I am not even trying to be witty when saying, that this show misses pretty much every single aspect of telling a good or even mediocre story. What comes around at the end is simply and nonchalantly put, a mess. Quite an intriguing mess to say the least but only for the fact, that this existing has rendered me speechless for quite some time now.
I won't cover basic review sections as extensively as other people did, because I would probably just parrot them. Animation is good, characters are unfocused blobs of fodder, main character is sued up to the point of ridiculousness, Asuna is the one even passable feature of the anime but is frequently shoved aside for Kirito to shine, ans so on basically. Do not pay as much attention to the score on this one, because it does not really reflect my enjoyment of the show. There is definitively no score for that.
What I rather want to do however, is to try an understand how such a story could even be published to that extend and in such a state of unfocused and unpolished dribble. I have not figured this out even to this day and it still baffles me. What we first have to understand however is, that this is a story for 14-year-olds and below. In my opinion only those people could have a legitimate good time with it and show future potential of at least grasping the basics of a good story. Shounen is the most successful form of anime for a reason and those frequent tropes found in cette genre are there for a reason also. But still, shows like AoT, which I don't particularly like but could still see the appeal in, when threatened to get shot, at least have parts that redeem the show as something not being worth your interest rather than making you hate it. But there is no redeeming with SAO though. There is only agony and despair.
But I don't want to insult anybody, despite what I said earlier. I do try very hard not to. So let us rejoice in the fact that at least there are not more episodes coming and I don't want to hear about gun gale or whatever. He is a girl now and I don't care.
But what makes this show so bad, so abysmal besides the obvious things like unnecessary timeskips, nonsensical charaktermoments and -motivations, literally cheating death because we'd like to keep out protagonist as flawless as possible?
Well, in my opinion, what is far worse than any of these things is simply a lack of knowing even the basics of writing on the authors side. It is like Twilight all over again with these people. Aside from the baffling decisions that went into structuring the plot of Swort Art ans Alfheim Online, which are both almost equally bad in my opinion, this whole anime does not show even the slightest form of restraint. An overhyped, ultra badass, untouchable, walking deus ex machina of a protagonist is just the tip of the iceberg in this case.
It is as if a kid without any kind of experience in the field of writing just walked into an office some day and somehow pressed everybody there into publishing his story. This makes not even passable first writing steps for a teenager. This seems almost like an insult to regular anime watchers, even consumers of shounen. I see Naruto writing itself deeper into a corner with every chapter, I see Bleach, refusing to bloody end but I have never seen such an embarrassment of a story. A community praising it as the second coming just adds further layers of salt to this already bad tasting meal.
So in conclusion, I would not recommend this show to anybody wanting at least a decent story. Something passable this is not. This is bad, appallingly bad, horrifyingly bad. So yeah, terrible show, awful in almost every regard, two years worth of semen, goodbye dear reader.
Animation was fairly nice though.
