Review of Sword Art Online
Never in my life have I seen a show as infuriating as this. It could've easily been at least good, but it comes out as a total abomination. For everything it does right, it does three or four things wrong, and heinously wrong at that. I suppose I should start with the one element I actually liked, which is the soundtrack. The soundtrack is from Yuki Kajiura, who I'm utterly convinced is incapable of making a bad soundtrack. The music is excellent, with the track Luminous Sword standing out as my personal favorite. The voice acting however, is nothing but pure cringe. No matter which languageyou choose to watch it in, nobody turns in a particularly good performance, and it's incredibly easy to become as bored as they sound, and suddenly realize you have no idea what they're talking about.
The most important element of any story, which is a strong cast of characters, is woefully lacking in this show. The main character is perhaps the blandest protagonist I've ever seen, with a large lack of consistency between scenes. He may be helping a bunch of Red Shirts for no discernible reason one episode, and then act like he hates everyone the next. The main girl fares no better, being nothing but the most generic of generic Tsunderes. The supporting cast is mostly made up of girls who have little to no character outside of their attraction to the lead, and thus they're completely forgettable. As for the villains, they get almost no screen time in their own stories. Particularly noticeable is the villain of the first half, who only shows up for about five minutes when not disguised. The villain of the second half gets more screen time, though I would've honestly preferred less screen time for him over what we got.
The story is riddled with so many holes that I'm surprised any of it's left at all. The first half had the advantage of a decent concept, but it was ultimately wasted by terrible pacing, poor focus, and overall lack of vision. The second half suffers from all of that, but doesn't even have a decent reason to exist at all.
The animation of this show is often praised as being great, but honestly I find it underwhelming. The only scenes I actually liked were the duels between Kirito and Heathcliff, because those were at least fluent. Aside from that, the animation ranks at early-2000's levels of quality.
Finally, I should mention any other major points of where the show stands out. The points where everyone suddenly engage the idiot protocol and decide to act so dumb that they can't even pass for believable dumb people nearly had me throwing in the towel for how bad they were. The forced fanservice scenes are so horrifically forced that they're reminiscent of something one would see in a Studio Arms production. The second half of episode 13 is actually decent, and easily my favorite part of the show. Aside from those points, there's not much more that can be said from my end about this abomination.