor for double death. Fortunately, his own tragedy is immersed in Kirito’s soul at this moment.

The window makes the two feel a fusion of emotions, but at the same time it assumes the function of the other side, and a phantom is a phantom after all.

One of the more anti-routine points of the animation is that the successive heavy losses did not allow Kirito to grow rapidly.

He couldn’t figure it out, so he chose to self-exile. In the following period of time, Kirito singled out BOSS-level monsters as if desperate, just to brush up resurrection items.

The result, of course, was a void, and the resurrection item could only be used within ten seconds of the player’s death.

At this moment, Kirito didn’t notice. Although he couldn’t understand why this crazy and meaningless tragedy existed, he had already begun to think about the most crucial question in his life——

What exactly is real power and power?

Reality reflected in another world

Several things that Kirito encountered later led him to find the answer.

A real couple is also married in the game. In reality, women are “ideal wives without any dissatisfaction”, “cute, submissive, and never had a fight”, which is what her husband likes most about her.

After entering the game world, the wife became more energetic, more confident, and became the core of the team. On the other hand, her husband, because he was mentally fragile, could not bear the devastation of death anxiety and gradually became ill, and developed a resentment of “being abandoned in place”.

In the end, the husband chose to “seal his wife in memory forever” in this “lawful killing” world and designed to kill her. He even told Kirito in a arrogant tone of the past, “You will understand sooner or later, the day you get love and will lose it”.

The heroine Asuna said it well:

The original novel was serialized in 2002, from which you can glimpse the avant-garde color of feminism in popular literature.

Similar stories are not accidental, orange players who kill for fun, bullying weak unions in the name of customs clearance, discussions on the setting of shared item storage after marriage…

These are the biggest places in Sword Art Online. Another world is a mirror, a prop used to reflect reality.

Therefore, it is keen to describe how diseases and karma in reality will develop to an advanced stage step by step under an extreme background.

If the famous saying left by JOJO is “the hymn of human beings is the hymn of courage”, then the puchline of “Sword Art Online” should be “the power of human will can surpass the power of the system”.

But what kind of great will can transcend the system that is equivalent to God in the game? Kirito didn’t understand this answer even after he cleared SAO and became a hero who saved 6,000 lives.

On the contrary, due to the appearance of another villain, Sugo, the heroine Asuna – who had become Kirito’s lover at this time – was trapped in another game and never woke up. As a result, Kirito fell into a deeper confusion.

In the final battle, Kirito was rubbed on the ground by Sugo, who had control over the system.

Originally, I expected Kirito to defeat the system on his own.

But the reason he was able to win was only because Sugo stole SAO’s technical framework, which led to the previous boss Kayaba hacking into the system and lending it to Kirito as an administrator with higher authority.

Kirito’s original words can also reflect his self-irony: “Next, it’s the battle between you, the ‘thief emperor’, and me, the ‘gilded warrior’.”

Kirito used the “gilded hero” to call himself a wake-up call: whether he or the villain, the power obtained in the game is the value given by the code, which is hypocritical.

Hot-blooded young people may feel that it is a pity that this scene does not reflect “beyond the system”.

But it is possible that only after recognizing this point itself and understanding the other world’s “all conditioned methods are like dream bubbles” can we be qualified to glimpse the true meaning of transcendence system.

To Kirito, the “will beyond the system” is his love for Asuna, a love that was born in a virtual world, but is incomparably real because of shared adversity and life and death.

“If Asuna doesn’t wake up for a day, my reality won’t advance for a day.”

At the end of the story, Kirito discarded equipment, values, and the title of hero. These are not important, cheating can only win, then cheating. The only important thing is to wake up Asuna and turn the gears of the real world together.

This may be what Sword Art Online wants to sing:

Friends, a journey to another world under the moonlight is a dream after all.

Only this life full of birth, old age, sickness and death, resentment, and love and separation is worthy of being taken seriously.

“Sword Art Online” is not only a model to be imitated, but also an object of rebellion by animation creators.

Animation fans complain that the theme of the other world has been played badly, which is a way of expressing dissatisfaction. In fact, the backbone of the animation industry, although they like to catch up with the tide of the different world, they are always breaking through the shackles of the original framework, or “deconstructing” the different world.

So later, the industry produced masterpieces such as “OverLord”, “Re0: Life in a Different World from Zero”, “Grimgar of Ash and Fantasy”, “Blessings for a Beautiful World” and so on.

“Grimgar of Ashes and Fantasy” uses the operation of letting the protagonist group members take the lunch when he appears, reminding the audience that another world is just another reality.

“OverLord” subversively observes the human beings from the perspective of the villain.

“Re0” develops the S/L (save and read file) elements in the game to the extreme, kicking the protagonist from the edge of death again and again.

“Blessings for a Wonderful World” is one of the funniest comedies to date. When it comes to comedy, of course, “Uncle Fantasy World”, which is currently on the air at station B, is also indispensable.

For ten years, the animation of the different world has been advancing in the constant confrontation of structure and deconstruction, and those who want to perform well on this stage are still appearing in turns.