Also, SAO added an interesting factor, death, turning everything into something more than a game. The target was no longer having fun, they had to win and survive, and that introduced dilemmas and situations that were beyond the game. Some people just tried to survive, others did whatever they could to win, either teaming up or betraying other players. A virtual reality game had become, suddenly, a life simulator, with such a simple and yet so important detail as death.
I liked the idea, there's no doubt, but everything changed when they decided to forget what, at first, looked like the anime target, or what I thought the target would be. In a few chapters everything became different, chapters went through a romantic plot between the main character and the gamer girls he encountered, helping them like a perfectly good blue prince, and forming, step by step, his harem. Female characters who could have excelled were brought down into housewives (ehem... Asuna... ehem), romantic comedy overtones everywhere and, as time was going by, a worryingly descendant presence of action scenes or details that reminded you that everything was part of a game (even the protagonists forget it), and I would like not to talk about the second part of the anime, fairies...
In conclusion, the good ideas that made me being interested in the anime became nothing, a really misused context which ended up telling a love story which, also, has nothing special, a hero who saves the troubled girl, nothing new. SAO has been, with no doubt, one of the great disappointments that anime has given me.
