Sword Art Online (SAO) had real promising from reading the synopsis; however, I feel that it failed to delivery on all the hype it was getting. But after watching several episodes I feel like SAO has two major issues which make the anime really hard and jarring to get into. These two problems are the Story and the Characters. The story starts off with the premise that players are trapped within the game, SAO, and the only way to get out is to clear all 100 levels. But the problem here, with the story, is that the anime tends to skip months at a time, which is very jarring as a view. It felt as if I missed out of entire events from watching one episode to another.
The story, though 11 episodes, hasn't really gone anywhere aside from the main characters fighting bosses and proceeding through the levels, but the main problem is that there is no "main" villain per say. And what I mean is that we don't really see a villain (can be argued that the game is the main villain, but I don't think that this was intended). This bothers me personally, I like to see who is pulling the strings or at least some hint of someone behind everything. Sure we saw the creator in episode one, but after that he is never mention again, as of yet. So I've given the story a lower score because it just seems to not be going anywhere and because of skipping so much time.
3/10
Art-
Characters look great, sets look great, different levels have different art styles, and they all look great. Not much more to say here.
8/10
Sound-
I really loved the music in SAO, I felt like it harmonized well with the different levels worked well during the fight scenes. Enjoyed the music.
8/10
Character(s)-
There are really only two main characters that we see on a regular basis and the problem is, well, they're pretty boring. There is no real development for our main hero and heroine because they've skipped so much time in the anime and we're not given time enough to get to know and like these characters. I think that the relationship between the two are rushed and is hard to believe. They are too perfect and have no flaws or interesting traits to them, basically they're two dimensional and have no depth to them.
2/10
Overall I think that the story and characters really dragged down SAO from being what it was hyped to be. And the problems are so huge that it's hard to over look them and enjoy the anime. From the time skipped, months at a time, I felt very disconnected from the world they presented because I felt as if I missed so much. So it's hard for me to really give SAO a good score because I believe it had great potential and premise. But overall I would give SAO a 4/10 for the problems mention above.
