The bad. The whole of the second arc was pretty bad, there were certain things that I questioned about second arc that made me kind of annoyed. For instance, people don't go to the lengths that Sugou did just to piss off Asuna. When I say people don't do this, I mean that people don't really force others into marrying them, they don't do it at all because it is actually illegal to do, yes, arranged marriage is illegal if the groom or bride doesn't want to marry the other person or is highly opposed to the idea, it's kind of a thing. And it doesn't seem like the loving father, that Asuna was bragging about, to marry his daughter off while she is in a coma. So having an unrealistic villain because the last villain wasn't really a villain and you needed to have a person that people could hate as the main villain, really seems like a cop out and really lowers the score on this for story, character and my overall enjoyment of the series. The other thing that pisses me off about this series is not Sugu believe it or not, but the ending, which seems to be universally loved. The ending made absolutely no sense to me, why would these people go back to playing MMORPGs with anything that resembles nerve gear after experiencing what happened in Sword Art Online. Any person with any sense wouldn't ever put a nerve gear on in the first place let alone use it after a traumatic experience involving it. Another thing I need to point out is all the plot holes in this part. For instance, where is Kirito's mom all the time. They outright state that she lives with them at the beginning of this arc and then they just disregard that and make her unpresent all of the time. Another thing, the reasoning for why Asuna and lots of others were transfered to Alfhiem Online was kind of bullshit. It would have taken them at least a few days to get the rights to the program used to make Sword Art Online, by that point, every single player would have been logged off and with their families again. So that's a massive gaping plot hole. How about less likable characters within the game, turning Yui into a pixie like thing, and just having this part so that you can charge more for a boxset. Another thing I was kind of annoyed with was the fact that Asuna and Kirito didn't realize that they can't actually raise Yui, the main reason for this is something similar to Chobits, which handled this much better, saying that no matter how much it seems like it, an AI can't love you back, it's only programmed to do so. That's also a good lesson for anybody who wants to marry a fiction character, they can't love you, even if they are programmed, it's just a lie created by either you or somebody else.
The good. The first arc was amazing. You have likable characters that evolve over time and real life conflict rather than just "Some old creep used bullshit logic to get my girlfriend stuck in a video game again". People reacted to this whole thing more realistically and even started to scapegoat people because they had played through parts of the game before and didn't say anything about the dungeons, where as in the next season it was literally just a game, that played more like a society, this was a society of people stuck inside of a game. I didn't expect most of the events that happened and it wasn't the most predictable show at this point, I was happy when they had Asuna and Kirito get together in the series and actually had their relationship develop. And the ending to this arc was just amazing, this was the ending that they should have gone with. The villain not really being evil and even forgetting why he did what he did by the end of the two years that this took place over. And I did like the Sugu side story in the second half, it was the only good part of that side story.
Final Verdict:
Watch the first half and look up a summary of the second if you are curious what happens.
7/10
