As many knows, this anime has been very popular among viewers, but this DOES NOT make it anywhere as good as they say it. It has lots of flaws, which becomes blatantly evident in the 2nd half of the show. But this does not take away the entertainment.

Anyway, let's start off with the characters first. The characters is probably the weakest thing about this anime. Most of them, come and go and are forgotten by the next episode, they are that forgettable. The main male character, Kirito is stereotypical. Calm, good at everything he does, gets the ladies, basically what I'd call a perfect character. Asuka, the main female character is boring, charmless and quite useless. And even worse, she becomes totally useless in the 2nd part of the show. "The main characters have no depth, what can we expect from the side characters right?" - True to this, the side characters are shallow with no depths and fail to make an impact, both enjoyment and emotional wise. Which leads me back to my point, the characters are the lowest point of this show.

The pacing of the show is another low point, because it's the definition of "rushed". The time skips makes it even worse, and fails to keep engagements. The time skips is another reason for the poor characters, because it fails to make relatable and fails to develop them.

The anime does alright even with bad characters and pacing from episodes 1-14, but when the game "changes" from episode 15 onwards, it goes downhill even more. Even worse characters, with atrocious writing, and overall is just horribly forced and rushed.

Anyway, pushing all the negative asides, the animation is brilliant. The colors is beautiful and the style just magnifies the beauty of the setting. If I had to pick, I would say the animation is the best thing about this anime. The "enter a video-game" concept has been used in anime before, so SAO does not follow a unique theme, but the series still creates a good atmosphere for the theme. The "survive inside a video game" concept is also an attractive notion, which was basically the first thing that attracted me to the show, sadly this falls through the cracks in the second half as well. Another thing that shined for me was the music, the soundtrack is pretty good as well.

To sum it up, SAO is an anime with handful of flaws from shallow characters to bad pacing to forced second half, but it's still entertaining enough to make a person complete it, and has a brilliant animation with nifty soundtrack.

Here's to hoping the upcoming second season doesn't screw up, cheers! (show less)

Who wasn't impressed at the 'die here die in real life' idea at the beginning? I'm sure it's been done before, but this was amongst the new generation of anime, and I was eager to see what fresh world would be before us on this adventure, and what new things to see.

I followed every episode as they came out: rich graphics, sweet mechanics and it seemed things would go the right way. I must admit I sort of expected the grimness of an Urobochi tale, or perhaps some form of epicness in character like so many anime have to offer, but I was sorely dissapointed, and the moment I guessed romantic attachments, events that would happen next I knew I had fallen out of love with SAO.

So I gave up watching and my friend explained to me how it progresses, I did not regret setting it aside. There are shows that are bad that I can muscle through to pick out the good elements, but Kirito and co made me constantly want to tear my hair out.

I will give one quatre though: I'm not shocked that people enjoy the show - nay love it - and I don't hold anything against them. I dropped one of the dot.hacks for similar reasons, but I prefer that to this. (show less)

pros
+ fast and furious first arc
+ interesting side characters
+ pretty good animation and classic music
cons
- jumpy first arc with plot holes, and don't get me started on that second arc
- stereotypical main character
- a helluva lot of bugs

conclusion: here i go, with the most overhyped anime of the past year. heck, it wasn't even so bad back when it started, fast and furious, reminding me a bit much of .hack and hxh greed island, but at least good. the animation's up-to-date, never mind a good couple bugs (background animation, frames); the music is yuki kajiura so no more needs to be said about it; and where the storyline jumped around from sidetrack to sidetrack far too much for my taste, at least the side characters were quite interesting. then that arc finished at around half of the anime, and it started going downhill. the first arc had left rather huge plot holes, and if that wasn't bad enough, the second arc became far too predictable and un-developed for my liking. most side characters were barely seen again; the online world (though new, since it had changed halfway through) never got explored much; and it became increasingly more obvious just how stereotypical and unrealistic, a.k.a. unrelatable, the protagonist was. and his rather unbelievable love life doesn't exactly help.
it's entertaining sure enough if you care more about action and animation than about plot, since the action is there and very in-game-ish. nevertheless, if story is the focus of your reviews, or would be right that if you ever got around to writing a review, i can't recommend this one.

peace. (show less)

This anime is allright the first episodes are good and it will keep you hooked. However i didnt like that all most none of the characters the main character meets or befriends stay with him through to the next episode. The anime can be kind of hard to follow and i lost complete interest in it after about the 13 episode because it changes( can say what changes without giving spoilers). Another reason i lost interest was because it appeared that the characters forgot what they were suppose to be doing at times and they would be distracted something else. Eventually the anime turns into a survival thing into kind of a save the girl love story so i wouldn't recommend it to people who like anime that are survival only or horror. If you like anime that is like this than more power to you (show less)

hey people,

so, let me review this series a bit. i first took interest with SAO, when i browsed through anime access, i found out that this anime was among the most downloaded one so yeah i gave it a check. into the series, it was fun first, though you pretty much can predict that its just like the other story which you needs to clear the game then you can be free from VR. everything trapped inside. yeah, its a bit predictable. like i said it was fun, with the level up, some action scenes, adventures and unique stuffs was pretty nice. but, yeah after half the story, the story turned to some cheesy romance series, which kills the fun part. if you're into romance anime, you may go through the series. the first half was fun, suspense-packed. to be precise, i dont mind romance stories, but this anime was overly packed with it, so yeah it headed to a boring storyline. it emphasized too much on love between the cousins, and girl to the point they're missing out the adventure part. so yeah, the series was watchable, but it aint as interesting as some other anime.

but credits to the animation. i think its pretty nice. the quality of the picture was okay as well. ;) (show less)

Sword Art Online seems to be the big show for this season and it was also written by the same guy that made Accel World.
First off, I'll start with what's good about the show. The battle scenes are awesome due to the style of the animation and how smooth it looks. The first few episodes introduced a dark, grim, and interesting world where the players are forced to create their own little society where most of them are focused on getting out of the game alive. The show made me feel like I would enjoy to play an mmo like that where most of the economy relies on the player base and not NPCs.
(This part has a few vaugue spoilers, no characters named, just plot stuff)Where the show falls short is the story and it makes sense considering it was primarily a love story written by a 14 year old boy. Besides a few characters introduced in the beginning and a couple in the middle of the series, all the other characters in the series are introduced in an episode and either killed off or flat out go away for the rest of the series, this is where most of the "sad and grim" parts of the series everybody talks about comes from, personally, I didn't have enough time with the characters that died to actually care for them when they did die. The story sort of fails for me because it seems like it's trying to be a jack of all trades when it comes to genres, it's got action parts, adventure parts, romance, comedy, and it also tries to have another romance (completely falling on it's face near the end). In the end the story is just a mess and would have been much better if the writer had just focused on one or two genres instead of trying to cover all the bases. Also, at times, the characters seem to forget facts that were previously stated in the show like there being barriers in certain places and such.
In short, Sword Art Online is a decent but highly overrated anime with good action scenes and a plot that falls flat on it's face. (show less)