Let's start with what the anime manages to do okay with. The music is pretty good. You cannot go wrong with Kajiura Yuki. I do wish her skills were used for a more polished anime, though. While I didn't care much for the first opening theme, I did enjoy the second ending theme and ended up listening to it several times while watching the anime (I usually skip openings and endings). The art was quite good and certainly worthy of praise. A hefty budget gave way for fluid animation and some exciting battle scenes.
The main premise isn't all that bad, either. A bunch of virtual reality gamers get stuck in an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, for the uninitiated) and must fight their way to “clear” the game. The problem is that the first episode itself is rather foggy about exactly how one “clears” the game, and I went on for at least half the SAO arc wondering why exactly the players weren't more driven to actually, you know, level up. I made up from several conversations that all it took was one person to beat the game, and then everyone could leave. Perhaps it's just my comprehension that is wacky, though.
What Sword Art Online fails with is making us care about what is happening at all. We know absolutely nothing about any of the characters. Developments seem to happen off-screen, the episodes don't connect to each other, and characters pull plot twists out of their derrières. What we're left with is a mess of interactions that aren't interesting or titillating in the slightest. Plot points that we should have been able to infer or guess for ourselves instead appear with little to no rhyme or reason. Revelations should leave me astounded or with a sense of satisfaction that I was right for my assumptions. Instead I was left feeling dysphoric and unimpressed with the anime's direction. Everything seemed childish.
There are far too many time skips to make the viewer feel connected or interested in any way. Characters and events that I should care for lack the chemistry and artistic finesse to actually make me do so. This causes the main characters (and side characters, for that matter) to come across as under-developed and flat, which they are. We have little to no reason to actually empathize with them. Their stories simply unfold in front of our eyes like a secondhand play script, minus the emotion that an actual script would contain.
Another problem that appears is the apparent necessity for Kirito, the main lead, to form a harem. Instead of actually interacting with his main love interest, part of the SAO arc consists of mostly stand-alone episodes wherein he saves or assists a girl of an obligatory archetype. We have the shy girl, the loli, the tsundere, among others. Most of these girls end up falling for Kirito in one way or another. What makes matters worse is that these characters usually do not join Kirito's party for long, if at all, making the episodes seem pointless as the girls often do not appear again. Combined with the fact that the majority of them aren't very memorable, it makes for a rather contrived manner of showing the main lead's many "facets", if one wishes to call them that.
His facets can be described in one word: "perfection". Kirito rarely does something wrong, and if he does, it's clearly other characters' fault – or no one holds him responsible, anyway. He is the poster child for what every young boy would want to be, which would be fine and dandy in children's fiction, except Sword Art Online is marketed as a thrilling and nail-bitingly exciting life-or-death escapade. Kirito always has the best equipment, always comes up on top in fights, and always knows best. The first few episodes have him displaying one of the strangest and most jarring mood switches I've ever seen, made worse so by the fact that there is not even a hint of an explanation and that the mood swing makes no further appearance in a later episodes.
While Kirito's relationship with Asuna, his love interest, was refreshingly mutual and realistic, it failed to make any sort of impression on me other than "oh, hey, they're actually together". The majority of their developments, especially in the beginning of the series, seem rushed and jarring in comparison to the rest of the anime. Things just happen, and we don't get to see an actual emotional connection or bond between the two of them. In fact, at first, they are downright hostile to one another. Perhaps "realistic", in this case, is not a proper word to describe them; still, I feel it's an apt descriptor for a couple who actually behaves like a couple amidst of a sea of anime where leads rarely get together until the last few episodes.
That brings us to the second arc of Sword Art Online, and that is where things go horribly wrong, even for SAO standards. The lack of Asuna's presence gives Kirito an excuse to enlarge his harem – and perpetuate a "plot twist" that was completely unnecessary, tasteless, and downright senseless. A series of plot twists, even. And once again, these are pulled straight out of characters' behinds with no one the wiser. While the second arc does have a bit more of a coherent plot, it still fails to provide much entertainment value or intrigue. It ends up seeming like simply an attempt to provide wish fulfilment. It doesn't bring anything new to the table except more frustration and boredom, and in the end there is still almost no reason to care for any of the characters.
Just about the only good thing about this arc is that the main villain actually seems to have a tangible purpose, unlike the antagonist of the first arc, who simply existed. The villain of SAO's second arc also managed to come off as particularly despicable and it was quite satisfying even for me to see Kirito go to town on him, so I suppose at least they got that aspect right.
Overall, the anime left me with a feeling of utter indifference and the sensation as if I'd just consumed too much junk food. And that's exactly what this anime is: junk food. It's not good for you and won't do anything for your health, but it might be entertaining for a little while.
