First things first. SAO incarnates two already known concepts together: creating a virtual reality game which you connect to with special helmet-type devices and then imprisoning all the players inside the game till they complete it, making it so their death in game will cause the device they connect with to end their real life as well. Here is basically where the very first plotholes of the series begin to show off. How can you explain that it wouldn't be enough to get those people back simply by cutting the power off the helmets? Internal battery? Well fine, but how long can an internal battery of the device that is permanently sending signals to your brain run, even speaking of the (not very distant) future? Even if, it would only take someone to destroy the thing from outside by just cutting some cables in it. Or you could just physically annihilate the game servers which belonged to a public-known company. However, eventually noone from outside ever consired those options and thus 10 thousand people were stuck in this digital world. And this only opens the very long list of this series' plotholes.
The main character of SAO is Kirito. Looking like a typical visual novel character, but behaving more like Hei from Darker than Black as he can manage everything and has an inborn advantage over all the rest. As the only person in the game he tries to beat it alone which makes him achieve better statistics than others, although it is never shown to us how he manages to do it... Just at some point we get to know that Kirito is about 20 levels above the regular players. It needs no explanation that watching a character experiencing no hardships whatsover is not very satisfying, especially when you have bery little idea about how he got to that state. Shounen obvously wouldn't be a shounen without a female partner of the main hero and this role was assigned to Asuna. Till some point she actually keeps up with his pace, but finally she turns out to be merely a character that just needs to be saved by the main hero (not the only one to that). I can kind of compare her to Orihime from Bleach (or to Yin if you want to stay with DtB version), but if the second season of SAO is true she may even get promoted to second princess Peach. When the second arc begins, the third key character is introduced to the series and that one seems pretty similiar to Karen-chan from Monogatari series (the comparison is not coincidencial, because since she comes out half of the show's air time is filled with her cleavage shots alone...). Thanks to her something like a love triangle appears as well, but it is so poorly done and executed (I'm not even sure about it) that despite my strongest efforts I can't even call it a better love story than Twilight.
The plot of SAO was divided into two parts and although the first one is commonly believed to be the better one, I have a different view on this topic. It is because most of the series' plotholes and weirdness is contained within the first 14 episodes. My favourite one of those was the fact that amongside the lucky 10,000 first buyers of the limited edition of the new mmorpg game you could not only find female customers (and lots of them in fact), but also... Retired people and kindergartenrs. Yep. I'm not even kidding. Being at this it's hard not to mention the author of the game himself, the one who caused the sufferening to the "lucky" customers. It is taken for granted that villains have their own motives, usually something they want to achieve with their actions. I don't want to spoil you what's hiding behind this particular case, though I will say that the answer is extremely dissapointing and clearly shows how little effort the plot creators put in the title.
What tries to save the anime is the audiovisual layer. However I will admit that the graphics aren't at all that much great. Action scenes are fine, but there aren't that many of them and they're not packed with special effects. And that's a pity, cause we have an anime that is showing a computer game, so it could at least try more, for example by including some nice looking CGI graphics! What I must praise is the OST of the series. And not even the openings (I felt that the second was better btw), but mostly the background music. It's really cool and climatic and you can hear lots of it, especially closer towards the ending. In my opinion it's clearly the best aspect of the show.
To sum things up, despite a very ambitious concept, SAO remains a mediocre shounen deprived of any greater ambitions. Numerous plotholes, unoriginal and rather disturbing characters and the fact that the anime doesn't really keep you watching it makes it barely possible for me to recommend it to anyone. I hope that someday someone will try to touch this interesting theme once more and this time do it some honor.
