Review of Sword Art Online

The key draw to Sword Art Online (SAO) is the premise put forward in Episode 1; players cannot leave the virtual MMORPG game world and if they were to die in the game they would die in real life as well. This key concept plays excellently throughout the first 14 episodes, however from episodes 15-25 this is stripped away - leaving a rather generic story with no meaningful consequences. The second half of the series is nonsensical with excessive narrative oversights for the sake of a rather lackluster romance spin. The art and sound featured in SAO is great, however the characters are unrelatable and shallow. As aparticularly terrible example of character development a romance sub-narrative is showcased in Episode 3, whereby the main protagonist Kirito falls in love with a female player (only 8 minutes of screen time is given to this), only for her to die and then have Kirito cry about it for the other 9 minutes of screen time in the episode.

Episodes 1-2 & 5-14 are excellence which I'd score 9/10 overall.
Other episodes 3-4 & 15-25 are quite bad which I'd only score 5/10.
Overall I've given SAO a score of 7/10.

If they had cut the unnecessary episodes of 15-25 and just finished with a concluding 15th episode after episode 14 then the series would have been a great anime that lives up to its popularity, it's kind a shame they ruined it.