Yes, it’s done! We fin­ished our work on it! The leg­endary web novel that accrued over 6.5 mil­lion views on a per­sonal site has now been brought to English!

From merely the descrip­tion, Sword Art Online is a novel that’s easy to pass and ignore. Its premise is ridicu­lous yet hardly orig­i­nal. Its char­ac­ters are very cliche. Its plot and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment are rel­a­tively sim­ple and uti­lize some very com­mon tropes. Its art and char­ac­ter designs remind one of Rag­narok Online. Every­thing about it screams generic scifi/fantasy writ­ten for gamers by a gamer. Yet despite all that, Reki Kawahara’s work is a piece of art that leaves any reader with the sligh­est MMO expe­ri­ence doubt­less of SAO’s pop­u­lar­ity and why he is the grand prize win­ner of the 2008 Dengeki Novel Prize. The truth is a sim­ple one, eas­ily dis­cernible once you flip past the first few pages:

His sto­ry­telling style is sim­ply intoxicating

Jason of blog好き once com­pared the premise of SAO to a merge of Dot Hack and Tower of Dru­aga. Yes, it’s about 10,000 hard­core gamers who were trapped inside a vir­tual real­ity MMORPG and can­not exit until they climb to the top of an 100 story tower and defeat its final boss. Unlike the gamer’s dream, death within this Matrix also meant death in real life — no saves, no respawns. It’s quite the ridicu­lous premise: a deadly exper­i­ment pre­pared by the game’s mad sci­en­tist cre­ator that trapped 10,000 unwill­ingly souls as its subjects.

We fol­low the adven­tures of yet another generic main char­ac­ter, a lone wolf with a tragic past, who meets up with the num­ber one bishoujo gamer of within SAO — and what, she’s in love with the main but is being slightly tsun­dere about it? All for a rea­son that seemed to have dropped out of some cheap visual novel? Is this the next self-insertable moe story or some­thing? Well, that might be part of SAO’s appeal—

But I’m reminded yet again that there is a value to stereo­types and tropes — their uno­rig­i­nal­ity makes them easy to under­stand, easy to sym­pa­thize with, easy to get in character.

This is where Kawahara-sensei’s writ­ing comes in. With­out any unnec­es­sary ver­bosity, his pre­cisely detailed descrip­tions paints every frame of the story vividly within the reader’s mind. We’re quickly tossed into a straight­for­ward main story with min­i­mum expo­si­tionary delay. With sim­ple con­cepts, events, and char­ac­ters, it’s easy to fall in line with the main leads, think his thoughts and feel his emo­tions. Com­bine this with Kawahara’s atten­tion to detail and the story’s first-person per­spec­tive which describes to us exactly what the main char­ac­ter sees, hears, feels, and does, we quickly get in sync with him. As a result, every­thing that hap­pens gains a sense of per­sonal attach­ment, be it his guilt as a sole sur­vivor, his desire for alone time with his beloved, or his con­fu­sion regard­ing the real-world ver­sus game-world issues. Finally, add some icing on the cake through Kawahara’s excel­lent use of fore­shad­ow­ing, a few well-placed cliffhang­ers, and sev­eral bril­liantly told melo­drama scenes, and we have one addict­ing and highly enjoy­able novel.

[ 茨乃 ]

Mat­ter of fact, Kawahara’s writ­ing is the rea­son I ended up work­ing on the project — I wanted to keep as few of those vivid descrip­tions from being lost in trans­la­tion as possible.

As I men­tioned, the first vol­ume has fin­ished trans­la­tion and edit­ing at Baka-Tsuki, which cov­ers all of the main story within the first SAO game (PDF)(Backup) . The sec­ond vol­ume, which we’re mov­ing directly into, will fea­ture four short sto­ries that hap­pens before the first vol­ume to fur­ther shape the SAO world, its mechan­ics, its inhab­i­tants, and our lead char­ac­ters; the main story will then con­tinue in vol­ume 3 in another game.

In the long run though, SAO might become another game-like novel series (like ZnT), except where Kir­ito picks up party mem­bers while hop­ping between dif­fer­ent MMOs.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Fate/Zero Light Novel Review: Sur­pass­ing Originals
• Bun­gaku Shoujo Light Novel Review: Sui­ci­dal Mime, Matryoshka Literature
• Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria Review: Dra­matic Slice-of-Life Mystery

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 18:46 and is filed under Light Novels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.