The setting of accel world and the game design is quite spectacular, even better than SAO, but most of the plot significantly lacks novelty. Eventually every player enters this battle arena and starts killing each other with their unique super powers. That's pretty much it. Oh, and your girl was once the leader of this epic guild, but now everyone in this whole world fucking hates her and suddenly you're alone with her to learn her techniques and try to build another super epic guild? Seems legitly cliched. The first few times you encounter such sprinkles, you get excited from the sugary taste, but after awhile it gets dull. The author mitigates such triviality starting at volume 6, where he introduced this dangerous central palace and a hypnotizing armor. This was quite interesting, but even if I ignore some of the obvious plot holes, the feeling I got from this is similar to when a game company releases a new patch for a boring game. First it seems as a breadth of fresh air, but immediately you get tired of it again because there were no fundamental change to the backbone.
I think I am too critical. But it is just difficult for me to seriously consider the situations of these characters, no matter how bad, because the setting of this entire story is that they are playing a "game". Maybe it's because of this reason, sometimes I feel like events taking place are depicted too seriously and the characters are doing stuff way too insane like they're some fat otaku. There's just too much drama in the real world. Sure it is on me to read it as a novel, but it is on the author to present a convincing and appropriate setting.
Despite everything I said, I actually like accel world. In fact I read it very quickly, in just a couple of days. The stories of some side characters were pretty good, and the art is great. But the fact that I never went back to re-read the novel or re-watch the anime speaks a lot. Did I mention it's still ongoing?
I give this a 7/10.
