Review of Sword Art Online

SAO will always split the anime community. A good portion thinks the show is the best thing since sliced bread and another (equally large portion) that think it is the worst thing ever. Neither IMHO is right. There are worse shows but there are definitely better ones too. I admit that I enjoyed the first half of the first season quite a lot. It was one of the first shows that used the concept of a player ending up in a gaming world and due to the fact that there were actual stakes since people really died for real when they died in the world,made it even more dramatic. I loved Asuna for being a BAMF who was an equal and even more than an equal to Kirito but then the second half fo season one and the Alfheim storyline happened and everything became a mess. As a complete insult, Asuna was turned into the damsel of distress that she never was during the first half of the season and the story itself was a tired re-hash of the original SAO storyline only with less dramatic fighting but cute little fairies and flying. And then season two happened and the less is said about that particular mess the better. SAO became a full-fledged harem show that threw out any coherent storyline and instead of swords, there were now guns. SAO should have ended after its 12th episode and everybody would have remembered it as the amazing show it used to be. Watch SAO but stick to the first story arc and forget about everything else. The first storyline would get a solid 8 or 9 from me but due to the rest of the first season and the second season, the show isn't worth more than a 4.