Review of Sword Art Online

TLDR; Gorgeous looking show with an interesting premise, but is ruined by bad writing and awful characters. Review will contain mild spoilers to explain why the review is so low. Story 2/10 Interesting premise, but poor execution. Many things that happen would be excusable and fine if treated as joke, but most of it is meant to be taken seriously. I think if I DIDN'T play a lot of MMORPGs I wouldn't have as many issues as I did with this show. But I have played a lot and so many of the parts of the story made no sense to me. First off, the issue with beta players.As someone who has beta tested for MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2, I can assure you that beta testing doesn't give you this huge, ridiculous advantage over others like this show makes you think. Also, does SAO not provide ANY TUTORIALS? The way some players acted (like Klein) made me believe so, which is completely ridiculous for a game such as this one. Another issue I had was that apparently being a solo players makes you level super fast and stuff? Uh, no. I could go on about the other issues involving the gameplay of SAO but it'd be too long and at the end of the day this is an anime not a video game. Basically there's no logic when it comes to the story. Oh and the second arc is just plain terrible.

Art and Animation 9/10

Personally, I think this show is absolutely beautiful looking and the animation is top notch. If you watch any boss battle in the show, you'll see what I mean. The only slight issue I have with the art is that literally all of the main characters have the same face template...

Sound 10/10

Epic music that really enhances the mood of the scene. Not much to say here other than the fact that it is excellent. Oh, and the OP? Sooooo freaking catchy. I have it on my phone. I love it that much.

Characters 1/10

Annnnd here's the worse part of the anime. Kayaba is a bad villain simply because we don't know his motives and his reasonings for them. Like, he trapped all of these players here because... he felt like it? What's the logic here? Even simple villains like Bowser from Mario have clear intentions and goals.
Asuna is the main love interest and an extremely disappointing character. She had such potential to be this cool badass and ends up being a stereotypical tsundere who needs rescuing from her bae (even though we keep being told she's this super strong fighter)
And now to talk about Kirito. In short, he's this super OP dude that is basically godly at all videos games and also knows how to hack and break the rules of the show's universe. He's a wish fulfillment character.

Enjoyment 4/10
As much as I liked the music and art, I kept feeling irritated when I watched this. It was annoying to see all of these mechanics in MMORPGs be ruined. Like, has the creator ever played an MMORPG all the way through to endgame? Because it felt like he hadn't. Also Kirito's OPness was annoying. And the second arc was a joke.

Overall 4/10

Beautiful, but had no depth. And everything I criticized in this review had to do with the first arc. The second arc threw away what little good writing it had ALL away.