Let me put this simply: I fucking hate Sword Art Online.
This anime is perhaps the worst thing that I have ever had the misfortune of watching all the way through. At first, I had watched it and liked it. That was years ago. But then when I rewatched it, I realized just how dreadful this abomination is.
Let me start with the main character, Kirito. He is perhaps the worst main character I've ever seen for a protagonist. He is overpowered to the highest degree of the word. With his unique duel-wielding ability (which adds on to his godlike powers) he was able to single-handedly take down a damn boss. A BOSS! He was also able to break out of a paralysis and come back to life out of damn sheer willpower EVEN THOUGH the NerveGear was supposed to fry his brain after he died.
He also has a solid following of three girls that he left completely alone, all of who at one point fell in love with him-we'll call them the Lonely Women's Club. The members of the wonderful club include Suguha, who he knew as Leafa in Alfheim, was his own cousin who fell in love with Kirito, and two other girls I don't care to remember because they're so meaningless. One of those two girls was a repeat victim of tentacles holding her in the air, revealing her panties.
And the Alfheim arc is completely irrelevant and insulting. Never has an anime insulted me more than the Alfheim arc. Asuna-who I genuinely like and is one of the saving graces of this show (more on that later)-was raped two or three times on screen while I was forced to watch. And in this arc, Kirito also spent most of his time dicking around in the Alfheim world while on a pressing time limit of six days until Asuna was forced into a non-consentual marriage with her rapist. Kirito spent most of this fighting some guy with red hair and then fending off a group with his demon transformation spell, which never appeared again in the entire anime even though there were multiple prime opportunities for it to appear once more for a fight. And while I'm on the topic of fighting, all of the fights in this series were laughably bad. The fight choreography is some of the worst I've ever seen in my entire life. It's just terrible.
I could keep going on and on about how bad this anime is, but maybe now I should focus on the anime's saving graces.
Asuna is the first of two She isn't an interesting character for a tsundere, but often times is the only rational voice in the entire show and usually is the only character to say anything that makes any sense Also, there's the music. While in SAO 2 the music is far better (aside from ending songs), I did enjoy the music in SAO a lot. "Crossing Field" is a decent OP, but the same does not stand true for the Alfheim arc. The BGM is also usually good, especially in fights. But that's pretty much it. A single character and the music are the only things I find enjoyable about this anime.
