Review of Sword Art Online

Sword Art Online is very bad. When I first saw it I didn't get why it was so popular. It's the definition of cringe. I am not kidding here, it looks like a loser's fan fiction, like a novel made by a depressed emo high school girl. It's starts bad and it ends even worse. Although the show isn't complete nonsense, it's still a big pile of garbage. Specifically, a pile of garbage made for lonely young people. It's just dumb entertainment. This is the kind of work that led me to never consider watching anime in the first place. I hate this show and atthe same time I have so much to talk about it. So I will tell you right now, this review will be long. I am only being thorough. At least try to understand my anger. This show will be the example that I will constantly be using every time someone claims a show’s popularity is proof of its masterpiece status.

The plot consist in ten thousand players trapped in a virtual reality video game where the only way to get out is by clearing the game. A nice catch is that if their hit points run out they will not re spawn in the nearest portal but instead they will die permanently. Something similar is going to happen if someone from the outside world tries to remove the virtual reality helmet in an attempt to free them prematurely. This offers a feeling of actual mortal danger and that it’s not just a harmless game. Another catch is how their avatars in the game are made to look as their real selves, so it was funny to find the usual joke of males playing females or hardly being as handsome as they appeared at first. So, think of all the cool stuff you would normally expect to get with such an amazing set-up.

As soon as the shock from the most intriguing pilot episode I've seen so far is over, you are offered a mess of a plot, shallow conflicts, cop-out solutions, and lots-n’-lots of dumb self-indulgence. Aside for the premise though, it has a weak characterization, no philosophical ramblings, no amazing soundtrack, not even a good plot.

It's such a basic idea. I don't understand why so many people likes it; I thought video game fans had some type of respect for their industry.

I guess many viewers only stick to the superficial elements of an X series and don’t care about execution, thus they can make anything to seem like a masterpiece if it just looks nice. I mean, if you shut off your brain, I am sure it will fool you to think it is a masterpiece.

The anime barely explores any of its interesting concepts, which again looks like a positive thing in the tiny minds of its fans, since they get this way to speculate for years over what the hell is going on. Plot holes, inconsistencies, character rewrites, and stuff that simply contradict each other are somehow excused as an elaborate mystery that is too smart to get it. It is constantly making you have high expectations and is deliberately not making any sense so you are made to fill the blanks by yourself, using the only tool available: Imagination and wish fulfillment. It’s a very neat trick to fool the superficial audience into liking and talking about something because it is presented as mysterious, even when in reality it is simply badly written fan fiction full of double standards and vague explanations. Just like the Bible! When it suits the script, it will appeal to real life claiming OH MY GOD THIS IS SO REAL - THIS IS HOW VIDEO GAME FANS BEHAVE, and when it doesn’t it will run to excuse everything with random gaming terminology clichés.

By the way, damn, any attempts at romance this show tries to have is straight from a stereotypical chauvinistic and unrealistic date simulator. You can easily see why harem and video game fans will love it at first sight. You know what kind of people I am talking about; the same people you give a real book to read and give up on the third page because it is not full of boobs and has more than 100 different words repeating over and over again. And it’s the same people who called this show the most original concept ever seen in anime, just to realize the huge lie that is by simply typing "anime about video games" in Google.

Let's talk about the events in the background, we are told thousands of players died in a few weeks. We never see that, which automatically makes the whole tragedy of the event completely superficial. It would be amazing if we were shown clips of people being killed by monsters and traps since it would make their deaths more than a flimsy passage. Instead of that all we are told is that they are dead; end of story and moving along. In a similar way, do not expect to see a hundred boss fights. You will get only four, the rest are skipped entirely. Do not expect constant grinding, hard ingredient gathering, or epic battles. They all last only a few minutes and always end anticlimactically.

The death game ends midway through the show; the rest of the episodes are in a completely different, non-deadly game
Half of the death game episodes are fillers without a plot
Half of the plot-based episodes will not be fantasy adventure in a video game world but rather slice of life, light adventures, very rushed stories, and fan service. Meaning, the total duration of the actual game only lasts for about 3 full episodes.

Everything important for the understanding of the game's physics will be mentioned for a few seconds and will never be elaborated. Despite the various explanations you will never understand the game mechanics.
Every time someone is injured in this game, his hit points drop gradually and not at once. This led me to believe there was a little bit of time allowed to heal someone before his life drops to zero and he dies by the damage he received seconds ago. But no, the game doesn’t allow that and I had to be told you can’t heal someone if his life is “actually” zero. People in the game are simply dying with delay, just so they can have a few seconds to throw out some famous last words. This creates a very big confusion, since without being told that, it really seems like you can heal them but don’t want to, or the victims refuse to be healed and act like they want to die. You won’t believe how retarded everybody seems to act in their death throes just because they never explained this part.
There is another part where some players have a teleportation crystal but don’t use it to escape to town when they are ambushed by other players. They act like they forgot they had one when in reality I had to be told by someone who read the novels that a crystal needs 8 seconds to activate. Without being told that in-series, it just feels retarded and confusing.
Most said game mechanics will matter only in the same episode they are introduced. You will never see or hear about them in a later episode.
All secondary characters do not have a role to the plot past the episode they are introduced. They will become background decoration afterwards.
All feats the protagonist accomplices will be forgotten in a few episodes by everybody and it’s like they never happened in the first place. This trashes all sense of progress and development.
And there are many other parts that simply contradict the way the game is played.
At some cases it is stated none of the bosses can leave the room they guard, in some others it is stated they roam the countryside and can even attack cities.
At some cases a crystal is said to be enough to teleport away a whole team, at others it only teleports one person.
At one part they mention there are renegade players who have betrayed their city, but then it is stated they re spawn back to their town when killed, something which makes no sense, since this way nobody would be able to escape the wrath of those he betrayed.
They constantly say you don’t feel pain in the game, yet you clearly see how every time someone hits them, they act like they are in pain. At the same time they say you can feel pleasure in the game when otherwise pleasure and pain can’t exist separately since they are basically the same thing.
There is a barrier at some point of the game to prevent anyone from crossing to forbidden parts of the game. Nothing should be able to pass through it. But don't worry, the protagonist does it because he is the protagonist.

The anime tells a lot and show very little. We hardly see how things work out on-screen and they mostly talk about them; which is boring.
But this is also a smart trap the series uses in order to make everything interesting. It never explains something clearly and lets you assume how something happened. You can literally explain everything any way you like and you will be right. For example, when I was pointing out plot holes with some friends fans of the show, they would run to excuse them by making up stuff that are not present in the show. They were talking about games they somehow / somewhere / somewhat have a few similarities to Sword Art Online and thus every game mechanic makes sense. Which of course is bullshit, since there are so many video games out there, and one of them is bound to have a mechanic to excuse the unexcused. Every show needs to make sense on its own and not by being compared to other shows or games. But no, there are people stupid enough to believe that since the anime never shows how it works, anything you say may as well be the truth. A very cheap method to hide all plot holes or even bother to explain all the rules of the game.
Of course this trick does not work with someone as smart as me. In fact, I play their game and I got to trash them completely. In conclusion, there are many plot holes in this game.
My friends were trying to excuse that by saying we don’t know how video games will be like in the future, so it’s wrong to mention rules than apply to current games. At which point I can only laugh at. First they say they love the game terminology and now they say it doesn’t even apply. Meaning, they don’t give a rat’s ass if it makes sense, they only want to hear words that have to do with video games.

All you have to do in order to win the game is to kill all the bosses. And if you think this means a lot of hard work and endless hours of farming, equipping, and buffing, you are wrong. You can clear the game without having to fight a single time! I am not kidding; you can spend years sleeping or goofing around and you can still survive. The reason is simple and dumb. Every boss doesn’t re spawn! If someone beats it once, it will never return and not every player needs to kill it at least once in order to advance to the next level. Only a dozen hardcore players are enough to clear the whole game by doing the above troublesome procedure, while all the rest can do absolutely nothing. They can be sleeping in town and when they hear the boss is beaten, they can just go to the next level. They don’t even need to walk through dangerous areas in order to get to the next town since they can use an easily acquired teleportation crystal.
The most insulting thing is that the game is beaten without reaching the final level.

The things I mentioned above ruin the feeling of dread, since all of a sudden it is very easy to survive in this game. Just don’t do anything or go farming past the easy areas. At the same time it makes the viewer think someone who endangers himself to the point of getting killed, simply deserved it for being a complete idiot who got what he deserved. Every time someone is killed, instead of feeling sad you just end up thinking: “Serves you right for going to farm in a dungeon fifty times your level, instead of letting others with proper levels and skills to do it for you.”
Any sense of danger is lost when you realize the system will make sure the protagonist will always be overpowered, will never lose, and be the guaranteed victor all the time just because he is the protagonist.

Something that gets really annoying during the show is when the characters can't be able to use crystals. There are crystals to teleport or heal and if for any reason they can’t use them, tragedy occurs, and it happens all the time!

Another annoying things are the cheats. There are many ways to abuse the game mechanics for power play and they are all very interesting for allowing you to have shortcuts to leveling up. But no, they are presented as evil when they are an easy way to beat the game easier.

The author will constantly be rewriting rules just for the sake of retarded plot twists, thus ruining even the very main appeal of the show. Have the artificial intelligence of the game saving you just in the right time. Break the unbreakable status effect of paralysis with the power of love, happens all the time. This is something no multiplayer ever allowed and no other player was ever shown doing it. But whatever; the protagonist can do it because he is the protagonist. But don't worry, I bet that in the future there's gonna be a game somewhere that lets you do that, of course! That will be the most successful game ever! And I'm sure there will be ghosts waiting for the last moment to give you power ups.

It's time to talk about the characters. You will never know what they think or why they changed like that all of a sudden. Something simple such as internal monologues could help to clear the confusion but the anime adaptation removed most of them. Characters will behave in the most one dimensional way possible, just to make the audience know right away what to feel about them for the rest of the show. Character introductions, relationships, and dramatization will form, develop, and end in just 10 minutes. There is simply no time to appreciate all that, yet the show will constantly expect from you to do so. It’s impossible to care for something which has no time invested in fleshing it out first. You will constantly see characters crying over people they know for a few days and barely exchanged ten sentences with. You are left to wonder what is so tragic about people you barely saw a couple of times.

All characters follow stereotypes that you mostly find in comedies. All characters are to the most part not worried about their lives. They will behave as if this is a game and not a life or death situation. And indeed, instead of making you feel like they do anything they can to survive, you are instead made to think they are enjoying it, like nothing of importance is going on. It may be fun for the audience to see them doing all the classic stuff players do in online games, but this is NOT a typical game. In fact, they are not even playing if they are forced to do it and defeat means death. The plot is half the time like that of a typical harem and not like that of a survival story. The protagonist for example makes any girl to fall in love with him 10 minutes after they meet for the first time, without any effort or even when he acts like a total jerk to them. There are no ugly girls in the whole show, even when they are supposed to have their real faces, and they all fall in love with the same guy.

Even the characters have contradiction.
We are never told why or how the protagonist became anti-social, neither we see him living a lame life outside of the game. We are just told in passing it is as such and need to believe it; that’s it. Talk about poor presentation; you simply have no idea why he doesn’t like people. And that is exactly what makes no sense numerous times later on, since he is he constantly helping people when he is supposed to be afraid of them.
He always mentions he doesn’t want to join guilds or be part of a team, yet he constantly does the exact opposite. And he does it only if a cute girl needs his help, which makes him look like a sexual predator that magically becomes sociable when some nice pair of boobs is involved.
Supposedly he just wants to help people without getting too friendly with them. That is far from true, since he always manipulates them for personal gain.
His idea of friendship is to betray his own team and make everybody to hate him, so they will be too busy trying to kill him instead of killing each other. Somebody needs to tell him that a team which wants to self-destroy itself is not really a team. But it’s OK, it’s not something anyone cares about a few episodes later. In fact, they will pretend like he never betrayed anyone.
He constantly lies to his team or doesn’t tell them crucial information, a thing which always results to misunderstanding and a lot of deaths that could very easily had been prevented.
Even when girls are involved, instead of being polite to them he treats them like dirt. Practically every male in the story is a misogynist and the protagonist is supposed to be there to protect the girls from other men, yet he is no better than the rest. Yet, the girls don’t mind and forgive him right away, just because he is the protagonist.
He pretends to care for a girl but in reality he only uses her as bait for bandits, so he can show off how cool he is.
He pretends he cares for a female blacksmith but in reality he breaks her best sword and then manipulates her into making another one, which of course she gives it for free. And as soon as she expects from him to say how much he loves her, he runs away with his other girlfriend, he refused to mention he had all this time.
Furthermore, he is supposed to be the top level player in the game, presumably by constantly fighting in the higher levels, yet always goes back to lower levels and randomly walks around looking for weaker players who may need his help but we never see him in the higher levels. He is constantly helping people when he can save them all by simply pressing forward and clearing the game, instead of this nonsense. Meaning, he ended up killing far more people this way, instead of saving.
At one point he refuses to kill a few Non player characters, an act that will help them beat a boss. His excuse is that he doesn’t want to see people dying. The problem is that they are not that dumb; plus they re spawn even when they die.
Later, he contradicts that by spending the whole day sleeping and saying his life is just fine in the game and doesn’t need to do anything anymore. In the meantime, others were getting killed while fighting bosses and monsters. Supposed he did that because it reminds him of the time his earlier guild was killed but we are never told that; so it’s like a plot hole.
Even more later, when the game is no longer deadly, he contradicts himself once again and kills all the players he just met for fun.
At another point, someone got murdered and he cares to find the criminal for no given reason, while everybody else in the whole game doesn’t give a damn about it. Contradiction!
He is also such a hypocrite. He always rushes to capture players who break the rules when himself is a beta tester, and thus a cheater.
Later on he is not even doing that, since he becomes a detective who lets the criminals go away. He seemed pretty serious in imprisoning simple bandits but then doesn’t care to arrest murderers. Supposed they were too powerful to attempt arresting them but we are never told that so you can again assume anything you like. That still doesn’t excuse how he spared one of them who admitted the crime and was very weak. He literally left him to be scolded by his companions and that’s it.
He can use special abilities nobody else in the game can. The thing is, he refuses to use them all the time, supposed because he doesn’t want others to find out and pest him about it. In reality of course he doesn’t because every battle will end in two seconds if he does. And that can also lead to some facepalming cases of forced drama, such as letting people die instead of using his powers right away. So much for caring about saving lives! The hilarious part is that eventually everybody found out about it. Guess what; nothing of importance happened. Later on he is supposed to fight hundreds of powerful monsters and again refuses to use his abilities. Because he forgot he had them! Hilarious!
On top of everything else, he is also a great hacker who even manages to alter the game’s programming. An element they mentioned only for ten seconds but never cared to elaborate ever again.
And despite his elite powers in video games, he still makes mistakes not even rookies would accomplish. At one point he needs to go on a rescue mission, and begins the journey without the slightest preparation. He has infinite amounts of wealth and never buys better equipment or even a second sword for his special skill.
He is not even a believable character. He is closer to a plot device and wishful thinking for the dork audience. All he does is being the best in everything, solves all mysteries, beats all the monsters, wins all the chicks, and saves the day while shoveling us with forced preachy monologues about how the game works. Every video game fan's dream.
Hell, the video games themselves do their best to make him immune to defeat.
The first game picked him to be the chosen one, so it makes sure he gets a convenience to save him every time he is about to lose.
The second game lets him become the most powerful player of them all, as soon as he begins playing.
And for God’s sake, his nickname in the game is the black swordsman. I read Berserk 3 years ago and I wish it has nothing to do with this.

A girl even falls in love for the protagonist because everybody finds out he is a manipulating cheater, and she is a dumb broad who loves to be exploited.
She likes to roam around while wearing a cloak that hides her face. That doesn’t help in any way since nobody is chasing her, and by hiding her face she only attracts more attention on her.
She becomes the second in command in the most powerful guild of the game. You can just imagine how dumber everyone else playing the game is. Or how easy it is to level up without dying from stupidity.
They are constantly trying to present her as strong and dynamic, when she otherwise acts like a total idiot and is incapable to do the slightest thing when the protagonist is around. There's even a scene when the protagonist needs a place to spend the night, she assumes that means he wants to sleep with her AND UNDRESSES!
He says he doesn’t want to have sex with her and she punches him for not seeing her AS A SLUT!
She tells him how much she cares about him when he is sleeping and acts completely shy WHEN HE WAKES UP!
She tells him not to look at her panties even after she had sex with him A HUNDRED TIMES!
Guess where she was spending all her skill points all this time. On cooking! Instead of going for a more useful ability that would make her a better spy or fighter, she wasted all her skills on something that is completely worthless in the whole game! And they actually made this monkey their second in command! And what a surprise, the only person she ever cooks for is the protagonist.
And let’s not forget all those sappy moments where she gets all emotional. Oh, I wanted to kill myself with the artificial date sim way she was talking. “I believe in you, Lover! I will kill myself if you die! I can’t exist without you!” And God, the way she was acting for a married woman was horrible! She still acts like she is a naive little girl who is afraid to show her own husband her virtual panties. And guess what, she doesn’t even know how old the person she married is!!!
As if all that weren’t enough, in the second half of the show she turns from a dynamic woman, to a powerless damsel in distress who is constantly raped by a jerk and needs the protagonist to rescue her.

Of course, the protagonist's sister is in love with him because this is what all sisters are obligated to do in harem shows.
She is supposed to be strong both physically and mentally, but as soon as the protagonist is around she can’t even breathe without him coming to her rescue.
Turns out that she is also playing games, despite the fact that her own brother and thousands of others were killed or in coma because of them. And yet she acts as if it was never much of an issue and just was curious to see what was so special about them.
Check this out, as soon as the protagonist enters the game, the very first person he meats by complete chance and immediately runs to save is her. Try to calculate those odds.
Furthermore, even after she meets him, she doesn’t recognize him, despite having the exact same voice, nickname, and fighting style.
She doesn’t even raise an eyebrow for any of the above. Not even when a seemingly new player has enough power to defeat four others without much effort. She is just another dumb girl.

There's an AI acting as a game-based child of the protagonist before revealing to be a rogue program who fell in love with him because he is the protagonist. And even saves him from a monster with her skills before she turns into an accessory. Very fitting for how video game fans view women in games.
The most stupid thing about her is how despite not being part of the new game in the second half of the anime, she is magically integrated into it, like it was a very easy thing to do, because supposed she shares the same programming as the previous game. And at the same time she DOESN’T have her skills anymore for no apparent reason. Bullshit!
Afterwards she becomes a pocket Wikipedia just for the sake of advancing the plot without the hero having to bother searching or asking around for information. There isn’t a thing she doesn’t know; she can point you to the right direction, the proper person, and even calculates the exact distance and time to get there. This trashed completely the sense of mystery and adventure the first arc had.
She also becomes a psychiatrist of sorts, as she constantly tries to offer explanations to why people love each other and what it means to care about someone, and other cheesy stuff like that. And she does it from the perspective of a stupid child, so it passes as nothing more than yet another effortless attempt to make the show deep when it’s a pile of garbage. Her line of thought makes no sense and they are actually paying attention to her.
Towards the end of the show, she all of a sudden has admin access once again.

The whole incident of people being trapped in a video game happened because someone was feeling like being a douche. Facepalming.
As usual of course the fans was making its best to try to reason that and before you know it, all of a sudden this guy is a prophet! He warned people for the dangers of video games and how they can be abused by men in power, as it was proven in the second half of the show. Too bad nobody in the whole world gave a damn, since people kept playing these games like nothing of importance had happened.
He also didn’t kill anyone, since he only trapped them; those who died killed themselves with their actions. That’s right people; you are not a murderer if you give guns to killers. You are just a douche who wants to have fun.
And don’t go asking yourselves why wasn’t anyone from the outside world able to hack into the game or trace the location and capture this asshole for years. The game was simply a tank that can't be penetrated… until the protagonist tries that is; and does it in three seconds.
Also towards the end of the show this guy is somehow becoming a hero for helping the protagonist with another convenience he gave to him in the last minute when he could otherwise do it all along.

The second villain is a jerk business man who will act like a complete lunatic every time he describes his plans and demands to rape a comatose girl because he has enough money. Screw human rights and laws, I HAVE MONEY. And will be kind enough to act like a jerk and constantly explaining all his satanic master plans in a most honest way and in front of the protagonist, just so we can all hate him 2 minutes after he is introduced of course! Deep and well-thought characterization right there!
And despite his constant gloating, his showdown with the hero will be the most anti-climactic thing in the whole show. At least the first villain posed a severe thread and was very hard to beat.

The rest of the cast get very annoyed if someone is trying to hoard all the special items for himself. They even call cheaters all the beta testers of the game just because they have an unfair advantage over the rest by knowing most of the attack patterns of the monsters.They make no sense, no matter how much you fight to get a super weapon, you do it so you can escape this damn game. You can be a level 9999 twelve winged radiating bastard god by the time you complete the game and you will still be the same weak dork you always were in real life. Not to mention you will be weakened even more by all the years your body didn’t move. In fact you will feel better for not wasting endless hours risking your life just so you will be a super god in the game, while knowing very well you will lose it all when you leave it. And don’t anyone dare say they perhaps do it to prove their worth by winning fair and square. Nobody wants to do that if he is forced to play a death game! You are kept away from real life! Your relatives are getting crazy from grief! You can die! WHO CARES ABOUT CHEATING! CHEATING IS GOOD! In fact, everybody should do the same and use as many cracks, cheats, hacks, or whatever else they can find. It would normally ruin a game if some abuse the rules like that but in this case this is not entertainment anymore! You don’t care about having fun beating the game; YOU JUST WANT TO BEAT IT!
And speaking about fair play, there are guilds in the game as usual. Each one goes on its own missions and gathers its own items and experience. In such a situation there shouldn’t be guilds, sides, teams, rivals, or whatever. Everybody should be a single team and working for the common good of everybody. They should all go to fight the same boss, instead of spreading out and have so many casualties. I mean the progression of the levels is as linear as it gets; this is not a game where you can go anywhere you like and do things in any order you prefer. Stupid and unexplained.
The top guilds kills each other just for the sake of getting random drops that resurrect the dead. They kill other players, so they can be the ones to fight a boss and hopefully get an item to resurrect them. Bullshit!
And then we get the second game of the series, where again many players play it. They are not trapped in it but are very well aware of how it was created with the same game engine as Sword Art Online and was released a few months after it. BULLSHIT!
Let’s just suppose for a second that they don’t care about the game having the same game engine. The second game is broken and unfair and yet they don’t seem to care once again.
Anyone who gets to the top of the tower will offer to his race a superior set of wings that will trash the game balance completely.
There is a game feature that allows a player to change races. If a race gets the new wings, then everybody will immediately use the feature to become that race, thus ruining the whole purpose of having many races.
There are no game masters to investigate possible cheating or hacking. Everybody can break the rules as he likes and nobody will do the slightest thing to stop him.
There is another game feature that allows you to steal other peoples’ main equipment.
I keep hearing excuses by some fans who claim all the above are reasonable because:
The characters are teenagers and stupid, so they are OK to make mistakes. That is not saving it, since we see players of all ages in the game, and they are all equally stupid.
Most players in any game are retards and the series is just being realistic about it. But even careful players die twice a day in normal games and these idiots here just survive in an unforgiving death game. Everybody who is stupid should be dead and only the cunning and intelligent would remain alive.
And let’s just go easy on it for awhile and assume the above does not matter. They are still not acting as typical multiplayer players, since the show is a harem.

Thousands of players wake up after years in coma and not a single doctor runs to help them.
The protagonist saves thousands of lives and nobody cares about him.

There was a girl who kept her time in safe zones in the first game, smart decision since there were lots of others progressing through the game very fast. She could just wait there for them to clear the game and free her. Instead of that the protagonist gives her courage to pointlessly risk her life in leveling up, which eventually leads to her as well as the rest of her team being killed in an ambush. “Thank you so much!” Yes, that makes sense; thank you so much for getting us killed for no reason. Character rewrite once again. Of course they try to present it as if she thanked him for being the only one who gave her courage to keep trying to survive instead of committing suicide or something but that doesn’t fool me. She got killed EXACTLY because he encouraged her and he is supposed to be an anti-social who doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Oh, and let me not forget to mention how she also had the hots for the protagonist for no apparent reason besides him being the protagonist.

There's another girl who managed to get all the way to level 45 by making all the deviant male players to be giving her healing potions and sharing their experience with her just for the sake of having her around and undressing her in their minds. That would normally make her a very manipulating personality, since she exploits people’s lust to have it her way. But no, she is a total dumb girl who doesn’t even know the basic rules of the game. She doesn’t even know of the protagonist, one of the most famous players of the game. And yes, she too falls for him because he exploited her emotions for capturing some bandits and doesn’t miss the chance to offer fan service by constantly flashing her panties and being molested by tentacle monsters.

The author is practically only writing about the ideal brothel all video game fans want to spend their lives in and sure as hell does not write good plots or characters. He is exactly like those people who write sappy romances full of sex for bored middle aged housewives.

The protagonist is constantly introducing new characters and trying to make them dramatic before killing them or never mentioning them again in the exact same episode. If he wants us to feel sorry for a dying character, he should have kept him around for a dozen episodes so we get to like him first. Or when he is not killing them, he is keeping a few of them around as antagonists, only to conveniently turn them to jerks soon afterwards and the protagonist can seem heroic next to them.

I believe the Sword Art Online series is 10 volumes long. One would think this means that the story is very long. And it’s not! Sword Art Online technically lasts only one book! The others are irrelevant side stories that happen in flashbacks or entirely different games! That’s right, the title Sword Art Online is practically useless after the first book. It’s there just so the idiotic fans will keep buying more books with its name on it. It’s like buying compulsory everything that has an apple on it. This happens because the author used the old “Bait and Switch” method. Being completely useless to keep a story going for more than a few chapters, yet unwilling to let it finish and move to writing something else, every time an arc ends he just finds a poor excuse to make another arc and start all over again, rehashing the exact same things.

After all, Sword Art Online is a light novel, stories written by people with little to no talent, appealing to people with no exposure to quality literature. Some of them may be smash hits and considered masterpieces among light novel fans but try to give those books to veteran readers of literature and try to see what they will say about it. You won’t find a big enough rock to hide under. So don’t assume that because the Sword Art Online novels are considered to be THE BEST BOOKS EVER WRITTEN it automatically means they are good. They are not.

The plot is one huge pile of stereotypes aiming to appeal to video game fans and dorks. The setting by itself is going to attract anyone who likes playing fantasy games. It will make them to constantly be comparing it to various game mechanics, and since the game does a shitty job at explaining its game play, it's clear why this anime is so popular.

The protagonist is THE BEST in everything. He has the highest level in the game, super skills nobody else has in the game, the most knowledge of how to farm easy, and can beat the strongest bosses all alone without even being prepared for it. No reason for why he is so good in everything; we are just supposed to accept he is super cool and wish to be like him. Well if you ask me he is completely boring for the same reason. He acts like a Mary Sue who always wins just because of his statistics reaching epic levels without ever showing us how. An overpowered character is a boring character exactly because there is no challenge he can’t overcome. He is also just there to give forceful explanations to how the game works, as if it’s too hard to just show it on screen.

And he accomplishes all that by being a complete jerk. He lies, exploits, doesn’t reveal crucial information, leads people to their deaths and every goddamn girl in the game finds out about that and her reaction is to beg him to bang her. Yeah, mister author, thanks for trying to make us feel like jerks who can get away with everything by identifying with this ass of a protagonist you are throwing at our faces. And thanks a lot for making him act as blunt and boring as possible so we can better get into his shoes.

And of course the animators made it impossible for girls to wear decent clothes.
Oh, and not to forget to mention how they are constantly molested by tentacle monsters and crazy rapists.
And how they can’t do anything right when the protagonist is around so he will of course run to their rescue every single time with his amazing skills.
And how they constantly forget to dress and walk out of their rooms while in their underwear.
And how they never miss the chance to bend over and have the camera zoom to their asses.

The anime is supposed to make the viewer be afraid of the game but at the same time it wants to make him wish he was part of it.
Imagine you being trapped in a fantastic world full of dangers and adventure, where you need to fight hard in order to survive! This is not a game, it’s as real as life itself! … But at the same time it’s still a game and everybody still acts like it is.
Imagine you being the most awesome, most powerful, most smart, most sexy person in the whole world, and have all the girls in the world falling in love with you right away. But you stay faithful to an equally perfect, beautiful, sexy bitch of a wife who cooks and cries only for you. And imagine having cyber sex with her without worrying she might get pregnant. It’s like hearing someone talking about how bad rape is but you otherwise love to see criminals constantly raping people. Meaning, this is a show for masochists.

Each one of the filler episodes ends up being nothing but an easy mission where the protagonist is showing off how cool he is and increases his harem. They are completely boring despite attempting to help us get to know the game and the secondary characters.

The writers of the anime took out several explanations regarding the way the game is played, and internal monologues which reason the mentality of a character in certain episodes. The girls are presented in a lot more harem-like way. They were turned from dynamic women who like the protagonist to masturbation material after his virtual cock. They took out the sex scenes and replaced them with several scenes where they simply make overused boob grabs and panty shots, followed by bitch slaps. And instead of “we had sex” they always say “we were playing for hours.” Great way to dumb down the good parts. The original script of the first arc was only one book long that could hardly fill half a season. The second book were just stand alone side stories that happen in between its various time skips.

This is hardly one of the best animation works though; it has several scenes per episode where it is too crude. The artwork is definitely nice since it really feels like a fancy Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. The animation is otherwise very poor; there is very little animation in it for a show that is supposed to be full of action and adventure. There may be battles in this show, but they are all dull and usually end in a few minutes. You are looking at static pictures and flashes that are substituting motions to the most part. Many times the battles aren’t even shown and are resolved out of screen or we fast forward after they are over. Hell, all battles are resolved through broken powers and convenient ass pulls.

I hate Sword Art Online.