Review of Sword Art Online

Tl;dr: Perfect? Not in the slightest, but I love it. The biggest issue the first half of the season suffers from in my opinion is the inconsistant pacing. How much time passes between episodes? Days? Weeks? Months? It makes it hard to really get involved in the lives of the characters as they survive in the game. The time that's spent developing the relationships between the characters is a fraction of how long they're on screen. However, a better execution would have required a much longer series focusing solely on the time in SAO, and since they had to keep it realistic to cover the lightnovels, I don't want to fault them for not covering it in more depth.

Now, fairy dance. Inconsistent? Yes. Weird? Between the pseudo-incest and tentacle molester, definitely. Bad? No. Again, despite the faults it's still an entertaining story overall.

So the biggest takeaway for me is this: when the show is good, it's great. When the show is bad, it's hilarious. I don't get why some people hate it so much, but maybe that's just because I'm not a weeb.