Review of Sword Art Online

Contains Slight Spoilers!!! First of all, I'll start with the story. Story:4 At first I was interested in this anime but then ended up disliking it as the episodes got worse and worse. Although the plot is pretty unique, it wasn't very clear, because the pacing was bad, to be honest. I mean, we know that the goal in the first part of Sword Art Online 1 is for Kirito and some other people to clear the game, but it's like for a few episodes in a row something would be happening, and in another few episodes in a row, something else would be happening. It waskind of just a bunch of little stories jumbled up together that sort of unfold and develop the plot. The episodes got worse and worse as it went on, it could've all just ended at episode 14. I don't get why they had to add the fairy world. It's like there were two bigger stories with small mini-stories in each that make up 1 season.

The romance sucked. SPOILER: In one episode, it showed that Kirito and Asuna would always bicker and quarrel and that Asuna didn't consider him to be even a friend, but then a few episodes later she would always hug him and stuff. End of spoiler. The romance wasn't well developed;it didn't show how their affection for one another grew.

Nothing about the MMO stuff was well explained. If you haven't played a MMO, you wouldn't understand how the Sword Art Online virtual world worked, like I didn't understand until I learnt about MMO's. You'd only understand a little bit of the story. The leveling up was like "what?" cause in one episode Kirito would be level 20 and then in the next he would be level 48 and then level seventy-something. The building guilds (groups of players that help each other out to complete the goal of the game) and solo-players thing wasn't explained well, either. Also, 10,000 people can't play in one server.

Art:6

The animation was okay in the SAO world. The action scenes weren't that well done. I think the action was alright but could've been done much better, like, it wasn't well detailed. It was sort of a ''Just about 200 slashes and that monster is dead'' kind of thing.
But the art in the fairy-world looked sort of childish. I personally didn't like it at all.

Sound:7

The sound was probably the only really good thing in this anime to me. The openings and endings were all nice. I personally don't like English dub at all, so I didn't like the dub. The soundtracks were okay.

Character:4

The characters were alright but weren't developed well at all. They didn't each have their own distinct personalities. The main differences among the characters would be things like how the program thing named Yui called Kirito and Asuna "papa'' and "mama", how Kirito cared for life and would rather die with someone than letting them die, how he was level 100, how Asuna would commit suicide if Kirito died, how she was good at cooking, etc.

Enjoyment:4

Sword Art Online could be enjoyable to lots of people but I guess I just personally didn't enjoy it that much.

Overall: 5/10

If you are looking for a good romance and action anime with good pacing, I wouldn't recommend this one to you.