"There is no doubt that writer Reki Kawahara of Sword Art Online and Accel World is a writer of our times. His obsession with virtual reality elements in games is something that ties in very intimately with our modern gaming culture and the possibilities we have imagined for the gaming industry. Seeing as franchises like .hack pioneered some of these concepts in anime long ago, Kawahara did not exactly invent the wheel here. However, unlike franchises such as .hack, there is a much more intrinsic focus on the social and personal implications of entirely different worlds that we can access at our finger tips."
