Review of Sword Art Online
Putrid bile. Filth. Abomination. The story starts promising with a death game premise where it is explained that 100 floors must be cleared in a game world to survive and in game death means real life death. This is a semi-standard death game horror premise. So when something like this is written in for the first episode, you expect there to be the threat of death looming and extreme danger right? Narrative stakes where characters could die at any moment and mistakes from other players showing their demise throughout the story? A 100 floor virtual reality mmo with RPG settings. You would expect an adventure where theMC collects items and improves his stats and gear, has epic fights with a variety of unique monsters and uses strategy to overcome his battles right?
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha....
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
No. This is actually a harem romance anime where there is absolutely 0 threat to the MC. There is a time skip almost immediately where half the floors are skipped (because who would want to see the MC's initial progress and rise from weak to strong right?) and the MC is already fucking invincible for no reason. Oh sorry, there is a reason, it's just utterly retarded. He has the fastest reflexes so that means he can use 2 swords (*SOYFACE OMG DUAL WIELDING!!!*) and no one else can :), he's a beta tester (all the other players are first responders, you'd expect them to be hardcore gamers) so that means while every other person is failing and incompetent, this teenager is a God among men who can solo raid bosses. These bosses don't seem to possess any interesting abilities, drop no cool items, don't require any strategy to beat and have no sense of sentience.
The "characters" mostly don't exist. I mean there are people(?) that have names and stuff, but they behave mostly like NPCs. There are two characters (MC and Asuna) that have any kind of development at all. MC is gary stu cardboard extraordinaire and Asuna is his faithful sandwich making cumslut.
Sometimes the story moves, I think about 5% of the show moves the plot forward although that might be generous. Most time is spent on showing Kirito collecting harem members before forgetting about them or sexing woman slave #1.
The main overarching villain has a very deep ideology that drives him to perform his devilish actions. Think he smoke a joint and forgot tho, "yooooo dude I totally had like a crazy idea... what if I just trapped some people in the game and shit *puffs* haha that'd be tight bro." The MC is supposed to lose but God comes down from the heavens and revives Jesus-kun. I almost wanted to give this a 2 because I've never seen such a shameless deus ex machina in any story and I do love shamelessness, but sadly there is nothing to signify that this story is self aware at any level.
The 2nd part with the pedophile netorare tentacle rape and the dumb incestous teen who constantly gets fanservice shots of their crotch didn't even phase me at this point. If it leaned a little harder into these points I would've thought it was ironic and praised this story a bit more, but it seems to just perfectly be plausibly terrible enough that you know it actually is written just that badly.
I must admit this is the worst story I've ever sat all the way through. I have never been so perfectly baited into a story quite like this, so kudos to SAO.