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After watching a bunch of anime. I thought I probably should come back and write a review for one of my first watched anime.

~ Notable Aspects ~

-- Art --

The animation in the anime is great. There are no stupid-looking CGI monsters, the character proportions and attire look natural (in the anime style of course. Not real world) and the backgrounds and scenes are unique and pleasing to look at in every episode


-- Sound | Music --
...
This part of the anime is simply fantastic. Still the best music I have heard in an anime to date.

Some nice ones are:

Swordland
The First Town
With My Friend
A Close Battle
In This Cruel Land



~ Main Review Below ~


-- Aincrad Arc | 8.5/10 --

The Aincrad Arc may not have a deep plot or any significant moral story or anything like that, but one thing that this anime does better than many others is that it provides a break from everyday life and lets people relax and just watch without thinking too hard about "what does that mean?" or "is that foreshadowing?" Normally, this would cause the anime to simply crash and fail since it would be trying to force a story without an actual meaningful story (and it does crash and fail in the Alfheim arc for this very reason) but since every episode (sometimes spanning 2 episodes) in the Aincrad arc provides a totally different mini-story, viewers are never bored even though the main story is virtually non-existent. The Aincrad arc provides people with a slice-of-life in another world and lets viewers be entertained by how situations would play out in an RPG game world. Add in a bit of romance and an overpowered main character then you got an anime that appeals to many people.


-- Alfheim Arc | 2.5/10 --

Now, this part of Sword Art Online is just simply bad. This arc provides nothing significant and also loses the mini-story structure of the first arc. What was great about the Aincrad arc is completely destroyed in this part. The first arc can be defined in the isekai and slice of life genre's but this arc can summed up by: "Shit, my girlfriend is trapped I have to save her --> random unrelated side stories + incest (where did this come from?) --> Happily ever after"

While this arc is insignificant, there are some fun moments in this arc that some people might want to see:

(SPOILER WARNING)



Yui Reunion
Monster Kirito
Kirito Shounen fight with Eugene
Kirito's sister/cousin Suguha funny moments
Asuna Reunion
The Music and Visuals (Even though the story is bad, the art and sound is still great)



***I am not including the Alfheim part of the anime in my review scoring***

This review contains spoilers. The first few paragraphs do not contain spoilers.
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First things first. Do not watch this anime if you:

Hate extreme manipulation of people.
Dislike major character deaths.
Want a love story.
Are not a fan of psychopaths.
Don't want sleepless nights.
... Don't want to feel depressed for 2 weeks.


While this anime series is indeed great, in which I mean that every character is thoroughly developed and it is easy to see their point of view, I will have to say that I am not a fan of the tragic ending of this story. I watched this series right after Code Geass and while Lelouch (Code Geass) and Light (Death Note) both have somewhat similar personalities, Light is considered by me a mastermind psychopath while Lelouch is a genius, selfless hero.

This series does invoke powerful feelings of loss and will make you consider the meaning of living and the meaning of justice. This series will also allow many people to see some of the extremes in life, such as how twisted and evil people can get whilst keeping a belief that they are doing the right thing for society.

Spoilers start here.
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While Light does die in the end of the series, it is difficult for me to hate him for his ideals. As seen in real world cases like the Stanford Prison experiment, when given power without consequences, people tend to go to the extremes while taking on a "The means does not matter, only the results do" ideology. Light is clearly trapped in this belief that it is up to him to save the world while as we all know, society will still function even with him gone.

Another thing that I have to add in the middle of this is that the anime becomes extremely stale after a while, there is no comic relief in basically the entire series, and each and every scene is just business and nothing more. Though I guess that it does add to the effect of the series in a way that lets the audience feel as if they were living in that situation.

Light kills and manipulates a ridiculously large amount of people during the series and nearly all of those people dies, some of the killed are people that he tricked into falling in love with him, others are innocent people that he kills for experiments, even his father dies because of his actions. Light has no feelings for others (Unlike Lelouch from code geass) and that is what makes this anime feel so depressing for me. In a single sentence, this is what this anime series feels like to me:

A student, given the power of a god, becomes a psychopath, in seek of a perfect world, brings death and destruction to himself and many others.