SAO covers many different sub-genres -so if you're not open to a wide range of different genres and looking for a straight up action go watch some power rangers because you won't even understand the draws in this series.
If you need everything MMO-based explained word for word in an easy to understand dumb-down way go watch Log Horizon because this series expects you to have a little common sense and be able to infer on how they work.
There seem to be a number of people bringing up that our main character Kirito is "overpowered", however this actually isn't the case as he's constantly facing isolation, loss, and defeat progressively throughout the entire story.
I'm not going to say the series is perfect, there are a number of issues I have personally with some of the scenarios and to be honest I think the Yui arc was the worst point of the series, but no one really seems to give mention to that since they're blinded by their hate. The fact is that none of the people that watched this series really gave it a fair shot, they were told by their friends "Go watch this; it's the best thing you'll see in your life!" and they went in with the highest expectations, and tried to nit-pick absolutely everything in the series and actually ruined the experience for themselves.
SAO was never really about Sword Art Online, it was about getting out, there was no point for them to extend the Aincrad Arc because the entire objective was not being there, hence the time skips which people misunderstood as poor pacing.
The ALO arc has many good points, however as soon as it gets to the "incest-like" part of the story, literally everyone who isn't okay with that sub-genre says the series is garbage and that it shouldn't have happened, which was really just another point that you as a viewer needed to be open to in order to enjoy.
While I've watched SAO 5 times already, I did watch the series once English dubbed, and it was absolutely terrible, the characters lacked all emotion, there were awkward silences and changes between certain dialogues and it just felt pathetic, so if you saw the English dub first, you've just made a fatal mistake.
