Someone must have decided that the SAO series did not have enough attractive ladies in it, because this spinoff adds about five more gorgeous girls to our favorite VRMMO gamer’s quasi-harem; the fact that some of them are AIs is a minor detail.
Creative Staff:
Original Story: Reki Kawahara
Character Design: abec
Art: Tomo Hirokawa
Story Supervision: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment
Translation: Stephen Paul
Lettering: Brndn Blakeslee
What They Say:
A few months after escaping from Sword Art Online, Kirito is ready to dive into a brand-new VRMMO–Sword Art: Origin. This game promises to have all of the base features from Aincrad without any of the bad. When Kirito meets a mysterious girl in need of his help, that theory will be put to the test…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Let’s take a moment to clarify where this manga fits in the Sword Art Online franchise, because it’s not the clearest thing in the world. The SAO video games have their own storyline which, while closely related to the original light novel story, diverges at certain points. Not only do the games have their own original characters that don’t appear in the main story, but certain characters who are dead in mainline SAO are alive in the games, and so on. Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization is the first manga adaptation of the game storyline. So what we have here is a manga based on a real-life video game, which is based on a light novel that takes place inside an imaginary video game. Clear as mud? I swear, sometimes living in the future is hard.
Anyway, SAO as a franchise always leaves me in a difficult place, because while I like it a lot, I feel like the maturity level of the series fluctuates wildly. On the one hand you have Mother’s Rosario, a genuinely poignant story that deals with themes many other franchises are afraid to touch, then you have stuff like Silica being flipped upside-down by a plant monster and flashing her panties. But just by putting it that way, I fear I’m falling into the trap of saying “fanservice= dumb,” and I should really know better than that. Media with erotic content can have intelligent stories, and stories that lack ero content aren’t necessarily intelligent, either. In specific case of SAO though, the storylines that I find most compelling tend to be pretty much devoid of fan service. Hollow Realization features Silica accidentally flashing her panties, so I’m tempted to write it off as “not my kind of SAO” right from the beginning. Is that really fair though?
The story is pretty intriguing, even though the setting is a retread of Aincrad from the first story arc. In this version of Aincrad (called Ainground, because err…does it matter?), the players no longer die in real life when they’re killed in the game, but the NPCs do. A killed NPC does not respawn, but is simply replaced. At first this seems trivial, since NPCs aren’t people, but for Kirito and Asuna– who have an AI child that they raise together– the distinction isn’t nearly so clear. They find a girl AI with a glitched quest, Premiere, who’s particularly vulnerable to being killed, and since Kirito can’t go five minutes without finding a pretty girl to protect (whether she’s digital or analog), we have our hero’s motivation.
I feel like this story would be more intriguing if the aforementioned AI daughter, Yui, didn’t already exist. We’ve already seen a story where Kirito and Asuna bond with an AI girl and start questioning the ability of AIs to develop sentience, and it’s hard to imagine that Premiere’s story is going to go in a wildly different direction. Premiere is not Yui and has her own idiosyncrasies, but still, it’s not the freshest storyline for this franchise to tackle.
If you’re a different sort of fan than me and find stuff like Silica’s panty shots charming rather than annoying, this volume has a lot to offer. Not only do we get all the likable SAO heroines like Asuna, Leafa and Sinon off having adventures together, but we also have the game only heroines like Philea and Strea on hand as well. Hirokawa’s style is well-suited to drawing the many ladies of SAO, making them both cute and sexy. I’ve always felt that Kirito’s “harem” is somewhat wasted on him, what with him being so devoted to Asuna and all, but if you like the girls of SAO, this volume is for you. Since Asuna is unquestionably Kirito’s one and only, the other girls don’t get a whole lot to do, but I’m sure they’ll all get their own moments in the sun as the series progresses.
In Summary:
Am I interested in what happens to Premiere? Kind of, but I could probably never pick up another volume of Hollow Realization again and not be bothered worrying about her. As SAO side-stories go, this feels pretty skippable, and unlike SAO: Gun Gale Online, it’s not even in the same continuity as everything else. However, if you like these characters, particularly the girls, this isn’t a bad excuse to spend some more time with them. I’m tempted to give this a C, but Tomo Hirokawa’s art is so perfect for this project that it elevates the whole thing, so let’s give credit where credit is due.
Grade: B
Age Rating: Teen
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: November 13th, 2018
MSRP: US $13.oo CAN $17.00
