Review of Sword Art Online

Overall, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. While it clearly has its problems, I never really hated watching it. I can see why this show was a big deal at realease. The first episodes do a good job setting up the world and its stakes which probably kept me going throughout the series. The animation isn’t the best, but it’s not terrible. The fights are mostly misses. I was thinking about giving it a solid 4 after the first 13 or 14 episodes, until the second half came and bumped it down. World-building in the second half was bad and rushed, Asuna wasrelegated to being even more useless, and the pacing was all over the place.

The characters are bad, no way around it. None of them are realized and they mostly rely upon Kirito most of the time. His ability to be great at everything and get all the girls started to test more in the second half. It has a lot of wack moments, but you can overlook them as long as you don’t think too hard about them. I liked how, while Kirito pretty much had a harem, it was never too in-your-face about it and stayed mostly wholesome. I also liked his realtionship with Asuna and certain elements of the first half were decent enough. It’s a solid 3.