#first volume

I didn't remeber that that doctor was the one to diagnose Midoriya.

(Abandon the idea, it's for the best)

Mr. Perfect record (Bakugo) but also a bully in his free time. What an asshole he was and what a wonderful character development he has had.

Also his hand is funny ajsbjd. It's so noticeable the difference between the first volume's hands and the last one's.

(I told you to stop smoking. If someone finds out I'll get in trouble too.)

ALL MIGHT IS A FUCKING GIRAFFE WTF

I didn't remember him having such a long neck?? Has it always been kilometric?

I recently saw a post about Mic not having nostrils and now I cannot stop seeing it

Also, I'm so happy that Kirishima ended up second :3 and pretty close to Bakugo point-wise.

(I just realized they put the results panel in English, what the hell)

I think it's so funny that at first, Midoriya put Iida and Bakugo in the same bag (I'm not sure this expression is like this in English, anyway.)

(I hope those scary guys are in another class...)

I love Aizawa AJSJJDM. He's giving his first impression to his students as a worm ajsjkd.

(If you want to play friends go elsewhere. Because here... You come to become a hero. What!? And this man?)

Also, I have to mention how funny it was seeing the first drawings of some of the mains ajsjks.

Mina looks like she's got her hair wet and Asui like a depressed person ajsnd. Meanwhile we have poor Koda (what even happened to him) and Kirishima's hair looks kind of weird?

To end, we got some gremlin Bakugo

(Explosive speed!!)

Story:

Sword Art Online: Progressive is an expansion to the first arc of the main series: Aincrad with plenty of new scenes and details added to flesh out the story and characters. If you somehow don’t know of the premise to the arc, it’s essentially a survival game story set in a VRMMORPG where if the characters die in the game, they die in real life and to escape the game, they have clear all 100 floors of Aincrad, all of which have their own strong bosses. This volume is about the clearing of the 1st and 2nd floors.

I will start off by saying that this volume contains a few illustrations that are on the ecchi side of things and has some silly light novel humour in parts. I didn’t mind it too much and I actually laughed at some of the jokes but I know that can be a deal-breaker for some people. The major issue that I had with the volume is that Kawahara has a habit of over-explaining things. He’s gotten better with time but those explanations can really bog down a scene and make it tiring to read. I also didn’t think the action scenes were that exciting as they tended to be full of too much video game terminology which made it hard to follow along. As an example, instead of saying “the sword” it would often say “Anneal Blade +6″. These things didn’t help the action scenes flow smoothly.

The Japanese edition of this volume is over 500 pages long but it barely felt like it. Explanations of battle mechanics aside, it was very easy to get absorbed in the book. While this volume is quite slow and has quite a few scenes with characters just talking to eachother, I actually really liked that aspect of it. To me, the scenes with casual conversations between characters is to show how they’re adapting to the world and are starting to act like they would in real life. Plus, those scenes were very enjoyable and relaxing to read. I’d argue that the theme of this first volume is “finding the will to live in a seemingly hopeless situation” and I think it covered it well through the characters of Asuna and Nezha.

Character:

The first difference that readers of the main series will notice is the absence of Klein. The volume starts off with Asuna and Kirito’s first meeting so Klein doesn’t appear in this volume at all, though he is mentioned. I think this is for the best, however, as it means the relationship between the two leads is much more developed than it was in the original. They get plenty of great interactions and Asuna gets to really shine here and show off all the stuff that makes her such an interesting and charming character. I also liked Kirito here. I’ve always found his self-sacrificial nature to be one of his more interesting negative character traits (I may go into this in another post at some point) and his narration was quite amusing at times. This volume also features Argo, a character who I think was only in the original arc during the Red-nosed Reindoor story. I was always surprised about that because of her striking character design but we’re finally getting to know more about her here!

Adaptation Notes:

This series has two manga adaptations. The first one is illustrated by Kiseki Himura and seems to cover the first two volumes of the light novel while the second one is illustrated by Shiomi Miyoshi and I believe it starts from the 3rd volume. I’ll just be talking about the first one here with regards to how it adapts this volume.

While the light novel series has Kirito as the primary protagonist but occasionally switches to Asuna’s POV, the manga focuses almost entirely on Asuna’s side, leading for some very effective manga-only scenes. Personally, I find Asuna’s perspective to be very interesting and I wish the novel had more of it. Unfortunately, the manga cuts out some very cute scenes and I also found that it had more silly humour and ecchi scenes than the original did though I did laugh at some of them. I’m not sure if I’d recommend it over the light novel but it’s definitely worth the read if you’re interested in Asuna’s POV.

I’d like for this series to get an anime adaptation at some point. The first anime actually did adapt part of this volume in it’s second episode but a lot of it was cut or changed to the point where I almost wish they didn’t bother and adapted The First Day side story or expanded one of the other side stories instead.

Recommended for:

Fans of the main series should definitely read this. I think people who didn’t like the original arc could like this as well due to Asuna’s increased presence and the slower pacing allowing for more character and relationship development. If you didn’t like the original due to Kirito, I’m not sure if this volume really fixes him but his growth is paced out enough that he doesn’t feel as OP. You could definitely read this without having read the main series but you wouldn’t be able to read this and then read Fairy Dance expecting to understand everything because this series is still incomplete so several semi-important characters haven’t been introduced yet.

Will I be reading the next volume?