Sword Art Online
Probably the biggest name in the genre right now. When people are doing a parody video series on YouTube of your anime, you know you've gotten big enough to make an impact on the culture. Over the course of five story arcs so far, we've seen three different MMOs, all ostensibly based on the same engine. Two of them are distinctly in the "heroic fantasy" mold and one seems to be more of an MMO shooter with interesting loot drops. As games, from how they're described, they've got the following problems:
- The light novel and the "Aincrad" arc both mention how Kirito maxes out his Speed attribute, thus getting the Dual Wield special ability. The light novel goes into more detail, indicating that there are a dozen of these abilities and only one person in the game can hold them. This is pretty damned ridiculous from an MMO perspective. Bearing in mind that we're talking about a game world, it has to have game mechanics that make sense. Most MMOs have a point of diminishing returns on certain attributes, so even if you had maxed out Speed, your character still wouldn't have any advantage over somebody who had just reached the practical threshold for that attribute.
- To continue on the "there can be only one" aspect, particularly in a game where everybody is trapped in the environment, you'd have to know that some folks out there would be gunning for anybody who had those powers. While it would be cool if one group of people had banded together and used those powers to help beat the game, the reality is more likely to be closer to Afro Samurai than The Seven Samurai.
- The first episode of the anime mentions how the players who get out in front and hunt mobs hard are the ones who are going to get all the XP. This is probably the most damning proof that Reki Kawahara doesn't game much if at all, and certainly not MMOs. For good or ill, mobs respawn, which means XP isn't a finite resource. Oddly enough, it might be interesting to see an MMO where mobs did take longer to respawn, where mindlessly slaughtering half the wildlife in whatever forest zone you happened to be in wasn't a viable strategy for advancement. But that would mean you'd have to construct other means of getting XP to improve.
- Much like the different "floors" of Aincrad, the dungeons seemingly had only finite amounts of mobs and bosses to beat. Beat them once, and they were cleared forever. In a game where people were (initially) expected to leave and come back, that's not a great recipe for building any sort of deep and abiding interest. It also would create the sort of situation we see right now in games like World of WarCraft where certain raid guilds fight to get that "world first" clear, even to the point of sabotaging other guilds.
As much as I enjoyed SAO, I enjoyed Log Horizon even more. Why? Because it didn't rely on giant set piece battles or protagonists being mentally and emotionally tortured for their failures. Yes, there was angst, there was moodiness, there was drama. But Log Horizon kept a lot of more of the "game" feel, even though it became apparent that the players were in an actual different world instead of merely unable to log out. It also gave us characters who can and would outsmart their opponents instead of getting into a fight. That said, the underlying game did have a few problems:
- There was definitely a sense of "class bloat" going on. You see it in Final Fantasy XIV and WoW, where you have multiple different classes overlapping in certain areas, along with different specializations. While it looked like there were only about seven or eight classes shown, I got the feeling there were more that hadn't been covered. If that's the case, I have to wonder how many there were.
- I can't tell whether it was because of the transition from game world to alternate reality, but it felt like the game was less of a game and more of a second job, much like EVE Online. Arguably, the fact that everybody had to actually learn to cook kind of reinforced that idea, but there was a lot of ambiguity about things like character class, craft and profession skills, and that sort of thing.
- The economy sounded like it was fundamentally broken. When you're able to calculate that the world only has enough gold to keep things going for a few months at most, and then everybody will be losing their houses and guild halls because they can't pay the rent, you gotta figure the economy was very tightly managed and not terribly well thought out.
- I will take a moment here to praise the series for getting something kind of right. The raid zones that the characters go through are immense. It's probably the first MMO-themed anime that really captured that aspect for me. Even so, some parts of the raids did get kind of bonkers, particularly the sense that you had to raid in order to get the best gear in the game, period. That part's accurate enough, but it's still bonkers.
This one seems to be in the same vein as Log Horizon, but with SAO's sense of stakes. We certainly get the impression that the characters are in a game, but they don't appear to have any conscious recollection that they are in a game or how they got in there in the first place. There's also not any sort of indicators like health or mana bars to show the player's status. Nor is there any sort of XP bar, though the characters do think to go back to town for more training. Not quite halfway through, one of the party members die, and the rest of the series deals with how the group handles that loss, as well as the incorporation of a new party member to replace their dead comrade.
- I can't be sure on this one, but much like Log Horizon, there was a feeling of "class bloat" that couldn't quite be totally demonstrated. While there were only seven characters that series focused on, I got the vague impression there were more classes out there which we hadn't and probably couldn't see because the party had all the basics covered (tank, DPS, healing, crowd control).
- The ranking system which seemed to replace the level system wasn't very clearly articulated. Pay X amount of cash, buy yourself a promotion to the next tier. Seems kinda silly when you think about it. Admittedly, levels themselves can be an arbitrary limitation, but it does at least give you an "at-a-glance" notion of relative power levels. The ranking system does much the same, but it's more fuzzy.
- Since the players have no memories of who or what they were before waking up in Grimgar, it's hard to say if this is even technically a game, a tech demo, or somebody breaking reality. Weirdly, the title sequence suggests some sort of very unique "total immersion" within a game environment, though whether players are simply reincarnated and respawned on a different server "shard" or if they're really dead is open to debate.
Towards the end of the 22nd Century (yikes!), a popular "deep dive" VRMMORPG is slated to shut down after well over a decade. The leader of one of the game's top guilds, who goes by the name Momonga, decides that he'll stay logged in right through the shutdown, despite his guild having dwindled to almost nothing and their guild hall being practically a raid dungeon in its own right. When the servers shut down, Momonga finds himself in a completely different world, where his guild hall and everything in it is sticking out like a sore thumb. Hilarity ensues.
- For a wonder, there wasn't a sense of class bloat, or race bloat for that matter. A few basic fantasy races, some basic classes, pretty standard stuff. Very restrained.
- While the class/race combos might have been restrained, the character progression system was very clearly not well explained. Admittedly, whatever the system was originally before the shutdown is probably moot, but it would have been more helpful to understand exactly how the main character can swap from nearly omnipotent lich king sorceror to merely earth shattering badass warrior.
- The game may not have succumbed to class bloating, but they definitely had some problems in the loot department. The ranking of certain powerful magical artifacts, and their effects, speaks of a game that got wildly out of hand with regards to power balance. Maybe not quite Dragon Ball Z levels of ridiculousness, but pretty darned close.
- One thing I was particularly taken by was the presence of AI followers that players had control over. While MMOs like WoW have only started giving players sidekicks in the last year or two, and certain classes have always had "pets" as part of their power sets, this was something far different. These were NPCs of the players' creation, with personalities, backstories, abilities, and other intrinsic details determined by the player. I'd like to have that sort of feature in a game. Something analogous to the Leadership feat from 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons combined with the character creation tools from City of Heroes.
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