Sword Art Online / Tropes U to Z

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U

• UltimateGamer386: Common for each of the story arcs, as they all take place in a virtual world. Most notable in SAO, where both Heathcliff and Kirito become this.
• Underestimating Badassery: This happens to Kirito a lot in Volumes 2–7, though it's justified as Volume 2 involves interactions with people who haven't heard of him, and in ALO and GGO, he doesn't have the same rep he had in SAO and is an unknown quantity. Ironically, the top-level players in ALO know who he is, but the middle to lower players have never heard of him.
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal:
  • Played for Laughs in the first episode of the anime — see Those Two Guys for details.
  • "Freya," to Klein. Unsettles everyone else present as well.
  • Kirito to Sinon in episode 5 of season 2. The latter assumed he was a girl due to his very feminine appearance, until he shows her his stat info. She doesn't take it too well, as she's stripped down to underwear at the time.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: After getting a glimpse of the Floor 74 boss, The Gleam Eyes, Kirito and Asuna start thinking strategy; tanks in the front row, keep switching, and at least 10 shield users. Then the Liberation Army captain tries to take it on with a single exhausted party; Kirito, Asuna, and Furinkazan barely manage to survive, but take the boss out.
• Unstoppable Rage: Silica enters this momentarily after Pina's Heroic Sacrifice, in the light novels. Subverted in that it turns out to be quite stoppable.
• Useless Useful Non-Combat Abilities: Many of the skills in SAO are utterly unrelated to dungeon crawling. Some of them are indirectly useful (such as creating/maintaining equipment), and others aren't. When they first meet, Kirito wonders why Asuna would waste the time needed to grind the Cooking skill to the maximum level, although he changes his tune pretty quickly after tasting her food. After they marry, he gives up the two-handed sword skill (which he probably didn't use much anyway after picking up dual-wielding) to learn the Fishing skill.
• Unwinnable by Design: In ALO (while it was still under control of RECTO), the lore says that the first race to reach the top of the World Tree and go to the city in the sky will become Alfs (Alves?). The boss monsters that the players would have to pass/defeat have a ridiculous spawn rate and the door won't open for anyone without Admin privileges. This is because Nobuyuki Sugou and his team are using the tree to hold and experiment on the 300 minds they captured from SAO.

V

• Video Game Caring Potential/Video Game Cruelty Potential: Kirito, especially after his first year or so in Aincrad, deliberately invokes the former and avoids the latter. Before they become friends, he even fights a duel with Asuna to protect NPCs from being used as distractions to the Boss in the upcoming Boss Fight. He discusses the latter trope with Silica in Episode 4 and with Leafa in Episode 19.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Does Asuna wants to defeat a boss by sacrificing NPC townpeople as part of her plan, much to Kirito's chagrin? Well, let's her to get emotionally attached to a AI program that call her "Mommy" and then observe, with impotence, as that program is subjected for deletion by the GM system, much to her suffering. Fortunately, there's Kirito to save the day, partially though.
• Villain Ball: The villain of the second arc, from his first appearance. You just looked straight at a guy who spent two years saving six thousand people and outright told him that you convinced his girlfriend's parents to exploit a legal loophole and force her to marry you while she's helpless and comatose. And you don't think this is going to blow up in your face?
• Villain Respect: Akihiko Kayaba is genuinely impressed that Kirito and Asuna were able to actually defy the physics of his game through sheer force of will. In his mind, this essentially proves the tenacity of humans — which was what he was trying to study all along.
  • Comes up in ALO where Kirito, defeated by Sugou's GM powers, is visited by Kayaba's ghost, who is confused by how Kirito has seemingly given in to Sugou's power. He then gives Kirito his admin access to level the playing field.
• Virtual-Reality Warper:
  • Kirito himself has often displayed an uncanny ability to defy the system with his Heroic Willpower, which later was identified as an ability called Incarnation.
  • Any Game Masters with administrator privileges, such as Kayaba or Sugou are this by design. Kayaba is capable of freezing the world around him as well as giving himself Complete Immortality so there is no chance of him being killed, though he later turns this off to fight Kirito fairly. Sugou is even more notorious, using his GM powers to be a Gravity Master who can summon items out of thin air, as well as subjecting Kirito to Cold-Blooded Torture by turning off the pain absorber.
  • In the Underworld, this exists as an ability of the world itself, where characters with strong enough willpower can reshape reality using their imagination, which ranges from materializing objects, converting objects, or healing damage.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: When Shino pukes during her panic attack during Season 2 Episode 3, the camera helpfully gives a view of the floor of the room she just vacated.

W

• Wanted Meter: In SAO, players have a colored indicator above their avatars indicating their moral standing. Green is the default color for players who are within the bounds of the law. Players who violate the law, typically by attacking or killing other players, have orange indicators. Orange players are prohibited from entering towns by NPC guards until they turn back to green again, which is accomplished either by waiting for it to turn back on its own, or undertaking a quest to turn it back to green. The quest's difficulty depends on the number and severity of the player's crimes: petty thieves are given simple quests, while those who attacked or killed other players will have significantly harder quests, and serial player-killers will be permanently branded with an orange cursor.
• Warp Whistle: Crystals in SAO, which allow you to instantly return to the level's town area. Unfortunately, certain dungeons have anti-crystal fields.
• The War Sequence: The Grand Quest in ALfheim Online can be considered this; a motley crew of players (or maybe even a solo player) fighting their way through hoards of Guardian enemies. Kirito fails the quest on his first attempt, but succeeds later with help from Leafa, Recon, and the Sylph/Cait-Sith alliance as backup.
• Weirdly Underpowered Admins:
  • In the Aincrad Arc, admin Akihiko Kayaba sets up Sword Art Online to trap several thousand players from around the world in The Most Dangerous Video Game as an insane social experiment. Problem players such as Laughing Coffin, a guild whose members deliberately hunt and murder other players for their own enjoyment, don't get removed because the whole point of the thing is to see how people behave. Kayaba himself is playing the game as Heathcliff, the leader of the top guild Knights of the Blood, and uses his admin powers to put himself in permanent God Mode so he can watch to the end as the players try to beat the game so they can get back to real life.
  • In the ALO Arc, Alfheim Online admin Nobuyuki Sugou has the full suite of admin powers and uses them to full effect to torture Kirito and Asuna, until Kayaba, who has uploaded himself onto the Internet, hacks the game and transfers the admin powers to Kirito, partly out of a liking for him and partly as a screw-you to his former underling Sugou for stealing his life's work (ALO uses SAO's engine) just to have Asuna for himself.
  • In the Gun Gale Online arc, two people are coordinating a Player Character in the game and a person in the real world to murder high-ranking players. Once Kirito figures this out, and since he's working for the Japanese police this arc, you'd think the next step would be to subpoena the account details from the game company. However, said company is overseas and not providing any contact information, making it impossible to do this in anything close to a short enough time.
  • The second half of the Alicization Arc revolves around an attempt to steal data from an Artificial Intelligence project. The good guys for some reason have to have Kirito get Alice to a particular place in Underworld so she can be retrieved IRL and kept away from the thieves, can't lock the attackers out of the system, can't order the in-game "Final Load Test" (The War to End All Wars between the humans and demons) stopped, and left the Player Character account for the Demon King in God Mode and unprotected.
• Wham Episode: Sigh... Even an MMORPG anime can have it!
  • Episode 1: At first this was like your typical MMORPG until the rules unexpectedly changed. No logging out until you clear the entire game, which will take ''years'' even for the best player. Also, if you die in the game, you die in real life.
  • Episode 14: Heathcliff is Kayaba.
  • Episode 17: Sugou is playing ALO as Oberon the Fairy King. Sugou is the one keeping Asuna and the other 299 players prisoner. ALO is nothing more than a front for Sugou's experiment in using the Full Dive technology for mind control.
  • Season 2, Episode 5:Kirito comes face-to-face with Death Gun, and not only is he another SAO survivor, he was part of Laughing Coffin, and he has a grudge against Kirito.
  • Season 2, Episode 11: The reason Death Gun can kill is because he has an accomplice in the real world, and said accomplice has broken into Shino's apartment, ready to kill her.
  • Season 2, Episode 13: Kyouji is Death Gun's "other hand", and he's completely snapped and wants to go ahead with killing Shino anyways.
  • Season 2, Episode 22: Asuna learns more about why Yuuki and the other Sleeping Knights suddenly tried distancing themselves from her when she attempted to join their guild. The guild is made up of terminally ill people, and the reason it's disbanding is because Yuuki is dying of her terminal illness. Which is AIDS. Despite finding out the truth, Asuna still wants to spend what little time Yuuki has left to help her Go Out with a Smile.
  • Alicization Part 1: Kirito is attacked in the real world, injected with poison, resulting in him nearly dying, suffering brain damage and ending up in the Underworld.
  • Alicization Part 3: Kirito accidentally kills Raios by chopping his arms off, which ends with him and Eugeo being kicked out of the Academy and handed over to the Integrity Knights. And Alice is later revealed to be working for Quinella.
  • Alicization Part 5: The Synthesis Ritual is actually a form of brainwashing or giving amnesia on the Integrity Knights. To make things worse, Eugeo is forcefully Synthesized into an Integrity Knight by Quinella by the time Kirito and Alice met him again.
  • Alicization Part 6: Quinella kills Eugeo and the GDS' attack on Ocean Turtle puts Kirito in a Heroic BSoD and Angst Coma.
  • Alicization Part 7: Alice is revealed to be the MacGuffin Girl Gabriel and the GDS are looking for.
  • Alicization Part 9: Gabriel's Army is almost winning and PoH, who manipulated the foreign players into attacking the Human Empire Army earlier, beats up a still paralyzed Kirito in front of the heroes.
  • Alicization Part 10: Alice's departure from UW is successful, but at the expense of the World End Altar being rendered unavailable. Kirito and Asuna are now stuck in UW for the next 200 years as a result, forcing Alice to adapt into the RW on her own.
  • Unital Ring Part 1:
    • New Aincrad is crumbling apart due to ALO being merged with the other VRMMOs built by The Seed into the titular game. But that's not the only problem: Kirito, Asuna, and Alice found out that the ALO’s box menu system have been replaced with a new one, their Friends List and messages are gone, they can't contact Yui (who is nowhere to be seen, but is later revealed to be with Silica and Lisbeth), and all of the players' stats have been reset back to Level 1, including theirs. The only saving graces are they can still logout from the game and the OSS Yuuki gave to Asuna back at the end of Mother's Rosario remains intact.
    • In the real world, Asuna had an encounter with Shikimi for the first time, while Kirito had an unexpected reunion with Argo.
• Wham Line: From Episode 23, Kirito fights his way past the hordes of enemies to the door to the top of the World Tree. Once there, Yui gives him this news:
  Yui: Players were never meant to open this door.
  • From Season 2, Episode 18, the group discusses whether Zekken, someone strong enough to defeat Kirito, is a fellow SAO survivor- Kirito had asked whether Zekken was a "full-time resident" of virtual reality, but didn't get an answer:
    Lisbeth: [quoting Kirito] "If Zekken had been in that world, rather than me, the Dual-wielding skill would have been awarded to them."
  • Season 2, Episode 22- Dr. Kurahashi reveals why Yuuki's in the Medicuboid.
    Kurahashi: Human immunodeficiency virus... HIV, for short.
  • From the very first episode:
  Klein: "Huh? Where'd the log out button go?"
  • Chapter 10 of Volume 7 ends with "That was when Dr. Kurahashi sent Asuna a message saying that Yuuki's condition had taken a turn for the worse." In Episode 24 of Season 2, you see the message itself, which says, "Yuuki-san, Konno-san's condition has deteriorated. Can you come immediately?"
  • In Volume 10, while Asuna's talking with Kikuoka and Rinko Kojiro about their research, she suddenly announces that she's realized its true purpose, to create an AI that can kill enemy soldiers in a war.
  • In Volume 11, the Integrity Knight sent to arrest Kirito and Eugeo for violating the Taboo Index reveals her name- she's Alice, the Childhood Friend Eugeo has wanted to find for years.
  • In Episode 15, one of the twins stabs Eugeo and introduces herself as an Integrity Knight.
    "My name, sinner, is Linel Synthesis Twenty-Eight."
  • In Volume 20, two familiar names come up among the list of new church apprentices- Frenica Cesky (Tiese's friend from the Imperial Swordcraft Academy) and Selka Zuberg(Alice's younger sister)- and immediately cause an uproar in the meeting.
  • From Volume 21:
    Kirito: “Um.. who are you?”
    New Transfer Student: How rude. I came all the way here to transfer, you’ve forgotten about onee-san already?”
    Kirito: "Eh? No, but..."
    (Kirito recognizes the New Transfer Student as Argo)
    Kirito: "Aaaaah!! A-Argo...!? Why... How come...!?"
    Argo: "It’s been a while, Kii-bou."
• Wham Shot:
  • Season 2, Episode 4 has one when Kirito sees the Laughing Coffin brand peeking out from Death Gun's arm-wrapping.
  • Season 2, Episode 22: When Asuna finally meets Yuuki in the real world, she sees her in a sterile clean room, her body ravaged by AIDS and hooked up to a VR device that she has been using continuously for years.
  • At the end of Season 3, Episode 20, Kirito is glad to see that Asuna and Alice logged out of the Underworld, but falls to his knees and cries at the thought of spending 200 years in the Underworld alone. He then sees a shadow approaching him, looks up and sees Asuna, who chose to stay behind.
  • The new girl Asuna met in Volume 21: Shikimi Kamura^note The surname of Kuroyukihime's mother in Accel World.
    • Also from the same volume, not only Argo survived SAO, but also transferred to Kirito's school.
  • Volume 24 introduces Eolyne, who looks suspiciously similar to the late Eugeo.
  • Kirito mentioned in the epilogue of Alicization that Selka went into suspended animation. The final illustration of Volume 25, however, reveals that Ronye and Tiese did the same thing off-screen as well.
• What Could Have Been: Invoked by Akihiko Kayaba aka Heathcliff when Kirito exposes his identity. Apparently the plan was to continue leading the players until about 10 floors before the final floor and betray them rather publicly, revealing himself to be the final boss to await the rest of the players at the final floor. Needless to say, this doesn't happen.
  • Supplemental material shows that Silica's dragon Pina would have become his mount and a sub-boss.
• What If?: Caliber Failure Side explores one such outcome to the Caliber sidestory. Kirito convinces the party to abandon Freya (without knowing she's actually a disguised Thor). As a result, they're unable to defeat the Big Bad before time runs out. Not only do they fail the quest, Kirito loses his chance to get Excaliber, and the Big Bad succeeds in deploying an army massive enough to destroy Alfheim and Aincrad.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human??:
  • On the 56th floor, Asuna, Kirito, the Knights of Blood, and various other players were debating on the strategy they would use to fight the floor boss. Asuna proposed to use the nearby NPC villagers as a distraction while the players attacked the boss. Kirito refused to help, saying that the NPCs are alive and that they should choose another way. Everyone in the KoB laughed at him, but in the end, Asuna believed that he was right.
  • This forms the core theme in the Alicization arc. Kirito deems the A.I.s that were created in the Underworld to not be programs, but souls without bodies. They can even be given physical bodies in the real world which allows them to enter.
• What You Are in the Dark: In ALO, Leafa learns that the Salamanders are preparing to ambush the leaders of the Sylph and Cait-Sith races at their conference place. Leafa tells Kirito that it's in his best interest to cut her down and join the Salamanders, because if they successfully kill both leaders they'll obtain so much money that they should be able to successfully start challenging the World Tree. She even tells him that she understands and won't hold any grudge against him, but thinks to herself that she will likely never play ALO again if that happens.
  Leafa: This is a game after all, so anything can happen. If you want to kill, then you can kill; if there is something you want, then you can steal it.
  Kirito: ...People who've said that, I have met too many of them. On one level, that is true, and I used to think that way too. But it isn't right. Especially in a virtual world, there are some things that you must protect, no matter how stupid you look. I was taught that by a person very important to me... VRMMOs are called games, but this is a contradiction; splitting the player and the role is not a good idea. If you take on traits in this world, your personality in the real world will reflect those changes. Players and their character are one. I like Leafa, and I want to be your friend. No matter what the reason, I will not kill you to further my own self-interests, absolutely not!
• Win to Exit: Unless the final boss of SAO is defeated, players will remain trapped in the virtual world until they die one way or another.
• World of Jerkass: While there are certainly good and heroic individuals in it and even those that aren't can be good people deep down, the combination of the Taboo Index and one of the humans to raise the first group of Artifical Fluctlights spreading self-serving ideals among them has largely turned the Underworld into this, namely between the nobility and commoners.
  • On the Noble's side, the privileges the Taboo Index gives them turn them into Spoiled Brats and Upper-Class Twits who look down on commoners and take advantage of their status, as well as some Loophole Abuse, to do whatever they want with no consequence. Stand out examples being Raios and Humbert, 3rd-Rank Nobles who frequently bully Kirito and Eugeo for no other reason than the fact that they're commoners and do whatever they can to make their lives hell as well as sexually harassing Humbert's page Frenica so that Ronye and Tiese would step up to her defense, which they then paint as the two of them, 6th-Rank Nobles, insulting them and decide to punish them by raping them and having Kirito and Eugeo live with guilt and horror, even waiting for the latter to show up to their room so they can force him to watch and do nothing since he would be arrested if he tried stopping them. And when Eugeo does retaliate, cutting off Humbert's arm, Raios more or less tells him to suck it up and takes sadistic glee in the fact that he now has free reign to murder Eugeo since breaking the Taboo Index labels him as a criminal, one of the few exceptions to the rule dictating you can't attack or kill others.
  • Commoners on the other hand, due to being less privileged, often turn into self-centered Opportunistic Bastards obsessed with money. Orick, Eugeo's father, mainly saw his children, including Eugeo, as potential labor workers for his farm and was incredibly disappointed when Eugeo's Calling ended up being as the Gigas Cedar cutter, which by law prevents him from helping with the farm. Orick responds to this by showing Parental Favouritism to his older sons and taking all the money Eugeo earns from his calling for himself, which not only leaves Eugeo with sub-par food for lunch but also gives Jink, Eugeo's childhood bully who gets to keep all the money he earns, more fuel to pick on him with, despite the whole thing being out of Eugeo's control. This borderline unfair and abusive parenting is likely what led to Eugeo's very skewed definition of love. Come the War of Underworld Arc, and Rulid Village shows themselves at their worst; Alice's father denies her entry into the village and orders Selka to not interact with her, various farms around the village use Alice for cheap labor, and some grown men steal the Blue Rose Sword from Kirito, who at the time is essentially a paraplegic who can't even speak properly, not caring that they knocked him over in the process and mockingly claiming that he said they could borrow it. It's so bad that Alice wonders if there was any real point to protecting these people.
• World Tree: The setting of Volume 3 has one, which holds the goal of the game, called Yggdrasil. Unsurprising, since its setting heavily relies on Nordic terminology.
• Worth Living For: Kirito, when paralyzed and being stabbed by Ax-Crazy Kuradeel, thinks of Asuna and moves his hand to try to stop the blade. That doesn't work. But Asuna pulls a minor Reality Warper with the Power of Love to come in and save Kirito with an antidote/healing crystal.
• Worthy Opponent: Many of Kirito's opponents, such as General Eugene, become this. Kirito usually doesn't hold any grudges, either.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: In the "Caliber" sidestory in Volume 8, thanks to his experience as a gamer, Kirito fully expects NPC Freya, who's conveniently locked in a cell while looking for her treasure in the Frost Giant castle, to double-cross them. Except that the quest is based on Norse Mythology, specifically a legend in which Thor infiltrates the Frost Giant stronghold disguised as Freya, to retrieve the stolen Mjolnir; NPC Freya becomes party ally NPC Thor when they fight the final boss.
  • Well, in a way he was right. Freya certainly was a trap.
• Wuxia: From Fairy Dance onwards, and in particularly the Mother's Rosario and "Alicization Arcs, Sword Art Online steadily begins to adopt elements from the Wuxia Genre. These include Dedicated Schools of Martial Arts, Inter-Sword-School Rivalries, Young Prodigies seeking challenges in a Worthy Opponent, Striving To Leave A Legacy of Hope, Rivals Bound By Honor fighting side by side as Brothers in Arms, Ancient Techniques passed down as legacies of friendships, the Training Montage, Close and Loving Friendships Between Sworn Brothers and Sisters, not to mention elegant and balletic sword-battles reminiscent of those choreographed by Kung Fu Film Luminary Yuen Woo-Ping. "Phantom Bullet" is more of a tribute to the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk genre and Star Wars, the latter of which is itself a Wuxia saga Recycled In Space.

X

Y

• Yamato Nadeshiko: In A Murder Case in the Area we learn the story of Griselda, a sweet House Wife who was caught in the game alongside her husband Grimlock, then rose to the challenge of becoming a guildmaster. Bad thing? Grimlock has a Freak Out due to both the stress and seeing that she was more successful and independent than he thought she was, so he killed her.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: In Volume 9, beginning the Alicization arc, Kirito has a part-time job as a beta tester for a new VRMMO that uses time acceleration: several weeks in-game are a weekend in the real world... at least at first. In the non-canon sidestory after Alicization ends, Kirito and his harem spend fifty thousand hours (5 years 8 months) on an in-game honeymoon, while five hours pass in the real world.
  • However even those 5 years pale in comparison to the Two Hundred years Asuna and Kirito spend in the Underworld at the conclusion of Alicization, with an FLA of 5 million.
• You Are Too Late:
  • In the (non-canon) bonus side story Caliber SS (Failure Side), the characters follow the events of Caliber and miss an important Event Flag, which results in their being unable to stop Alfheim from being attacked by the Frost Giants. It does, however, imply they will go on to battle the Big Bad before he can bring any more destruction and hopefully restore the world in the process.
  • Also played tragically straight in "Red-nosed Reindeer", when Kirito tries to find a rare mob that drops an item that can revive a dead player around Christmas time. He does, and manages to get it, but finds out that the item can only be used within 10 seconds of the player's death, about 6 months too late to save Sachi, who died back in June. He gives it to Klein in the hopes that he can save someone in the future.
    • On that note, the death of Sachi and the other Black Cats of the Full Moon. Kirito is fighting through the hoard of monsters with all his might, striking them down as fast as he can, but one by one, his comrades are killed in front of him, with Kirito just out of reach to save them.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: In-game pain inhibitors prevent players from feeling anything but an uncomfortable tingling sensation when their avatar is injured. If the pain inhibitor is turned down too low, or disabled, it can lead to real-world effects on the player's body. Sugou finds this out the hard way when Kirito disables his pain inhibitor and cuts him asunder, causing him to suffer from severe pain and blindness in one eye.
• You Shall Not Pass!: These incidents happen from time to time, and are usually awesome.

Z

• Zerg Rush: The guardians of the World Tree employ this tactic. Yui later mentions after Kirito's first encounter with them that although individually they're rather weak, the sheer amount of them means they're as tough as an elite boss.
• Zero-Approval Gambit: Kirito protects the other beta testers from being ostracized by taking all the hatred on himself. A fragmented playerbase wasn't going to kill any bosses.

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