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Belated happy birthday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija! And a belated review:
Sword Art Online v1-10, Reki Kawahara - Stories about role-playing game stories and trapped-in-a-deadly-virtual-world plot devices are usually Not My Thing. I devoured these books anyway.
Mainly because Kawahara does good writing. His focus is as much on the psychology of video gaming and the possible effects of virtual worlds might have on same (including speculations regarding neuroplasticity) as on the RPG mechanics. It also helps that there's less sexism than your average Japanese pop-culture artifact, including strong female characters with real agency. Indeed, agency is a main touchstone for all his characters, and when the main female protagonist spends a novel in a golden birdcage, this is treated as the humiliating outrage that it is. Plus, he gets much, much better at motivating his antagonists as he goes on.
Um, I should describe the story, shouldn't I? The first book starts upon the initial release of the first neural interface to a VR MMRPG, the eponymous Sword Art Online. Our hero was one of the beta testers, so has a little bit of a leg up on surviving when the first 10,000 players are trapped by the game's creator, who announces he won't release them until all hundred levels are cleared -- oh, and by the way, thanks to those neural inducers, a game death is a real death. We then skip ahead two years to when they're working on clearing the 73rd floor. And see? -- it's descriptions like that that put me off.
My one caveat for recommending it is that in the current ongoing arc ("Alicization," and no, that's only tangentially a Carroll reference), the author seems to have decided that infodumps disguised as navel-gazing is a better use of the first half of each volume than zippy action -- which means all the story happens in the second half, with very little progress. 10 novels out, unlicensed, all available in fan translations (including Kindle formatted).
---L.
rachelmanija! And a belated review: Sword Art Online v1-10, Reki Kawahara - Stories about role-playing game stories and trapped-in-a-deadly-virtual-world plot devices are usually Not My Thing. I devoured these books anyway.
Mainly because Kawahara does good writing. His focus is as much on the psychology of video gaming and the possible effects of virtual worlds might have on same (including speculations regarding neuroplasticity) as on the RPG mechanics. It also helps that there's less sexism than your average Japanese pop-culture artifact, including strong female characters with real agency. Indeed, agency is a main touchstone for all his characters, and when the main female protagonist spends a novel in a golden birdcage, this is treated as the humiliating outrage that it is. Plus, he gets much, much better at motivating his antagonists as he goes on.
Um, I should describe the story, shouldn't I? The first book starts upon the initial release of the first neural interface to a VR MMRPG, the eponymous Sword Art Online. Our hero was one of the beta testers, so has a little bit of a leg up on surviving when the first 10,000 players are trapped by the game's creator, who announces he won't release them until all hundred levels are cleared -- oh, and by the way, thanks to those neural inducers, a game death is a real death. We then skip ahead two years to when they're working on clearing the 73rd floor. And see? -- it's descriptions like that that put me off.
My one caveat for recommending it is that in the current ongoing arc ("Alicization," and no, that's only tangentially a Carroll reference), the author seems to have decided that infodumps disguised as navel-gazing is a better use of the first half of each volume than zippy action -- which means all the story happens in the second half, with very little progress. 10 novels out, unlicensed, all available in fan translations (including Kindle formatted).
---L.