Review of Sword Art Online
Alright, SAO is every boy/man's and poissibly girl/woman's dream. To be trapped inside a virtual world, where you must fight to survive. The protagonist, Kirito, along with 10.000 other players are trapped in a virtual world. If they die in-game, their real-world brain is fried, so they go kaput in real life too.The reason they are trapped in this death game is not explained (remember that) and they have no communications with the outside world whatsoever. The protagonist, being a beta tester and a very good MMO player does practically solo the game at first (and sometimes later on) while meeting other players etcetc.
Now there are three things that are important: One, the manga writer AND the animators have clearly played MMOs before and that offers for quite realistic terms, situations etc etc. 2) The anime belongs mainly on the romance gender, the protagonist falls in complete love with the typical dynamic maiden-in-distress, Asuna, and ends up "sigh" marrying her in-game. Before point 3 it should be noted that he clearly shows preferrence to her. 3)Despite being a romance anime the anime does try to follow the harem route, progressively adding more girls that get at most 1-2 episodes screentime with the protagonist and falling for him (notable harem positions missing: The trap, the maid and the loli. Arguably Silica could be called a loli but since she's actually only 13 years old I wouldn't put her in that category.)
One of the biggest blows for me, before the first half of the anime ended (and before everyone got greed from Sword Art Online), the protagonist has a talk with the creator of SAO, Kayaba Akihiko. Remember what I told you to keep in mind? That it was never explained why he did it? Well when the protagonist asks that question to him the answer we are getting is: "It's been so long, I don't remember myself anymore" and the protagonist moves on to ask the next question. HOLD ON A MINUTE. This isn't some minor character we're talking about here! This is literally the main villain, the big bad. You can't just get away with a "Oh g, I wonder why?"!
The second half of the anime, ALO (alfheim online) focuses on a second mmo, created from the engine of the first. This time however, with the exception of the protagonist's primary girlfriend, Asuna, noone is trapped. When the protagonist hears that the typical corporate soulless bastard will marry the unconcious body of his "true love" before they unhook the life-support plug, he rushes to ALO, where there is a chance that Asuna might still be trapped. Now comes the second major flow of the anime, which did also exist in the first half, but there at least it could be explained by the fact that their lives depended on it. Even random people who are free to go in-and-out of ALO whenever they like take the game WAYYYYYY TOO SERIOUSLY.And I do mean TOO seriously. They hold offline meetings to discuss how they should proceed online, make it sound like a character dying would be something serious whereas that character will simply respawn 1 minute later and so on.
In this arc some spotlight is given to Kirito's sister who also has a thing for him (someone! tick the incest point off the harem list) trying to go for the dual female lead (that if I'm not mistaken baka to test began as a major trend first), but that fails as Kirito still only cares for our main female lead, Asuna. As to why it fails... Well 1) Asuna is the maiden-in-distress seeing as how she needs to be rescued whereas the sister can jut log off whenever she likes. 2) Asuna is prettier in appearance beyond comparison.
Oh yeah, soundtrack and animation are awesome.