I also want to point out that Sword Art Online is a Light Novel series and really as an anime should be judged in consideration that it is adapted from a novel and wasn't an anime first. That already is something that makes the situation of this anime special because it has to make a novel with pictures into an anime with a coordinated soundtrack, voicing, art, character development (without lots of monologues or written information to help do this), and do all of this while trying to stay true to the original point of the novel series.
This is why I am judging Sword Art Online based on the following criteria:
1. What is SAO trying to say?
2. How is SAO trying to say what it is trying to say?
3. Did SAO say what it is trying to say?
4. How realistic are the characters and the world that have originally described in the light novels and does the anime preserve the same conception of that world and make it enjoyable?
5.How story art, sound, character, and enjoyment all are overall.
First of all, Sword Art Online exists in season 1 in order to make two large points: 1. How you are in a game reveals something about your personality in the real world as well. 2. Games aren't all that different from the real world.
These two ideas have a lot of thought-provoking consequences. If playing an online death game, makes you feel as if you were going through the same exact experiences in the real world as in the virtual world. If you were to have your life saved in such a game and to live with other people in a dangerous place like this for a long period of time, then not only will your personality change as it would have changed if you were in the real world experiencing the exact same things, but also how you act in this world will reveal about who you are as a person if no rules or government except some basic programmed ones (from the game creator) are there to stop you from just arbitrarily killing other people.
In other words, this game not only examines how people stranded in an exotic world/place would try to act when trying to survive or trying to escape, but how they would go about either stabbing each other in the back, or working together, or leading their friends to their demise and feeling guilty.
In the end, this novel is about what happens if society starts from scratch from a group of gamers in an exotic world. What would the people do, how would they act, and would they want to escape this world, or stay there because it is so interesting and "better" than the real world.
What I am trying to say here is this: This anime isn't about Guys/Girls liking each other and feeling lovey-dovey just because one of them is hot and the other one of them is cool, it is rather a novel series/anime about the social dynamics of a deconstructed government, the character development of a deeply emotionally scarred set of individuals living in a socially deconstructed environment, and it is also an anime pointing out some of the possible consequences of using virtual reality technology, and some ways to try to overcome these consequences.
In very simple terms: are humans monsters or good guys? What will they do if no one is there to tell them to behave nicely. What if they have no homework? Are they going to go to see their parents or do other things? What is the difference between concepts in the real world and the virtual world, like marriage. The list of interesting ideas goes on and on.
Now that's just the framework for what is going on. Everything that happens has to do with these ideas. But realize this is an anime. So instead of thinking about these things expressly when you are watching the episodes, you can be watching fantastic boss battle fights for people struggling to protect each other in order to beat the game and save all of their friends inside of it. You get to hear amazing soundtracks while watching breathtaking visuals and a large, fantastic virtual world.
Since Sword Art Online isn't trying to develop a whole world with a huge list of characters inside of it in which you know everything about all of them, it not only has time-skips but it can tend to focus on the development of only a few of the characters in a significant way.
But the series does this because of the points it is trying to make. The reason Kirito and Asuna are so developed compared to other characters not because the other anime characters are never going to be developed at all now or in a future season, but rather because developing these two characters sets forth the points the series wants to make.
So why waste time developing other characters except for the fact that it's just convention? In my opinion, there is no reason to do this at all.
That's the first thing.
Point #2:
This series has a lot of very sophisticated beautiful music soundtracks that range from being very sad to being very epic. These all match what the characters are feeling and are beautifully executed. In a way, SAO was created for a reason and the reason it was actually created is left up to the viewer to decide. But it actually becomes somewhat obvious if you think about the point for a long enough time. SAO is attempting to be a game-changing thought provoking series that has a lot of amazing features in addition to good-looking characters, and romantic exchanges between characters. Every second in SAO, the players are worried for their individual and collective survival and which one matters more at any given point in time is very thought-provoking and interesting to watch.
SAO is a very dynamic series that covers a lot of cool topics and for the reasons I said above + other compelling reasons for why a series that has slow paced + fast paced episodes could be so good.
The animation, sound, art, and story are all amazingly done even if the story has time-skips and the characters aren't fully developed on-screen...
Story:
The story skips around sometimes, but it makes the points the series is trying to make very well and it is extremely emotional at times while very heartwarming at others. All in all it is extremely well done. 10/10.
Art:
The Art is absolutely fantastic. Except for perhaps Attack On Titan (at some points) it is the best art I have ever seen in any series that I have watched. This is partly because the art is integrated with what thematic concepts are trying to be conveyed at each point in time and the art not only looks amazing, but says a lot about undercurrents of what is happening in the anime. 10/10.
Sound:
This anime has almost all of my favorite anime soundtracks of all time. End of story. 10/10. I would rate it higher if I could.
This review has no spoilers:
Character:
Some characters are under-developed (in the anime) but they are all interesting in their own way.
Kirito, Asuna, Suguha are more developed than a majority of the other characters in the series. But the character development and actions of Kirito, Asuna, and Suguha just breath-take the audience while they watch the series.
Also, one of the large themes in the series is about how in a virtual world you can choose who you want to be and actively pursue it, always improving while heading towards this goal of (impossible) perfection. Kirito is the embodiment of a character who wants to do better, achieve more, and surpass what he was before. He always wants to improve himself because of how responsible he feels for saving the other people in the game. One of the largest points of this series is that the rules of a virtual world are fixed and in the end, caring enough about what you want to achieve and working as hard as you can to figure out the rules of the game, you can even understand more about the game than the person who created the game himself and you might be able to beat him... This plot-point isn't hard to imagine at all. Given that when you are playing a game in a virtual reality world, your brain is controlling all of the actions you make in that world, how amazing you can become at understanding everything in that virtual world just has to do with how well you understand how the game works. The creator of the game made all of the rules in the game, but the creator doesn't know how all of the rules interact with each other and how to manipulate them in every possible way.
Achieving your limits in other words is a huge theme of this series and Kirito does it in a really bad-ass way.
Other characters have really emotional plot points and they all serve to show how Kirito (who is the model individual who this story is focusing on in this world that has a lot of other characters who haven't been shown on-screen) and Asuna develop. This doesn't mean the other characters aren't important. It just means there wasn't room in the anime to include them because a point was trying to be made.
However, because this series had to adopt a novel series this is partly why people expect this anime series to develop every character perfectly and come back to them all of the time. Just to satisfy people who think those aspects of a series should matter a little, I'll give character 8/10.
Enjoyment:
9/10. The only reason it isn't 10/10 is because I originally didn't realize SAO was a light novel series and I originally didn't realize what SAO was trying to convey until about episode 8. The coolness of all of the earlier parts of the anime and the amazing music made me want to watch more, but I didn't get what the anime was trying to show. So the first time I watched it I kind of wanted to skip through some of the slower-paced scenes.
After I watched it though completely and realized exactly what the series was about, when I rewatched it already knowing this it was absolutely amazing and became my second favorite series I have ever seen. This is why I want to point out right now that despite all of the hate SAO gets: 1. It isn't a normal anime so it should be thought about differently when being watched. 2. It has breathtaking visuals, incredible music, and wonder voice-acting. These things make SAO a great series. These are the things which made me love it. These are the things I liked about it.
Overall:
Sure SAO had a lot of problems if you treat it like a normal anime, but if you actually are rating the show based on what it wanted to convey, it did it amazingly and it was really well done. Different anime exist for different reasons. SAO exists because of how beautiful it looks, how nice it sounds, and its deep plot content. If you are just looking for an anime that connects all of the dots for you in order to have a regular rom-com in a regular Japanese city, in a regular world, without any strange scenario, then don't watch this, watch a normal series. This series is good because it is different. It is a light novel series -> anime. And should be thought of working like that when being rated.
This is why I really loved the series, thought the characters were really cool, and loved the virtual world outlined in the show, and all of its societal consequences that arose because of the progression of the online death game.
10/10!!!
