Review of Sword Art Online
Ah, SAO. The anime that provided an answer to a question no one asked: "What if someone made a game/device that imprisoned thousands in a virtual world on pain of death?" The first "season", AKA the "Aincrad arc", is probably the strongest in terms of story and character (and unfortunately, this doesn't mean that character is all that great; it just means that character-wise series 1 doesn't induce one to try to remove one's own brain from watching crappy writing or scene planning). Visually... it's A-1. Neither groundbreaking nor eye-clawingly awful, but good enough to get the point across. I can tell that someone in the storyboardingteam wanted to see a bloodbath in the style of Bleach or Fist of the North Star, but someone talked him down to dismemberment and virtual "bleeding" where characters bleed pixels instead of blood. I'm betting this is the same window-licker who has a rape fetish that shows itself in subsequent productions, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Yuki Kajiura composed the soundtrack, and is for the most part rightly lauded for it, though the music that gets played during such praise is invariably the "Kirito opens a can of whupass" theme-- it's good, but come on, fellas, she's done better. Kajiura is known for other (mostly synth) BGMs, off the top of my head the My-HiME series and Elemental Gelade. It's all right, but sometimes I wish she would just get together with an orchestra. The opening credits song is pretty good on its own, but the credits animation was just "there" rather than being a true "partner" to the music. I don't remember the ending credits song, which probably means I listened to it once, thought "meh", and skipped it for the rest of the series.
The most interesting character is the villain of the Aincrad arc, largely because he not only is an insanely powerful presence through the entirety of the SAO canon, but also because he's written with some degree of complexity. Contrast that to the hero Kirito, who couldn't be more of a cliché shonen anime action hero if he tried (simple-minded like Bleach's Ichigo, tries to be some kind of a samurai badass by shouldering the blame, etc). This weakness is inherent to the weakness of the plot: instead of bringing Kirito and Asuna together in a more natural fashion, the plot has to make hairpin drifting turns to accommodate both the cruel setting and their relationship. The "finding love in the darkest situation" theme was dropped into the series after several episodes of "Kirito the Black Solo Badass", and while the scenes themselves worked, they just did not mesh with the rest of the story. Asuna, while she's written as a bit of a tsundere and is in some rather unnecessary fanservice scenes, is at least cast as a front line fighter rather than someone in the back supporting Kirito.
In the second half of series 1, Kirito is no longer the demigod he was in Aincrad, he's just a kid going up against the Japanese equivalent of Brett Kavanaugh: Rich, spoiled, and very likely a sexual predator. Someone in A-1's planning team clearly relished the scenes where this guy basically licked Asuna in front of Kirito (like the Uruk-hai licking Aragorn's dagger in the climactic fight in the Fellowship of the Ring film), and I'm betting he's behind the closing scene in episode 9 of Grancrest and the sexual assault scene in SAO season 2. The final fight scene for series 1 played this up so much that I basically fast-forwarded through most of it. Yeah, I know, "drama", but writing scenes that will clearly give assault survivors nightmares is more "cheap and disgustingly manipulative" than "dramatic"-- it's like the anime adaptation of School Days, which gleefully took the worst possible route until the broadcast studio stopped the final episode with the infamous "Nice Boat". What's worse is that whatever dramatic tension between Kirito and Sugu is overpowered by the silver spoon played by Sugita... not that this subplot was any good, it seemed like Sugu was a contingency plan for Kirito's fragile masculinity in case the author decides that Asuna gets raped or killed.
"But what about that epic fight scene where...?" Honestly, I didn't give a damn (and it's entirely predictable). That disgusting Brett Kavanaugh precursor essentially ruined the second half for me. And parents in Japan who arrange marriages for their teenage daughters can kiss my ass.