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Disclaimer: There will be some spoilers in this review. Please do not read if you haven't watched the anime in its entirety yet. You have been warned.

I've watched SAO a few different times now, and hear me out, despite me giving it a rating of just a 6, there's a lot to love about this anime. It's got arguably one of the greatest hooks in all of anime with the famous first episode where it is explained that "if you die in the game, you die in real life". It genuinely makes you invested right out of the gate and makes you want to ... watch more. Knowing that there was such high stakes in Aincrad and that one small mistake could be the difference between life and death definitely made the show more enjoyable. You felt the fear that certain characters had of dying and potentially losing the ones in which they care for. Another thing Sword Art Online does very well is making you feel immersed in the world. I was truly impressed with the background scenery in a lot of the episodes from both the Aincrad arc and the Alfheim arc. Various elements come together to make it feel like the characters are actually within a video game such as the sound effects, visual effects, items, sword skills, and various other systems that are explained throughout the anime. The animation quality, while not absolutely breathtaking is still very well done and some of the battle scenes were gorgeously animated such as Kirito's two fights with Heathcliff, the famous starburst stream battle in episode 9 and my personal favorite, Kirito's fight with General Eugene in episode 20. This anime also has a beautiful soundtrack. There is quite a few songs from this anime that I added to my music playlist and that is some of the highest praise I can give. I also wanted to comment that I particularly enjoyed the character design of Leafa; I thought they did an excellent job with her.

You might be thinking to yourself that if I enjoyed so many elements about SAO why did I give it such a low rating? Well, the show also has a fair bit of problems too that I just couldn't ignore. The first big issue I had was with the pacing. Now, I get it. Aincrad has 100 floors and not every single floor can be shown due time constraints. Likewise, were not going to be able to experience every time Kirito levels up. However, I just felt as if this show jumped around way too much. The 2nd episode showcases the characters beating the floor 1 boss, and by the end of episode, they have somehow made it all the way up to floor 49. Also in episode 3, Kirito is shown to be at least level 48. It just seems like an awfully large jump in the story that I simply couldn't ignore. Another thing I didn't like about SAO was that besides Kirito, Asuna and later Suguha/Leafa, the other characters didn't feel like they had any depth to them. There were some characters that I was genuinely interested to learn more about whether it be Klein, Agil, Liz, Sachi (RIP), Recon, etc. However, the side characters all had something in common with one another: they all had very little screen time and therefore very little room for character development. Characters such as Liz & Silica only show up for one episode in the anime and never show up again. To be fair Agil and Klein do make a few appearances in boss fights in Aincrad and Recon does show up a few times in Alfheim, but I never really felt like the focus was on developing their characters if that makes sense. I got the vibe that every time a side character appeared it was to somehow to move the plot forward such as Liz making Kirito's sword and Agil inspecting Grimlock's sword in episode 5 and 6.

The next problem I had with SAO is that the final fights (Kirito vs Heathcliff & Kirito vs Sugou) both felt like asspulls to me. In Kirito's fight vs Heathcliff, Asuna somehow overcomes her paralysis and sacrifices herself for Kirito and dies. Heathcliff after breaking Kirito's sword and knocking the other one out of his hand, impales Kirito with sword which technically kills him. However, fueled by pure plot armor and the power of love, Kirito somehow resurrects from the dead, picks up Asuna's sword, and impales Heathcliff. Heathcliff then decides to say "screw it" and drops his HP to 0 thus ending the game. There was so many things running through my mind the first time I watched this episode. "How did Asuna overcome paralysis?" "How the hell did Kirito resurrect from the dead?" "Did Klein possibly use the revival item that Kirito gave him in episode 3?" "Why did Heathcliff decide to die?" "Why didn't Asuna and Kirito actually die when you know, they died in the game." And perhaps the most important question of all, "What was Kayaba Akihiko's motive for creating Sword Art Online?" Most if not all of these questions were left unanswered which left it to be the viewer to try to make speculations. Some people might like endings that are open to interpretation, but I personally prefer endings that are more concrete. A similar asspull was done with Kirito's fight with Sugou where Kirito somehow meets with Kayaba Akihiko's conscious (later we found out he performed a scan on himself). Kayaba makes parallels to their fight and claims that the old Kirito would never have given up and "gave into the system". Kirito then is somehow able to use Kayaba's account ID to basically set Sugou to level 1. Maybe I'm being a bit nitpicky with this gripe, but I simply didn't feel as if either final fight was particularly well executed and left me wanting more.

There is quite a bit of problems I had with the Alfheim arc. The first is one I don't think people talk about enough and that is Yui. Now hear me out, I never had any issues with Yui in Aincrad. We learn that she is essentially an AI that monitors the emotions of players and when she uses the aid of the system to defeat the monster in episode 12, the system immediately recognizes this, runs a check on her program, and deletes her, but not before Kirito is able to hack the system and make her heart into an item. Well surprise, Yui is back in Alfheim and in the form of a cute, navigation pixie. Except she might as well be a cheating device because she can literally do everything. Track players from far away? Yup. Open doors and passages that were never meant to be opened? You bet. Have extremely useful knowledge about the best battle spells to use and when to use them? Sure, that too. It truly felt like that again Yui was just another character that moved the plot forward and didn't really receive any specialized character development. There is also Asuna who was one of my favorite characters in Aincrad because she was a badass swordswoman who did her best to clear the game, but in Alfheim she is reduced to a damsel in distress. It was truly a shame to witness and it felt like Yui had more screen time than Asuna.

Hear me out, I get it. A lot of anime shows have fan service in them, but Sword Art Online did a pretty good job of shoving it in your face nearly every episode. However, while I'm pretty tolerant when it comes to having suggestive camera angles shown to me, what I really found distasteful was the rapey scenes in the Alfheim arc. They genuinely made me uncomfortable to watch and I found a few scenes pretty disturbing to sit through. It's safe to say I didn't like episode 21 and that was primarily due to the tentacle scene. I didn't think it would get worse than that, but Sugou's actions in episode 24 were pretty gross. I understand he's the main villain and all, but it genuinely felt like I was watching a hentai rather than an anime at times.

A central component in the Alfheim arc is that Suguha/Leafa and Kirito are working together to make it towards the World Tree. However, Leafa does not know that Kirito is really her older brother (more on this in a bit). Eventually the two of them make it to the base of the world true and it's finally revealed that Kirito is looking for a person named Asuna and Leafa connects the dots and realizes that Kirito is actually Kazuto. Okay, fine. Here's the part I dislike though. Like pretty much every woman in this anime, Leafa starts getting feelings for Kirito (seriously how the hell does Kirito manage to get a haram without even trying). That's fine. What I kind of had to say "WTF" to was that it is also revealed that Suguha was starting to develop feelings for Kazuto in real life. Now, remember when I said that the two of them were brother and sister? Well turns out that Kazuto is actually from another family and Kazuto and Suguha are cousins. The fact of the matter is whether or not they are brother or sister or cousins its still freaking weird for Suguha to have feelings for Kazuto. The incest aspect of this arc made me pretty uncomfortable as well. As soon as their true identities were revealed to one another, Leafa should have stopped having feelings for Kirito, but I got the vibe that Leafa still liked Kirito even after the fact. Once again, it just felt weird and in my opinion should have never even been an element of the anime in the first place.

The last thing I really wanted to mention is that Alfheim didn't really have the same intensity as Aincrad did for obvious reasons. For one, everyone was able to log out of the game whenever they wanted (well everyone besides the 300 test subjects). Secondly, if you died in Alfheim, it didn't mean you died in real life like it did if you died in Aincrad. I personally think Sword Art Online was at its best and most enjoyable when the stakes were high. You could make an argument that for Kirito the stakes were high because he wanted to save Asuna as quickly as possible, but it just didn't feel the same as Aincrad's situation to me.

There's some other issues I had with Sword Art Online, but I got a lot of the major issues I had with the show written down. Anything else I write would more or less be nitpicking. Overall, I did enjoy my time watching Sword Art Online and despite all of its flaws, and all of the hate this anime gets, I do recommend it still. I'm happy this was my first anime I ever watched a few years ago. I can appreciate that SAO pretty much popularized the isekai genre and for everything this show did wrong, it also did a lot of things right. I will certainly be revisiting season 2 and seeing if some of the issues I wrote about in this review are addressed. Stay tuned.

Aincrad Arc: 8/10

Alfheim Arc: 4/10

Overall Score: 6/10