As for the people who will be happy to read this unnecessarily long review, I appreciate it.
Just like a lot of people say, Sword Art Online comes off as an anime where you either love it or hate it to bits. I thought the first three episodes was excellent, introducing the virtual reality game, Sword Art Online, giving us the feel on what it is like to play the game (such as the boss battle) and psychological break down people experience (which was shown in episode 3). But after that, it felt as if the writer decided to smoke crack and took a huge dump on his own story along with being completely out of ideas after that
The first biggest concern is the characters. No one has any depth to him or her. Asuna is introduced as a mysterious girl who kicks ass, turns out to be your generic annoying tsundere who I would like to teabag just to get them to shut the hell up. Kirito, for some stupid reason knows how to charm the chicks even though he spends his whole life staying inside his room playing games all day and is the most overpowered person in the game for some retarded reason, not to mention that he has absolutely no flaws. From what I witnessed, he is the ultimate unbeatable character throughout the whole show, so after getting to the second arc, you just know that he is going to obviously win the next battle. The rest of the characters are just your stereotypical harem baits that are not even relevant to the plot and are just there just to make the protagonist look like a chick magnet. But the villains…they are just bad. To not spoil anything about them (oh wait, what is there to spoil?), the villains have no motives of being evil and are just plot devices for the entire show. They come off as obnoxious and pathetic. Pffthahaha, I can’t believe Kirito praised Kayaba’s existence.
The second biggest concern is definitely the writing. The writing and the story is absolutely horrible. Throughout watching the show, I kept predicting how old the writer is from time to time. The dialogue comes off as predictable, childish like, cliché and just utterly stupid. The romance was way too forced into the show and it felt as if the creator just did it so that Kirito could look more like a man if he had a girlfriend as a prop. The romance was as poorly written, almost as poorly as the Twilight franchise. It’s like the writer guessed how romances work. Just because a guy meets a girl, doesn’t mean that you have to force love upon them. They don’t even have a good reason to like each other, Kirito sucks as a person and Asuna is nothing but a generic tsundere. Man I would have enjoyed the progression of the relationship more if they could include chapter 16.5 from the novel. Back to the topic. The dialogue between Kirito and Asuna. It’s…it’s bloody retarded. One of the most stupid scenes I thought was when Asuna told Kirito that she would kill herself if he dies. Really? They don’t know each other in real life and she is willing to take her own life because of some professional gamer? Bravo. Also throughout the whole show, the things Kirito and Asuna say to each other is absolutely predictable, you know when Asuna would go tsun and you would know when she would go dere. But what made the relationship between these two was when they introduced us to our beloved loli…Yui-chan. Bleh. At least Yui doesn’t come off as retarded as Fuko-chan from Clannad. God I want to strangle that kid and put her back in a coma. Ok spoiler alert, read at your own risk. Or probably you’ve already seen Sword Art Online so who cares. Yui is nothing but another plot device and a moeblob of the show. She starts calling Kirito and Asuna her parents because…THE HECK WOULD I KNOW? Then later on the newly wedded couple decided to keep her as a child and treat her as if they were actually her parents. “Awww, that’s so sweet…” No it’s not! It’s stupid. How old are these two again? 16 and 17. Wow it’s like I’m back to going on IMVU watching people create their own families because their real life family sucks.
More rants? Yes please. Cliché scenes! Or just dumb scenes! There is Deus Ex Machina writing everywhere. Because I don’t want to spoil the show much, I'll just say that even if he got killed inside the game, he still came back to life because...I don't know. It seems as if the writer couldn't think of anything good and decided to slap something random in just for the plot to progress and all I could think of is how lazy that writer is. Wow. But ass pulls gets even worse in the climax of the second arc. There was also a scene where Kirito just tries to sacrifice himself even though he could save himself along with the others, but the writer only does this just for the sake of shoving in more melodrama than this show already needs. But I won’t talk about that scene, because I would be “spoiling the show.”
It actually seems like I’m bashing the anime too much so I guess I’ll talk about what makes this show good.
The soundtrack and music is absolutely amazing. Definitely the ones used in the action scenes. It just sounded so kickass. It actually makes you feel privileged to watch the show because of it. When players open the menu or whatever you like to call it, you feel you ears having an orgasm every time you hear those beepity boop sounds. The action scenes in this show is absolutely well done, being mixed with the soundtrack would have your eyes and ears peeled to the screen. You would know that this show had a lot of budget, it’s a shame it’s wasted on this pathetic excuse of an anime. Oops, I wasn’t meant to be ranting any more.
The other great thing about this show is that you can never get bored. Even when I noticed the flaws and started hating it while it was still being aired, I was having so much fun watching the show. When you watch Sword Art Online, you feel as if the episode is just zooming through really fast and you feel unsatisfied by the end of the episode and then you just want the next episode already(this is how I felt while it was still being aired.) The show actually knows how to engage you and immerse you into the virtual reality game and you feel as if you want to be in that game. Side stories were okay by me, since this anime introduces different ways on how the mechanics of the game works. Such as cooking, fishing, training, gaining exp to level up, finding rare items etc. There was so much things explored in this show and it makes you want to see more of this. Sadly these things are only shown in the first arc, the second arc is filled with “I have to save Asuna from this very bad man who does bad things because of plot!”
So overall, Sword Art Online is definitely an entertaining show, but it comes off as utterly stupid from cliché writing, bad characters and utterly horrible use of dialogues. This show is nothing more than a wish fulfilment show for otakus who would like anything generic. I actually would recommend it to people who are actually new to anime, because it’s shows like these that actually bring more western people into the anime world. Even though Sword Art Online is a guilty pleasure, you would see it being a score of 1/10 in my list, since I’m one of those people who really hate it. But then again, who the hell has a neutral opinion of Sword Art Online. It’s either hating it or loving it. Overall I will give this show a kind of fair rating for this review with a solid score of…
3/10
