Monday, January 15, 2018

Sword Art Online and Danmachi/Is it wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon? Comparison



SAO and Danmachi are two of the most popular harem, video game inspired anime/light novel series out there. Both series are heavily criticised for being lazily written, pandering, and overrated. Some people like me, read these stories for fun and if you look on the side, you'll find my everything wrong with SAO page where you can help add to its faults. Here, I will be talking about what Danmachi
does better than SAO. That's right. I think Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon? more than SAO even though I have fewer volumes of it. The series still needs work, but at least it has some level of positive quality.

Main character
Bell is a better main character than Kirito for several reasons.

  1. Bell starts off weak and even though he gets powerful gear and an ability that makes him level up quicker, he's still able to be easily killed as he doesn't have good defensive stats. On the other hand, Kirito is overpowered in all aspects and only needs help from weaker characters in a handful of situations.
  2. He wants to pick up girls and is generally dumb when it comes to them. Bell saves a girl who screws him over several times because she's a girl. His grandfather taught him to be this way, which gives him a reason to obtain a harem. Bell doesn't really want to and only wants one girl, but he still manages to steal the hearts of a goddess, bartender, supporter, and desk attendant. It's true that I'd rather him be written as more of a brazen character rather than an idiot but that's what we have. Kirito has a harem even though he married Asuna in-game. Kirito doesn't even try to blow the others off and just keeps them around. The girls on Bell's side are also more useful and do more for the plot than Kirito's harem. Both of the main character's girls are somewhat uninteresting, but I'll have to say Aiz is better than Asuna. Asuna tries to be a strong woman who can stand on her own without Kirito, but that never truly happens even in her own little series. Aiz has a deadpan personality, but at least she isn't contradictory.
Welf/Klein
Welf is basically Klein from SAO. They both have the same hair color, haircut, fill the same role as the main character's best friend, and are both more interesting characters than the main character. The main difference is that Klein plays a samurai class and doesn't do much in the plot while Welf is a constantly on Bell's team and acts as his group's blacksmith. Welf actually has more time in the plot than Klein even though SAO has been running longer than Danmachi.

The Plot
Bell wants to be a hero and get a girlfriend/wife. That's pretty much the entire reason the plot keeps going forward. Simple and easy to follow. SAO, on the other hand, has no endpoint or reason to go on. Accel world is technically a continuation of SAO, which means SAO should've ended by now, but it hasn't. The plot of SAO tries to more than what it really is but keeps going on until it gets to this almost Ghost in the Shell type arc, which should be where it ends, but there are two more volumes that come after that so the future is uncertain. Overextended is the least I can say about it.

Overall, I think Danmachi is better than SAO. You might like neither series or both, but I hope this post has been informative enough to make you think about which series you should look at first or to make you think about them.

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