I'll try not to spoil any of the actual story, but the 1st half on the anime starts of quite fast, Kirito enters SAO the game by connecting his actual body to the Nerve Gear, Nerve Gear is a virtual reality heltmet, the heltmet can sense all sorts of things such as height, weight and age of the player etc. At first Kirito does not look like his avatar inside of SAO until certain events happens, this is when everything starts to go down hill when he himself and also other players are transported to the main centre of the game, at this point the creator of SAO inside of game reappears, Akihiko Kayaba is this person. Before this has happen Kirito and his friend Klein notice that something is missing when they entered the menu system, the log out button is not there meaning themselves and the other players are unable to log out of SAO. So we go back to the centre of the SAO where the creator of SAO starts to discuss why they can not log out of the game.
The only way to get out of the game is to reach to the 100th floor the tower that consists of 99 boss inside each floor and the 100th floor is where the final boss is remain, But there is a price, every time someone dies in the game dies in real life, this became a international problem in the outside world. The only way to survive is to train and level up the avatar. Making sure that there health does not reached to 0.
Kirito meets a girl called Asuna, they start to connect through out the arc and they effectually fell in love. Kirito went though different experience though out the time in SAO, loosing people who he had met inside of a guild. He met other people who are still alive. Kirito who was chosen as one of the 1,000 beta testers. Since he had previous experience and knowledge of the game, he felt that he could beat the game easily. As a result, he set out to beat the game on his own.
The 2nd half is when Kirito has woken up from beating SAO game but Asuna has not woken up and this became a problem for him. He discovers that there is another virtual game Alfheim Online, Kirito looks at an image of Asuma trapped inside of ALO. By someone, not putting who.
People had has there doubts about the 2nd half of SAO, because it drag on quite a bit. But in my opinion I thought it was ok, not bad just ok.
The art style is splendid in my opinion, the voices fit the characters quite correctly. The OST is also splendid, I can't stop listening to it to this date.
I'm still new to reviews but I hoped this has help. I do apologise if I had put some spoilers and I got carried away as well.
