(BUYER BEWARE: Amazon lists the first volume of the text-based light novel as the paperback version alongside the manga's Kindle digital release. This is a review of the light novel. Be aware of which one you've selected if you intend to buy either one.)
Ah, Sword Art Online. Whether you love it, hate it, or have never seen it, you've probably heard of it. A modern whipping-boy for people who insist on raging like rabid jackals at anything that becomes more popular than it deserves to be: an arbitrary problem not worth seriously complaining about in any case, though that's not to discount criticism in general (there's a difference between criticism and whining, and between complaining about a thing and complaining about the fans of that thing). SAO is in my own experience just a hit-and-miss series with some good parts, some bad parts, and a few specific parts that are absolute stand-out horrible plot elements. But it's worth mentioning that a large portion of the most commonly-complained-about issues with SAO are symptoms of the more deliberately shonen-centric appeal of the anime, combined with it not really doing a great job at adjusting the source material's storytelling methods to the medium. Written stories and cinematic/animated stories have very distinct strengths and weaknesses, and adaptations need to figure out how to adjust the strong points of one into those of the other, something SAO's anime adaptation only achieves mixed success with. This light novel series by Reki Kawahara is the source material, and as such can be judged in a vacuum; the anime, on the other hand, can be called out both for falling short of what it's adapting and for what it presents the audience on its own merits. It wouldn't be any more fair to judge SAO without at least examining the source material than it would be to base your entire judgment of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games on their respective movies.
In the spirit of that, Sword Art Online: Aincrad Volume 1 is an enjoyable, if imperfect, stand-alone story. But that's "stand-alone" in the sense that it was written with the intention of being self-contained, even if additional stories were set during the Aincrad story's time period after the fact. According to the author's afterword, it was originally written for a 2002 novel competition with a maximum length limit, which it ended up exceeding (thus not being entered into the competition in the end), prompting the writer to instead publish it as a web novel, and eventually it became a professionally published work with, I assume, some revision from its web novel iteration, since the writer references it as "amateur" and credits an editor with its rebirth in paperback form. There are a few aspects of this story in particular that make more sense in light of this, such as the way the novel's plot is paced (it begins two years into the virtual death game of Sword Art Online, flashing back after an in media res opener for a brief two-chapter look at how it started and a one-chapter synopsis of the intervening years, obvious attempts to keep the overall story compact) and the way the game mechanics of SAO function--at the time of its original writing, World of Warcraft would not be released for another two years; many conventions of MMORPG gameplay were still in flux during this period of gaming history, so the gameplay mechanics of Sword Art Online wouldn't have seemed as strange and frankly "backwards" at the time.
Considering its awkward origins, your mileage may vary on the clunkier elements of Volume 1, but it is, if nothing else, a story that doesn't need additional material to understand or appreciate, and which you can drop when you're finished with it if you don't want to be bothered reading more, which makes it a good starting point for anyone who's unsure of whether Sword Art Online is worth taking a risk on. The novel is written in the first-person perspective of protagonist Kirito, and because of this perspective, Kirito's personality is more solidly defined here than in the anime (in which it is... not really defined at all, to be brutally frank). The story itself focuses on one solo player among thousands of surviving players who've been trapped in a virtual death game for a long while, his relationship with a top-tier player named Asuna, and how the two of them found love and eventually decided to risk their own continued happiness by returning to the front lines to help clear the game and free themselves and the other players--ending with the (intentionally) abrupt resolution that would achieve that goal, although the novel trails off into a suitably uncertain final scene that leaves the future of the two main characters hanging off the side of a cliff in a way that fits both as sequel-bait and one of those maddeningly up-for-interpretation vague endings that novelists in general seem to love so darn much.
To be more specific about the story content in relation to the anime, this volume's story is that seen adapted in episodes 1, 8, 9, 10, 13, and 14 of the first season. Many of the other stories (including most of those introducing members of Kirito's "harem" as well as that rather eyebrow-raising character called Yui) are shorter side-stories that were written later in other volumes, although the story of Sachi and the Moonlit Black Cats guild from Episode 3 is present in this volume as a brief recounting of a past event that Kirito shares with Asuna midway through the book.
It's surprising how much better Kirito is when his character feels more generally grounded by the lack of troublesome story elements (the saying "less is more" comes to mind), but there are still issues with the story without bringing adaptations or future light novel volumes into it. The lack of any real coverage of Kirito's life during those two years leaves him without a truly solid "arc" to show his growth in skill as a player, with his only on-screen development directly tied into his relationship with Asuna and how it relates to their shared desire to live together but also to escape Aincrad. Asuna herself is shown very predominantly in a feminine love interest role here, without much real explanation for how a girl of her personality type became the vice commander of the game's most prominent frontline guild or one of Aincrad's strongest combat-oriented individual players. Further development for that side of Asuna wouldn't be given until future volumes, most notable of which are the stories in the Sword Art Online: Progressive light-novel side-series. The only character who can be called "fully realized" here is Akihiko Kayaba, the mysterious antagonist who designed SAO, but in this the story wins mostly by virtue of Kayaba working well as a mysterious, only partially explained character that you're meant to puzzle over from what actions of his are directly shown in the story. (So far, Kayaba is the only "good" villain in the entire franchise, in my humble opinion.)
One thing that I will both commend and criticize is the translation, which is enjoyable enough but also has a few examples of clunky wording or literal inclusions of writing style elements that simply do not jive with English prose. Double exclamation points and written-out verbalizations of wordless yells are two things that you'll normally only see in fanfiction, and apart from those kinds of weird bits, the general writing quality sits at "good to average" depending on the specific scene. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, as unwieldy as the woefully literal fan translation which is still floating around on the Internet. Considering that light novels don't get as much love as manga and anime here in the west, I can't really expect much better than this, but it COULD be better, and that bothers me.
Between this and the nice-sized, fairly sturdy paperback it's printed in, slightly more durable than your average manga volume, I'd advise buying the official paperback if you can and only reading the fan-translation to test the waters if you read that version at all. The illustrations are also pretty good, albeit standard fare for light novels, but the full-color set of eight illustration pages at the very start were a nice inclusion.
All in all, I'm going to say "give it a chance." You might like it. If you don't, chances are that you won't dislike it half as much as many dislike the anime. And if you do like it, I'd recommend springboarding off it into Volume 2, Volume 8 (not officially released yet as of this review), and the Progressive series for a more complete arc for the Aincrad death game era of SAO's plot.
As of this writing, since I haven't read beyond those, the jury is still out on whether the anime's abysmal Fairy Dance arc or the better-but-ultimately-average Phantom Bullet storyline are more enjoyable in light novel format. I'll be reviewing those light novels when I get to them.
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The enjoyable but flawed first novel in the Sword Art Online series.
Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2016
(BUYER BEWARE: Amazon lists the first volume of the text-based light novel as the paperback version alongside the manga's Kindle digital release. This is a review of the light novel. Be aware of which one you've selected if you intend to buy either one.)Ah, Sword Art Online. Whether you love it, hate it, or have never seen it, you've probably heard of it. A modern whipping-boy for people who insist on raging like rabid jackals at anything that becomes more popular than it deserves to be: an arbitrary problem not worth seriously complaining about in any case, though that's not to discount criticism in general (there's a difference between criticism and whining, and between complaining about a thing and complaining about the fans of that thing). SAO is in my own experience just a hit-and-miss series with some good parts, some bad parts, and a few specific parts that are absolute stand-out horrible plot elements. But it's worth mentioning that a large portion of the most commonly-complained-about issues with SAO are symptoms of the more deliberately shonen-centric appeal of the anime, combined with it not really doing a great job at adjusting the source material's storytelling methods to the medium. Written stories and cinematic/animated stories have very distinct strengths and weaknesses, and adaptations need to figure out how to adjust the strong points of one into those of the other, something SAO's anime adaptation only achieves mixed success with. This light novel series by Reki Kawahara is the source material, and as such can be judged in a vacuum; the anime, on the other hand, can be called out both for falling short of what it's adapting and for what it presents the audience on its own merits. It wouldn't be any more fair to judge SAO without at least examining the source material than it would be to base your entire judgment of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games on their respective movies.In the spirit of that, Sword Art Online: Aincrad Volume 1 is an enjoyable, if imperfect, stand-alone story. But that's "stand-alone" in the sense that it was written with the intention of being self-contained, even if additional stories were set during the Aincrad story's time period after the fact. According to the author's afterword, it was originally written for a 2002 novel competition with a maximum length limit, which it ended up exceeding (thus not being entered into the competition in the end), prompting the writer to instead publish it as a web novel, and eventually it became a professionally published work with, I assume, some revision from its web novel iteration, since the writer references it as "amateur" and credits an editor with its rebirth in paperback form. There are a few aspects of this story in particular that make more sense in light of this, such as the way the novel's plot is paced (it begins two years into the virtual death game of Sword Art Online, flashing back after an in media res opener for a brief two-chapter look at how it started and a one-chapter synopsis of the intervening years, obvious attempts to keep the overall story compact) and the way the game mechanics of SAO function--at the time of its original writing, World of Warcraft would not be released for another two years; many conventions of MMORPG gameplay were still in flux during this period of gaming history, so the gameplay mechanics of Sword Art Online wouldn't have seemed as strange and frankly "backwards" at the time.Considering its awkward origins, your mileage may vary on the clunkier elements of Volume 1, but it is, if nothing else, a story that doesn't need additional material to understand or appreciate, and which you can drop when you're finished with it if you don't want to be bothered reading more, which makes it a good starting point for anyone who's unsure of whether Sword Art Online is worth taking a risk on. The novel is written in the first-person perspective of protagonist Kirito, and because of this perspective, Kirito's personality is more solidly defined here than in the anime (in which it is... not really defined at all, to be brutally frank). The story itself focuses on one solo player among thousands of surviving players who've been trapped in a virtual death game for a long while, his relationship with a top-tier player named Asuna, and how the two of them found love and eventually decided to risk their own continued happiness by returning to the front lines to help clear the game and free themselves and the other players--ending with the (intentionally) abrupt resolution that would achieve that goal, although the novel trails off into a suitably uncertain final scene that leaves the future of the two main characters hanging off the side of a cliff in a way that fits both as sequel-bait and one of those maddeningly up-for-interpretation vague endings that novelists in general seem to love so darn much.To be more specific about the story content in relation to the anime, this volume's story is that seen adapted in episodes 1, 8, 9, 10, 13, and 14 of the first season. Many of the other stories (including most of those introducing members of Kirito's "harem" as well as that rather eyebrow-raising character called Yui) are shorter side-stories that were written later in other volumes, although the story of Sachi and the Moonlit Black Cats guild from Episode 3 is present in this volume as a brief recounting of a past event that Kirito shares with Asuna midway through the book.It's surprising how much better Kirito is when his character feels more generally grounded by the lack of troublesome story elements (the saying "less is more" comes to mind), but there are still issues with the story without bringing adaptations or future light novel volumes into it. The lack of any real coverage of Kirito's life during those two years leaves him without a truly solid "arc" to show his growth in skill as a player, with his only on-screen development directly tied into his relationship with Asuna and how it relates to their shared desire to live together but also to escape Aincrad. Asuna herself is shown very predominantly in a feminine love interest role here, without much real explanation for how a girl of her personality type became the vice commander of the game's most prominent frontline guild or one of Aincrad's strongest combat-oriented individual players. Further development for that side of Asuna wouldn't be given until future volumes, most notable of which are the stories in the Sword Art Online: Progressive light-novel side-series. The only character who can be called "fully realized" here is Akihiko Kayaba, the mysterious antagonist who designed SAO, but in this the story wins mostly by virtue of Kayaba working well as a mysterious, only partially explained character that you're meant to puzzle over from what actions of his are directly shown in the story. (So far, Kayaba is the only "good" villain in the entire franchise, in my humble opinion.)One thing that I will both commend and criticize is the translation, which is enjoyable enough but also has a few examples of clunky wording or literal inclusions of writing style elements that simply do not jive with English prose. Double exclamation points and written-out verbalizations of wordless yells are two things that you'll normally only see in fanfiction, and apart from those kinds of weird bits, the general writing quality sits at "good to average" depending on the specific scene. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, as unwieldy as the woefully literal fan translation which is still floating around on the Internet. Considering that light novels don't get as much love as manga and anime here in the west, I can't really expect much better than this, but it COULD be better, and that bothers me.Between this and the nice-sized, fairly sturdy paperback it's printed in, slightly more durable than your average manga volume, I'd advise buying the official paperback if you can and only reading the fan-translation to test the waters if you read that version at all. The illustrations are also pretty good, albeit standard fare for light novels, but the full-color set of eight illustration pages at the very start were a nice inclusion.All in all, I'm going to say "give it a chance." You might like it. If you don't, chances are that you won't dislike it half as much as many dislike the anime. And if you do like it, I'd recommend springboarding off it into Volume 2, Volume 8 (not officially released yet as of this review), and the Progressive series for a more complete arc for the Aincrad death game era of SAO's plot.As of this writing, since I haven't read beyond those, the jury is still out on whether the anime's abysmal Fairy Dance arc or the better-but-ultimately-average Phantom Bullet storyline are more enjoyable in light novel format. I'll be reviewing those light novels when I get to them.
Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2016
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 9, 2016
Ah, Sword Art Online. Whether you love it, hate it, or have never seen it, you've probably heard of it. A modern whipping-boy for people who insist on raging like rabid jackals at anything that becomes more popular than it deserves to be: an arbitrary problem not worth seriously complaining about in any case, though that's not to discount criticism in general (there's a difference between criticism and whining, and between complaining about a thing and complaining about the fans of that thing). SAO is in my own experience just a hit-and-miss series with some good parts, some bad parts, and a few specific parts that are absolute stand-out horrible plot elements. But it's worth mentioning that a large portion of the most commonly-complained-about issues with SAO are symptoms of the more deliberately shonen-centric appeal of the anime, combined with it not really doing a great job at adjusting the source material's storytelling methods to the medium. Written stories and cinematic/animated stories have very distinct strengths and weaknesses, and adaptations need to figure out how to adjust the strong points of one into those of the other, something SAO's anime adaptation only achieves mixed success with. This light novel series by Reki Kawahara is the source material, and as such can be judged in a vacuum; the anime, on the other hand, can be called out both for falling short of what it's adapting and for what it presents the audience on its own merits. It wouldn't be any more fair to judge SAO without at least examining the source material than it would be to base your entire judgment of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games on their respective movies.
In the spirit of that, Sword Art Online: Aincrad Volume 1 is an enjoyable, if imperfect, stand-alone story. But that's "stand-alone" in the sense that it was written with the intention of being self-contained, even if additional stories were set during the Aincrad story's time period after the fact. According to the author's afterword, it was originally written for a 2002 novel competition with a maximum length limit, which it ended up exceeding (thus not being entered into the competition in the end), prompting the writer to instead publish it as a web novel, and eventually it became a professionally published work with, I assume, some revision from its web novel iteration, since the writer references it as "amateur" and credits an editor with its rebirth in paperback form. There are a few aspects of this story in particular that make more sense in light of this, such as the way the novel's plot is paced (it begins two years into the virtual death game of Sword Art Online, flashing back after an in media res opener for a brief two-chapter look at how it started and a one-chapter synopsis of the intervening years, obvious attempts to keep the overall story compact) and the way the game mechanics of SAO function--at the time of its original writing, World of Warcraft would not be released for another two years; many conventions of MMORPG gameplay were still in flux during this period of gaming history, so the gameplay mechanics of Sword Art Online wouldn't have seemed as strange and frankly "backwards" at the time.
Considering its awkward origins, your mileage may vary on the clunkier elements of Volume 1, but it is, if nothing else, a story that doesn't need additional material to understand or appreciate, and which you can drop when you're finished with it if you don't want to be bothered reading more, which makes it a good starting point for anyone who's unsure of whether Sword Art Online is worth taking a risk on. The novel is written in the first-person perspective of protagonist Kirito, and because of this perspective, Kirito's personality is more solidly defined here than in the anime (in which it is... not really defined at all, to be brutally frank). The story itself focuses on one solo player among thousands of surviving players who've been trapped in a virtual death game for a long while, his relationship with a top-tier player named Asuna, and how the two of them found love and eventually decided to risk their own continued happiness by returning to the front lines to help clear the game and free themselves and the other players--ending with the (intentionally) abrupt resolution that would achieve that goal, although the novel trails off into a suitably uncertain final scene that leaves the future of the two main characters hanging off the side of a cliff in a way that fits both as sequel-bait and one of those maddeningly up-for-interpretation vague endings that novelists in general seem to love so darn much.
To be more specific about the story content in relation to the anime, this volume's story is that seen adapted in episodes 1, 8, 9, 10, 13, and 14 of the first season. Many of the other stories (including most of those introducing members of Kirito's "harem" as well as that rather eyebrow-raising character called Yui) are shorter side-stories that were written later in other volumes, although the story of Sachi and the Moonlit Black Cats guild from Episode 3 is present in this volume as a brief recounting of a past event that Kirito shares with Asuna midway through the book.
It's surprising how much better Kirito is when his character feels more generally grounded by the lack of troublesome story elements (the saying "less is more" comes to mind), but there are still issues with the story without bringing adaptations or future light novel volumes into it. The lack of any real coverage of Kirito's life during those two years leaves him without a truly solid "arc" to show his growth in skill as a player, with his only on-screen development directly tied into his relationship with Asuna and how it relates to their shared desire to live together but also to escape Aincrad. Asuna herself is shown very predominantly in a feminine love interest role here, without much real explanation for how a girl of her personality type became the vice commander of the game's most prominent frontline guild or one of Aincrad's strongest combat-oriented individual players. Further development for that side of Asuna wouldn't be given until future volumes, most notable of which are the stories in the Sword Art Online: Progressive light-novel side-series. The only character who can be called "fully realized" here is Akihiko Kayaba, the mysterious antagonist who designed SAO, but in this the story wins mostly by virtue of Kayaba working well as a mysterious, only partially explained character that you're meant to puzzle over from what actions of his are directly shown in the story. (So far, Kayaba is the only "good" villain in the entire franchise, in my humble opinion.)
One thing that I will both commend and criticize is the translation, which is enjoyable enough but also has a few examples of clunky wording or literal inclusions of writing style elements that simply do not jive with English prose. Double exclamation points and written-out verbalizations of wordless yells are two things that you'll normally only see in fanfiction, and apart from those kinds of weird bits, the general writing quality sits at "good to average" depending on the specific scene. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, as unwieldy as the woefully literal fan translation which is still floating around on the Internet. Considering that light novels don't get as much love as manga and anime here in the west, I can't really expect much better than this, but it COULD be better, and that bothers me.
Between this and the nice-sized, fairly sturdy paperback it's printed in, slightly more durable than your average manga volume, I'd advise buying the official paperback if you can and only reading the fan-translation to test the waters if you read that version at all. The illustrations are also pretty good, albeit standard fare for light novels, but the full-color set of eight illustration pages at the very start were a nice inclusion.
All in all, I'm going to say "give it a chance." You might like it. If you don't, chances are that you won't dislike it half as much as many dislike the anime. And if you do like it, I'd recommend springboarding off it into Volume 2, Volume 8 (not officially released yet as of this review), and the Progressive series for a more complete arc for the Aincrad death game era of SAO's plot.
As of this writing, since I haven't read beyond those, the jury is still out on whether the anime's abysmal Fairy Dance arc or the better-but-ultimately-average Phantom Bullet storyline are more enjoyable in light novel format. I'll be reviewing those light novels when I get to them.
The enjoyable but flawed first novel in the Sword Art Online series.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 9, 2016
(BUYER BEWARE: Amazon lists the first volume of the text-based light novel as the paperback version alongside the manga's Kindle digital release. This is a review of the light novel. Be aware of which one you've selected if you intend to buy either one.)Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 9, 2016
Ah, Sword Art Online. Whether you love it, hate it, or have never seen it, you've probably heard of it. A modern whipping-boy for people who insist on raging like rabid jackals at anything that becomes more popular than it deserves to be: an arbitrary problem not worth seriously complaining about in any case, though that's not to discount criticism in general (there's a difference between criticism and whining, and between complaining about a thing and complaining about the fans of that thing). SAO is in my own experience just a hit-and-miss series with some good parts, some bad parts, and a few specific parts that are absolute stand-out horrible plot elements. But it's worth mentioning that a large portion of the most commonly-complained-about issues with SAO are symptoms of the more deliberately shonen-centric appeal of the anime, combined with it not really doing a great job at adjusting the source material's storytelling methods to the medium. Written stories and cinematic/animated stories have very distinct strengths and weaknesses, and adaptations need to figure out how to adjust the strong points of one into those of the other, something SAO's anime adaptation only achieves mixed success with. This light novel series by Reki Kawahara is the source material, and as such can be judged in a vacuum; the anime, on the other hand, can be called out both for falling short of what it's adapting and for what it presents the audience on its own merits. It wouldn't be any more fair to judge SAO without at least examining the source material than it would be to base your entire judgment of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games on their respective movies.
In the spirit of that, Sword Art Online: Aincrad Volume 1 is an enjoyable, if imperfect, stand-alone story. But that's "stand-alone" in the sense that it was written with the intention of being self-contained, even if additional stories were set during the Aincrad story's time period after the fact. According to the author's afterword, it was originally written for a 2002 novel competition with a maximum length limit, which it ended up exceeding (thus not being entered into the competition in the end), prompting the writer to instead publish it as a web novel, and eventually it became a professionally published work with, I assume, some revision from its web novel iteration, since the writer references it as "amateur" and credits an editor with its rebirth in paperback form. There are a few aspects of this story in particular that make more sense in light of this, such as the way the novel's plot is paced (it begins two years into the virtual death game of Sword Art Online, flashing back after an in media res opener for a brief two-chapter look at how it started and a one-chapter synopsis of the intervening years, obvious attempts to keep the overall story compact) and the way the game mechanics of SAO function--at the time of its original writing, World of Warcraft would not be released for another two years; many conventions of MMORPG gameplay were still in flux during this period of gaming history, so the gameplay mechanics of Sword Art Online wouldn't have seemed as strange and frankly "backwards" at the time.
Considering its awkward origins, your mileage may vary on the clunkier elements of Volume 1, but it is, if nothing else, a story that doesn't need additional material to understand or appreciate, and which you can drop when you're finished with it if you don't want to be bothered reading more, which makes it a good starting point for anyone who's unsure of whether Sword Art Online is worth taking a risk on. The novel is written in the first-person perspective of protagonist Kirito, and because of this perspective, Kirito's personality is more solidly defined here than in the anime (in which it is... not really defined at all, to be brutally frank). The story itself focuses on one solo player among thousands of surviving players who've been trapped in a virtual death game for a long while, his relationship with a top-tier player named Asuna, and how the two of them found love and eventually decided to risk their own continued happiness by returning to the front lines to help clear the game and free themselves and the other players--ending with the (intentionally) abrupt resolution that would achieve that goal, although the novel trails off into a suitably uncertain final scene that leaves the future of the two main characters hanging off the side of a cliff in a way that fits both as sequel-bait and one of those maddeningly up-for-interpretation vague endings that novelists in general seem to love so darn much.
To be more specific about the story content in relation to the anime, this volume's story is that seen adapted in episodes 1, 8, 9, 10, 13, and 14 of the first season. Many of the other stories (including most of those introducing members of Kirito's "harem" as well as that rather eyebrow-raising character called Yui) are shorter side-stories that were written later in other volumes, although the story of Sachi and the Moonlit Black Cats guild from Episode 3 is present in this volume as a brief recounting of a past event that Kirito shares with Asuna midway through the book.
It's surprising how much better Kirito is when his character feels more generally grounded by the lack of troublesome story elements (the saying "less is more" comes to mind), but there are still issues with the story without bringing adaptations or future light novel volumes into it. The lack of any real coverage of Kirito's life during those two years leaves him without a truly solid "arc" to show his growth in skill as a player, with his only on-screen development directly tied into his relationship with Asuna and how it relates to their shared desire to live together but also to escape Aincrad. Asuna herself is shown very predominantly in a feminine love interest role here, without much real explanation for how a girl of her personality type became the vice commander of the game's most prominent frontline guild or one of Aincrad's strongest combat-oriented individual players. Further development for that side of Asuna wouldn't be given until future volumes, most notable of which are the stories in the Sword Art Online: Progressive light-novel side-series. The only character who can be called "fully realized" here is Akihiko Kayaba, the mysterious antagonist who designed SAO, but in this the story wins mostly by virtue of Kayaba working well as a mysterious, only partially explained character that you're meant to puzzle over from what actions of his are directly shown in the story. (So far, Kayaba is the only "good" villain in the entire franchise, in my humble opinion.)
One thing that I will both commend and criticize is the translation, which is enjoyable enough but also has a few examples of clunky wording or literal inclusions of writing style elements that simply do not jive with English prose. Double exclamation points and written-out verbalizations of wordless yells are two things that you'll normally only see in fanfiction, and apart from those kinds of weird bits, the general writing quality sits at "good to average" depending on the specific scene. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, as unwieldy as the woefully literal fan translation which is still floating around on the Internet. Considering that light novels don't get as much love as manga and anime here in the west, I can't really expect much better than this, but it COULD be better, and that bothers me.
Between this and the nice-sized, fairly sturdy paperback it's printed in, slightly more durable than your average manga volume, I'd advise buying the official paperback if you can and only reading the fan-translation to test the waters if you read that version at all. The illustrations are also pretty good, albeit standard fare for light novels, but the full-color set of eight illustration pages at the very start were a nice inclusion.
All in all, I'm going to say "give it a chance." You might like it. If you don't, chances are that you won't dislike it half as much as many dislike the anime. And if you do like it, I'd recommend springboarding off it into Volume 2, Volume 8 (not officially released yet as of this review), and the Progressive series for a more complete arc for the Aincrad death game era of SAO's plot.
As of this writing, since I haven't read beyond those, the jury is still out on whether the anime's abysmal Fairy Dance arc or the better-but-ultimately-average Phantom Bullet storyline are more enjoyable in light novel format. I'll be reviewing those light novels when I get to them.
Images in this review
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