Review of Sword Art Online

This one is going to be particularly hard to review for me, for a number of reasons, I first watched this anime many years ago, it was one of the first anime I watched and in that time it was simply amazing for me, so I became really attached to it, to the point that I decided on the career I wanted to study thanks to this anime. Because of that I watched it many times, and with time, growing up, details started tu bug me. First of all, the sadly wasted potential of the idea behind the story, it could have had so manyepisodes, let´s imagine the anime consists of only one episode for every boss fight and that´s all there is, just like that, it would have been a hundred episodes, just with boss fights. Now, there was plenty of material to make stories between those boss fights, how did our MC obtained his equipment and his sword breaking weapon? How did he leveled up so quickly compared to other players? How did he developed his skills in the game? What is his story?

All of this is story material that was wasted and if treated well, it could have been a great addition to it and would have replaced the medium chapters that introduced the secondary characters. Even chapters about the development of the hardware used to play would have been amazing. It feels as if the author thought this was not going to be successful and tried to finish the story quiclky, and many questions are left in the air. Now then, even with all of this waste of the material, I loved the idea of the hardware used to play in the anime, it´s the dream of every gamer. The general idea behind the story is simply great, the development of it is what lacks of some details.

All of the previous review is only taking into account the first 12 chapters of the series, or the "Aincrad" arc. When talking about the "Fairy Dance" arc, I see this one completely unnecessary, with the only exception of the fight in episode 20, and the encounter after the final fight of episode 24, I can´t rescue anything else in this arc, even for someone like me that finds the series enjoyable as a whole, this arc is unnecessary and consider it as the worst one. In what sound, art and animation refers, its great for both arcs nothing more to be said.

My personal opinion is that this anime is made to be watched completely until the last season aired, as I believe the story started well, committed mistakes, and tried to fix them and made a better series in the next seasons, and truly believe the greatest impact is obtained after watching the entire series and arriving the last season. So, considering only the "Aincrad" arc and the "Fairy Dance" arc, the anime is enjoyable, but with many things to be fixed, in need of the next seasons to be shaped better.

Note: My grade was given thinking only in this two first arcs and not considering the next seasons.