Review of Sword Art Online
[Potential spoilers ahead] This won't be an in-depth review, since you can find plenty of content on this series. It's one of those shows where nearly every long-time anime fan hates it, and nearly every new anime fan loves it. Story: Poor story, plot holes, the ending of Arc 1, everything except the concept in Arc 2, I can go on. The revolutionary VR tech out there is confirmed to be potentially deadly by a ~14 y/o, and nobody thought to regulate the tech in any way. The game system of SAO literally bends over backwards to the MC, Kirito (as he has the fastest reactiontime of any players, he gets an OP skill that I believe is revealed about halfway through the first arc). I won't discuss the ending of either arc, but the first felt purely bad and the second was just a generic ending with the bad dude getting his ass kicked, if I recall correctly. The forced villain in Arc 2 is...bad. Just plain bad. He's a villain for the sake of a plot device really.
Art: I don't really remember anything about the art. The characters do suffer from Same Face Syndrome, but it's not too bad unless you're used to anime that really do a good job at avoiding that. The fight scenes look quite nice, but I haven't watched the show in a while and it didn't leave a very large impression.
Sound: Most people who see SAO can at least agree there's some damn good soundtracks in this series. The most popular is "Swordland", but there are other good tracks in my music playlist that come from this series. The opening song is good but a little forgettable (unless you leave it on loop or something), and the ending didn't leave much of an impression either.
Characters: Kirito, the MC, is a blank slate for the sake of the audience projecting themselves onto him. The female lead, Asuna, feels rather generic. The potentially interesting characters (IE, Klein) have been thrown under the metaphorical bus and get little screentime or chance to develop while the characters that should develop (Kirito) don't really do so. Kirito is basically superhuman. He's a kendo prodigy (whose fighting style would make kendo practitioners want to cry) who gave up and became a super hacker instead; he even hacked government records to see his own file (not a big spoiler, but it causes family issues). The characters with predefined roles and traits (Sachi, the shy one to get Kirito to open up a bit more) has a fear of dying in the game. Because nobody else shares that sentiment.
TL;DR: Go watch the abridged series of this show by Something Witty Entertainment. It's a lot less absurd, and comes with better character development than its source material (even though it takes a very long time to update)