Review of Sword Art Online

I know this anime is kinda infamous in the community, so I'm gonna try my best to explain how I saw this. Story: The plot seems pretty cool for the majority of the original light novel series (which is the original source material). There's an RPG online game called Sword Art Online. It's new. It's hot. And it uses a virtual reality helmet to control avatars with the players' minds. Seems pretty fun, right? Well, how about the creator trapping you in that said world until you can complete all 100 levels of the game? Oh, and if you lose all your health, not only doyou die there, you also die in the real world? The concept of being trapped in a game is nothing new, but when you have life or death on the line, that sounds like an anime to watch...I still have yet to read the original light novels, but when you get past the first arc of Sword Art, I almost forgot that was the case until halfway through the first season because of how fucking unsympathetic they are towards it. I guess it's considered my WTF towards the story, but without spoiling too much, let's just say that the second arc is a really a WTF moment. With that said, I would give this a 5/10, and that may be just me being nice.

Art: In my opinion, the art is pretty spot on as far as shonens go. However, there are times where whenever this is a battle scene the art doesn't do enough, which is quite a shame because this is called Sword Art Online, not a parody of a trapped inside of a video game anime. This is where you have to fight in order to survive, and I think it would've been a lot better if they did add some blood into the video games. However, that might be the original writer's choice, but at least make it look like it hurts! The scar marks on the characters are cool, but make the character reactions more realistic because this is a game where the player uses their mind to move and feel. So this would be rated 6/10 for me.

Sound: Even though I love the soundtrack to this anime, there are certain songs that annoyed me. First of all, why do people say that the first opening is catchy? Maybe it's my nitpick, but I don't like the artist who sings the first opening. Her voice is pretty nasally, and I can't stand it. The second opening though is so much better. It matches for what the arc was going for much better than the first one. I mean, the first one is not bad for matching I guess, but it just turns me off. When it comes to endings, the first ending is pretty top and matches the show when it comes to what circumstances Kirito is facing. The second ending is straight up boring. It kinda suffers the same problems that opening one faced, but what makes this more boring is that this is about Kirito's cousin. Why not make it about Asuna only? She's the only person that really matters to Kirito! I understand that Suguha becomes more important in the second half of this season, but I honestly can't stand the girl. She's just a distraction for what Kirito needs to accomplish. But song wise, it's just your generic ending that sounds more like a opening. Because of the one opening and one ending, the sound has to be downgraded to 8/10.

Character: There are a lot of characters that come out of this season, and unfortunately, we don't end up getting to know a lot of them personally except for a few. So character development...kinda sucks here. Of course, there's Kirito, our main character, and let's go over his one major flaw. The motherfucking plot armor. For those of you who don't know what that means (but if you're an anime fanatic, then you should know by now), plot armor is basically the trope of the main character cannot die for the sake of moving the plot along and he's basically the strongest character due to the fact he can't lose. This might not always be a bad thing, but because of Kirito's undeveloped personality, plot armor becomes more annoying by the second. One character I will compare to prove my case of how it can work is Natsu from Fairy Tail. At least with Natsu, we have a backstory that makes us sympathize and empathize with our main male lead, and because of how long the series is, we have the time to get to know this character besides his obvious tropes. We know almost nothing about Kirito until the second half of this season, but not even that's enough to actually like him. I find him sexy, but his deadpan personality throws me off. Asuna is the female lead that could've been the next "Katniss Everdeen," but then she ends up being "Bella Swan." (Personally, I don't like Hunger Games either, but I digress.) We see her in the first few episodes with a bad ass personality and we thought she was gonna do something cool, but then she falls under the damsel in distress trope that pisses everyone off. She was downgraded to make Kirito "look better," which does not work. Then, we have Klein. Personally, I love Klein. I wish there was more of him. He was funny, and he had the skills of leading a group in order to save everyone. We were introduced to him as the new guy in the first episode, but he progress so much. How come we don't get that in Kirito? That is so weird how the anime did that! Then, we have two characters that are basically pointless. Yui, who is...apparently Kirito and Asuna's pet now. Her only reason of existing is supposively to bring Kirito and Asuna together even more, but why? They were already "in love" by the time they met Yui. Then, of course, she's also the "you need to learn how to believe in humanity again" sort of person, but we should've established that in episodes before! Then, we get to the second arc and we meet...Leafa (aka Suguha's avatar). I hate this bitch. I cannot stand her. Her only purpose is to remind us that Kirito also has a harem. Why? She's his cousin! Why do we need this? All she basically is is a carbon copy of what Asuna was supposed to be. We don't need another Asuna! With that said, the score is pretty low in the character department of 2/10. Extremely pathetic.

Enjoyment: As you can see, the above factors do affect whether you might like this anime or not. I will be dead honest and say that despite these things, the enjoyment is a hit or miss because of backstories and moments that were either necessary to the anime or not. There are plenty of filler episodes in the first half, which are completely full of unnecessary characters, and whether you watch the dub or sub, it doesn't matter. The character interactions will straight up be unnatural even from a virtual reality RPG. You might have some emotional moments, and there will be times that your heart will pound, but it probably doesn't last that long. Score: 6/10

Overall: Okay, I bitched and moaned enough. I'm just gonna go to the overall score, and that's a rounded 5/10. So the infamous rumors might be true; however, I would recommend this anime to beginner watchers so you can see how anime was improved over time. If you are a veteran already, don't degrade yourself like I kinda did for this.