Before continuing, I need to make something clear about this thing you might be thinking about me; "You are just mad because HAO got such a high mean score after its first episode." This, my friend, is some hilarious shit. Mainly because I replaced an S with an H. Other than that, the sentence is pretty much bullshit. "People are trying to get it a mean score high as possible because mean score makes the anime better." Sounds about as legit. To say make it simple; I don't care about mean scores, I only care about the quality of anime.
After watching the first minute of the series you will already know what the author has in mind - To trap the players inside the game world. When this happends one would expect the players to panic due not getting back to their own world, isn't that right? But nope, that doesn't happen because HAO is one-dimentional shonen which doesn't try to be smart nor realistic by any means at all. I'm wrong? Imagine how you would act in the same situation.
To make the setting even more cliche and lame you need to make your characters the same. So obviously our MC is the best player in that game and everyone envies him and his skills, he is the best, that's it. This is pretty much the thing what everyone dreamed when they were 7 years-old. You know what shit usually happens when this is done? Lack of character development. The MC also got some other nice tropes to his heart, like badass, which doesn't suite him at all, nor any other bishonen due it appearing mainly overly gay.
But wait! Some shit happens and there is a player.. even more.. powerful than our MC??!?! Like how? Isn't that the most cliche thing fucking ever? Oh, yeah, almost forgot the nature of this series. Needs to put over-used cliche to lame cliche to make the series deep, all the depth and shit.
Cliches aren't all that bad thing if the story is otherwise awesome, the writer has balls to do shit and the character are actually worth of caring about. Unfortunately there is nothing to hold on to in Sword Bishonen Online, which makes it easily to be forgotten, and thus it's not memorable. Substance much? Pretty much the only different between Accel World and SBO is that HAO is dead-boring already from the very beginning while AW had actually some potentiality in the beginning. Also, pretty sure HBO will broadcast this at some point.
The pace of the series is something I'd call weird. Seems like not much is happening, yet the whole thing is extremely rushed. When I say it's rushed, I do not mean that the pacing is super fast. From recent anime e.g. Sakamichi no Apollon is really fast paced but it's not rushed due talented direction and quality execution. That's something HAO just lacks. Also, the director is a noname who has e.g. been part of the team who wrote Guilty Crown's storyboard, so, there you go. Just saying, though.
Production values really aren't notable. The art isn't bad but nothing special either, but I do agree it being fitting to the series. I personally dislike the character desing for the reason that it reminds me of personality lacking fanservice robots from Guilty Crown, but maybe that's just me. Animation is okay, but nothing worth of praising. It's not like the producers are known from their action scenes or anything anyway. Voice acting is decent enough. Theme songs come from LiSA, and she is amazing. Best thing in the series if you ask me, but I'm music faggot anyway.
I already heard complains about how wrong I am because HAO is actually one of the best from this Summer season. But no, don't misunderstand me. This season is absolutely terrible. I'm not saying this show is utter trash when comparing to other this season shows, I'm saying HAO is another cliche and very much an average series. It might be really enjoyable to watch, but is it actually good and easy to find it entertaining? No, I don't think so.
