I slowly watched this series with a friend over the course of a few months. After finishing it today, I'm left confused - what type of anime is this exactly?
Art:
Let me start with something simple: the art. The SAO anime series has pretty art, in both character design and background design. The style of character is typical of other fantasy anime that you see currently, very colourful and lots of variety. Evidence of the beautiful background design can be seen in the second opening sequence, when they are showing the different places in Alfheim. Some of the inbetween or faraway shots of characters are of low quality, however. For example, when we first see Asada Shino in real life, it is in a bird's eye shot of her, and her limbs look totally skinny and strange. Other than that, I did enjoy the art.
Sound/Music:
The soundtrack itself is lovely as well, with the serious pieces being quite emotional. I didn't care for the opening/ending themes that much, but they aren't bad.
Story/Character:
Okay, here we get to my issues with this series, and I'm sure that many others would agree. First, the characters. Basically the only new recurring character (other than the bad guy) we get in this series is Sinon, who is trying to find out how to be strong and move on. We get this whole arc, half of the series, devoted to her finding strength and finding happiness... and then, just like Sword Art Online I, all that gets tossed right out the window and she takes on a cheerleading backseat in Kirito's harem. Not only that, but her cool demeanor goes with it, and she appears to develop some sort of *thing* for Kirito too. Ugh. Really?
The Gun Gale arc is extremely bleak and dark (literally) compared to the other arcs in the series, and compared to the original Sword Art Online arcs. I'm not even sure how they thought the whole arc was good writing - 'I just came out from being stuck in a survival game for two years, and now that people have been dying in this new game, I'm gonna go and investigate and hope I don't die as well'? C'mon.
Asuna and the rest of Kirito's harem are basically nonexistent for this entire arc; Kirito just abandons his friends and goes on his own adventure. Oh wait, Asuna does that later too.
That bit with Shino's crazy attacker was unexpected; there was absolutely nothing leading up to that conclusion. Not sure how I feel about that.
Also, Kirito, why are you groaning and acting like you're going to die in that final dramatic scene at Shino's place? You've been playing a game where getting injured doesn't actually cause pain, so if you didn't get injured, why are you acting like you did? Sigh.
Looking at the arcs individually, I found the Alfheim quest arc not too bad. It's nice to see mythology incorporated into these things. I just wish that each of the Norns could have given them a quest, not just Urd, and then her two sisters appear at the end for no reason other than aesthetics. Why have 3 when only 1 does anything? Why Norns then, why not something that is only 1?
And the logic when Kirito needed to find Freya's lost item - use lightning magic so that the lightning/thunder powers in Mjolnir will be attracted to your magic and lead you to it. What?
That final arc, the Mother's Rosario arc - completely different from the others. It's like the writers went - OH, all that character "development" we did for Asuna before and then tossed out the window, okay, let's just give her some more "development"! I realize that the anime follows the light novels or something, which I've never read, but the final arc just feels like they slapped it on just so they could do something for Asuna. Now it's her turn to abandon her friends and go on an adventure. Then the writers tried to make it really heartbreaking. I guess it was kind of sad, but if you compare it to the beginning of the show.... I mean, Sinon just completely disappeared. Is this the same show, or just a "fanfiction" using the characters?
This show went from gun-fighting to fantasy to... that last arc. I guess the only way I can really summarize this show is that it's about video games. I wasn't able to really enjoy it because of how unrealistic and clunky it felt, not smooth or natural at all.
