SOE sliced a huge trench in the middle of the anime community, one side hailing the series as the best thing ever, the other side condemning it to eternal hellfire. My opinion is somewhere in the middle. It was pretty good story-wise, the art style, the world and the setting was great, but the writing and the characters were awful, plagued by dreadful writing and horrible pacing.
But for SOE II, it looks like the creators learned....absolutely nothing. It's almost exactly the same as SOE. Again, introducing a pretty great setting and idea in GGO with pretty good art and lots of possibilities, only to bring the whole thing down with terrible writing, characters and a frankly mind-boggling second half. This time, the pacing wasn't just bad, there were entire episodes in which absolutely nothing happens. Nothing of significance anyway, save for some redundant and meaningless dialogue that adds nothing to nothing. The characters in SOE weren't anything special, but in SOE II they've become so utterly bland and incoherent, not only did I loose the little interest and connection I had to them, but I even started having problems telling them apart. Kirito became a shadow of his SOE self, losing all sense of coherence, switching between "MMO god" and "broken psycho" seemingly at random. This went to the point he was benched and later degraded to a support role in the last arc, which was probably a good idea considering the alternative.
Shoving the series back into "fantasy fun fairy land" ALO was the final blow to the series for me. Asuna became front and center for most of the second half, but since her character was even more forgettable and empty, it made no difference. All the other support characters slowly congealed into a grey, bland mass, to the point I completely lost interest in what was happening on the screen. The arc with the quest for the Excaliber was utterly meaningless. Why would the Almighly Kirito, the demigod of all VRMMOs, need an overpowered special sword, when he can easily crush hordes of enemies and players without breaking a sweat anyway? Again, the whole thing was entirely pointless, there was no bigger picture, no character development, no intriguing story, nothing even remotely interesting or meaningful. It was the embodiment of "meh".
The last arc was just plain infuriating. Using horrible diseases and terminal child patients to try and incite some form of emotion from the audience was just disgusting. I never thought an anime series could stoop so low. No, I don't have a problem with entertainment mediums portraying terminal diseases and those suffering from it in the right context, but SOE II was clearly just using this as drama bait, a tool to rake in some sympathy points, nothing more. An incredibly underhanded desperation move from the creators.
I wanted to like SOE II so hard! I was waiting, from episode to episode, for the series to finally take off, but...nothing. It went out as it came, with a wimpy fart noise. There were some real possibilities in there, for good stories and characters. I really liked the GGO setting, the Death Gun arc, the raid quest mechanics in the latter half, and as much as I despised the execution, the technology to use virtual reality to ease the suffering of terminal patients was a really intriguing idea, that should've warranted more exploring instead of force-feeding us cringe-worthy drama. All in all, SOE II is just a series of missed opportunities and wasted possibilities drenched in a whole lot of bland and boring nonsense.
