A major concern I have with SAO is the uses of cliches and overused tropes. One instance is the use of the well known clause in anime where Kirito said 'Do I have to use that?' in episode 9 when fighting a boss. This is one of the biggest cliche in anime and so bad that other shows mock shows using said cliche. In the scene where Kirito said that, there were players dying from the boss. This meant that Kirito let people die because he didn't other players to find out about his skill.
One of the things that I found extremely irritating about SAO was the fact that Kirito was the strongest in the SAO the game barring the admin. This is evident due to the fact that he is a BEATer (a portmanteau between the words BETA and cheater). Also, he has a unique skill where only two people in the game have. Not only was Kirito overpowered, his girlfriend Asuna is overpowered as well. This might be sexist but I find it hard to believe that a girl would be good at MMO (she is one of the highest leveled person in the game) when she has never played them before even if SAO is different from normal MMOs.
This brings in new questions. Why did the author make the main characters the strongest? This is due to self insertion and wish fulfillment. This is painfully obvious when plenty of pretty girls such as Sachi, Lizbeth, Silica and Asuna are lusting after his manhood and his personality is very similar to teenagers who have emo tendencies and antisocial behavior so they can relate to him. He is also later shown to be a massive nerd therefore pandering to computer geeks. Asuna is particularly the largest wish fulfillment girl I have ever seen. She possess incredible power like Kirito, is considered beautiful by pretty much everyone, excels in cooking both in game and in real life and comes from a wealthy family which are considered traits of a perfect girl. However, I personally hate her due to these facts.
The characterization is absolutely atrocious. First there are the main characters Kirito and Azuna as I mentioned before are terrible characters with terrible characterization. They have inconsistent personality such when Kirito suddenly changes from an emo kid to a happy going person between episodes and when Asuna suddenly becomes a tsundere. Also, characters such as Sachi and Lizbeth fall in love with Kirito even though they only knew him for few days. Even Asuna is guilty of this since she had sex with Kirito despite not knowing too much about him. The only good characters in the series are minor characters such as Silica and Klein. (Why couldn't they become the main characters? Klein as the MC would have made the show better.)
The pacing is also a major issue. There are just too many time skips in the anime. This makes the episodes too episodic and not have real plot. I am not saying that being episodic is bad but the episodes between 2-8 serve in no point in the plot other than being a side story. The anime would have been a lot better if it was pure comedic, slice of life MMO life about a guild instead of what it is now where it changed from sol to having an actual plot which neither of them were good.
The only really good aspect of the anime is the music, decent character design, animation and the setting was done well. It had Yuki Kajiura as the series composer who is one of my favourite composers and LiSA, another one of my favourite, as the singer for the opening. The setting for the anime is surprisingly good and is somewhat creative. The art wasn¡¯t anything special but was still one of the best aspect about the anime. Regardless, all of these were sadly all wasted on this bad anime.
Despite all I said, the worst part about SAO is the potential it had to be a good anime. It could have easily become my favourite anime if it was done right. It had the trapped in the video game trope which I quite like. In the end it doesn't even matter what I write since the anime will sell like hotcake. The fact that an anime with bad characterization, plot, and plenty of cliches is the most popular is telling that anime is dead. In MAL SAO is rated higher than Nodame, Tatami Galaxy and many other anime that are better than SAO. This is disappointing and I hope publishers do not start making similar anime to SAO just because it¡¯s popular just to make money.
*Minor update*
I would like to thank the user Veronin for helping me when I was writing this.
