Well this is my first review. As most of you know there are light novels for this series, all of which I have read. And this has been perhaps the best read I've had in ages. The storyline, characters, vastness of the world and romance between asuna and kirito are perfect, and the twists will leave you dying for more. If you're here for an anime with a great storyline, have played any rpgs or enjoy a little romance mixed with action and suspense, then this is the anime for you. Although there has only been 4 episodes (at the time of this review), the anime has covered a substantial part of volume 2 in the sword art series, so from here on out the main and incredible storyline will be followed.
Animation & Audio: 10/10
The animation is beautiful to say the least, and will no doubt accurately represent the amazing setting from the light novels as well as the character models. The voice acting for the main characters Asuna and Kirito have been spot on (of course), and the sound quality is overall, like the animation, perfect.

Story & Characters: 10/10

As I hinted at above, the story will have you hooked from the beginning , I'm sure many of you have played rpgs, and if you died in those rpgs, you'd respawn and try again of course. But in this anime, the rpg becomes real life, if you health bar drops you're killed almost instantly in real life. With that kind of premise, this anime will be very suspenseful and engaging.
I'll focus on the main characters for now because most of the others haven't been fairly introduced yet. Off the bat you can tell Kirito isn't the average anime protagonist, he chooses to go solo for the sake of his own survival rather than stay with his "noob" friend and protecting him in the VRMMORPG. This might seem like a shortcoming, but in the novels he quickly changes upon meeting Asuna (his main love interest+party member), and becomes a character you'll love. Asuna is very strong willed and at first seems to contrast with the anti-social and awkward Kirito, but we later find out how similar they are, and their relationship is perhaps the best I've seen in any other anime or manga.

Overall/Rewatch Value: 10/10
This anime will only be about 25 or 26 episodes long, covering just volumes 1,2, and perhaps some of 8 in the process, if it does well enough movies and ovas or even another season could be launched, allowing us to further immerse in this incredible universe.

And I'm sure by the time this anime is finished (or long before), everyone will be rushing to read the novels, and they won't be disappointed!

...if it had kept to the standard it started out on. The first arc of SAO (mostly the earlier episodes within it) contains some genuinely interesting psychological exploration, solid character development, and of course, a hell of a cool premise. But as the first stage of the plot starts to draw to a close, SAO gradually abandons the things that made it so promising to begin with. The more memorable characters fail to ever reappear, the protagonist becomes increasingly one-dimensional, and the plot's ultimate resolution comes out of nowhere and is pretty unsatisfying for how much potential the concept had. Despite the gradual downhill slope, however, the first "half" (really a little more than that) of the show remains entertaining, and if left on its own would score a solid 4 stars.

The same can not be said of the second half, which is littered with tropes and has a maddeningly predictable plot, a host of bland cookie-cutter characters, and an even less meaningful ending than the first half did. It also becomes painfully obvious at this point that the main character has become a Gary Stue (male counterpart of the "Mary Sue", a common trope character, for those that don't know), and his primary adversary is even more cliched than he is, carrying none of the intrigue that the first half's nemesis had.

My advice: watch the first fourteen episodes (despite the generally negative tone of this review, that much of the show really is good), but if you choose to watch past that point, don't expect too much.

When I first watched SAO I was hooked. The premise had been done before but that didn't stop me getting in the show. I figured Kirito could grow to be an interesting considering his position in the world. But the show never gave him any true obstacles to overcome. He was literally perfect or things just worked his way. I mean him trying to be a loner so he wouldn't have to see others was ok. But after a few episodes he was so overpowered he never had to worry. He was paper thin as a character.

Even worse than that the show moved at such a break neck pace I'm surprised I didn't catch whiplash from it. The pacing was brutal and character development suffered because of it. The show introduced so many characters and we would only see then occasionally. Most of them seemed great but outside of a few brief appearances we never learn more about them. This made believing in Kirito and Asuna romance difficult. It just happened so fast and the show expected us to just accept a character we hardly know is his soul mate.

That brings me to the second half. It was entirely pointless and creepy! The return to the real world, his sister/cousin crush, and the vaudeville villain ruined the show. First off they skip over the real world ramifications of the game. We hardly even hear anyone talk about what happened. I mean 10,000 people were trapped for two years and it's basically swept under the rug. We never really see any characters recover from the order at.The show just skips ahead two months. The second half could have dealt with them recovering and making their love work in a world that they don't know anymore. That would have been amazing. But I digress.

Then the whole sister/cousin plot line was beyond uncomfortable. It just comes out of no where and makes no sense. We barely know Sugu and she's just trusted into the forefront. Every time she was on screen with Kirito I cringed. They could have taken her character is a completely different direction. Maybe making her a little sister desperate to make a bond with the brother she has become distant with. That would have made her presence make more sense and 1000 times less creepy.

But by far my biggest issue with the show is Sugo! He's horrible as a villain and character. Firstly how did he make a game that uses a newer nerve gear and get people to play it? No one in their right mind would use anything like that after the SAO incident. Secondly why would he announce his evil plans to Kirito? Why not just marry her and continue your plans in secret. For a genius he seems extremely stupid. And I don't even want to get started on the final show down. I was angry but couldn't stop laughing it was laughably bad! They should have just had he get run off and kept that outrageous melodrama for something else.

I'm not trying to be overly critical of the show. In all honesty I wanted this show to be great they just wasted the chance. I would have loved for them to just slow the pace and let all the characters grow and maybe did a new arc in a second season. At least they'd have a roster of characters we know and care about to keep us hooked.

When I read the summary of this anime, it actually caught my attention. Surviving in a game that could mean death just sounded interesting. Hence, I decided to give this anime a try. Watching the first few episodes, I truly believed this anime had an amazing vision, and it was going to deliver on it. Sadly it was not to be. The story goes from one of an epic quest to survive towards one basically of a romantic comedy. By the time you go into the second arc, the story drastically goes downhill. The characters honestly felt promising. However, due to time constraints, they were never fully realized. As a result, most of them are bland and have no depth. This anime should have expanded the first arc to the full 25 episodes. It would have given the story plenty of time to grow and for the ending to feel truly great. I know it would have been a masterpiece if it did. Sadly the reality isn't so. Still the action is amazing,and the music is good. Also as generic and stale quite a few episodes got, the series delivered them so well, I often forgot the major flaws in the show. So an okay anime, but it could have been amazing.

Pros:
+ Good action scenes.
+ Cool concept.
Cons:
- Only half the show was good, the next half became less interesting, and seemed to follow the old "Save the damsel in distress trope."
- Not all the characters were interesting. Some died off way to quickly before even starting to like them..

I was blown away from the beginning of this anime, it was so unique, and has the best fighting scenes i have ever seen in anime period. Unfortunately, the anime slows down, and doesn't seem to ever pick up the action, and the characters such as Asuna, loses character development, and becomes the normal girl who needs her boyfriend to do everything, and save her. It had a great beginning, but i started to lose interest toward the end.

Score: C+

The Movie Review.

It was literally a GIANT recap... Skip it if you have already seen the show.

When I first heard of SAO it was during the time it aired, back in late 2012. I didn't watch it at the time because, for whatever reason, I thought it would be lame and didn't even give it a chance. At the time, at quick glance, it looked childish.

This is something I do a lot. I hate wasting time and lots of times will over look what in fact is a stellar show. SAO was one of those cases. This show is absolutely amazing.

I am very glad I gave this show the chance it deserved a few weeks ago. I've watched my fair share of anime and I can truthfully say I have never come across a show as engrossing or addicting as this. The characters seem to have a depth of emotion and believability that at times was heartwarming, sad, inspiring, at times comical, scary and even would make me angry. And I think that is the heart of the show. The concept is great, as any hardcore MMORPG player can tell you, but its the characters and their own struggles and relations that are the heart of the show. The Kirito x Asuna love story is among the best in anime; alongside an awesome cast it makes for a great combination.

You'll see these normal people, some that become great leaders or martyrs, others that fall into the depths of insanity and evil, all trapped in a virtual world where death is real and always just around the corner. That is why you should watch this show.

So this show is pretty good. The first half is great 4/5 stars. But it's bogged down by the second half of the series which merits 2/5 stars. And here's why:

The first half of the series is about people who are trapped in a game that they have to clear to escape. The catch is, if they die in game they die in real life. This makes for some compelling scenes. For one, it actually matters if people die in game. The series can explore the results of actual death and the behavioral patterns that come with it, granted they don't do this as much as they should. They barely explored the PK aspects or the people who choose to not even bother, or the people that band together to help worse players survive. They briefly go over these topics but mostly focus on the main character.

So the first half follows our main character who is a solo player and his quest to clear the game, on his way he falls in love with a chick he meets and their love for each other just magically manifests out of practically thin air, He seems to like her because she's pretty and can cook, and she seems to like him because he's a nice guy and strong. That this is all it takes for "love" to occur is indicative of the immaturity of anime as genre and the cultural problems and stereotypes associated with the Japanese. As with most anime you get the normal sexist stereotyping of women as helpless, supporting characters who generally are good cooks and unconfident cry-babies. You can imagine my surprise when asuna turns out to be a capable swordsman. Of course she's only capable when it's convenient. Often times she still needs big tough kirito to save her or to take on the tougher enemies. Even in major boss battles that should not be solo-able asuna tends to take a supporting role.

But let's ignore the flaws almost all anime have with predictable character architecture and story telling. The world is pretty. Some of the storylines of minor character make the plight of being trapped more real. Some characters don't get explored enough. It's like the makers of this anime looked at .hack//sign which had a very similar overall story plot but chose to tell the story through dialogue and character development. The makers of SAO said, let's not do that, let's make it an action show with lazy character development.
The most interesting character choice was to give asuna and kirito a child. But this lasts only one episode in the first half and has no more relevancy until the second half where the child becomes merely a supporting character with no more significance than an information source and plot device.

The resolution of the story for the first half is arguably the weakest part of the story-telling. It felt rushed and poorly thought out. For instance, early in the series they get an item that allows you to revive someone 10 seconds after death, preventing them from dying. Kirito gives this item to klein who is at the scene of the final battle. But rather than have Klein use the item to revive asuna, or revive kirito to finish off the boss, kirito just gets mad and ignore the fact that he just died and as a ghost kills the boss. It was super lazy story telling I've come to expect from anime. Also the revelation of the final boss and how quickly that came about and also how the main character had already fought the final boss before makes the final fight kinda boring and uninteresting.

Overall the first half of the story merits 4/5 stars at best. Interesting side character story lines that should've been fleshed out and more in depth make the series good. Lazy story telling and stereotypical anime flaws bring it down from 5 stars.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The second half of the anime is terrible. They spend time introducing a flying control device and then the very next scene and episode that control device is entirely irrelevant. Let's ignore that this is poor game design to have a control device for flight that becomes irrelevant the moment you try to learn to fly the right way, this is blatant filler which just goes to show that this second half of the season was just to make money off a brand that was popular.

The second half focus' on kirito's quest to save asuna who no longer is a capable warrior but a damsel in distress incapable of saving herself. The one time I thought they might actually let her escape on her own and be relevant to the plot as anything more than a trophy to capture from the final boss led to disappointment. It makes all the airtime they spent showing her learning the code to her cage and escaping pointless because it leads nowhere. It does nothing more than to motivate kirito to try to suicide out of desperation into "heaven" or the top of the tree, w/e. The entire result of that sequence is, we know asuna is there for sure and the new supporting character, kirito's sister figures out kirito is her brother. Which at MANY, and I mean MANY points could have happened if these two characters had half a brain or interacted at all in real life like human beings.

Which brings me to why this second half is f-ing terrible. It's all about how kirito's sister is apparently in "love" with her brother who is in love with Asuna. But then she meets kirito and over the course of a week, yes you heard me, a week, falls in love with the online persona of kirito, her brother but she doesn't know that. The very fact that she thinks she loves somebody she just met on an online game is already pathetic story telling. They have no bond other than she thinks he's a nice guy and he's strong. But she has very little context for this other than him saving her and her game leader by fighting and killing players (who don't die permanantly obviously).

After barely knowing the guy she is in love with him, she also still loves her brother for some unexplained reason, despite the story even telling us that he and her barely interact at all in real life in the first half of the story. Apparently Japanese women are very easily attracted to guys because all you have to do is be nice to them a few times and they will fucking die to have you love them if you're a man.
Of course it eventually breaks her heart when the brother she hardly interacts with winds up loving asuna. So she clings to kirito as her love. Of course, in the most convoluted way, she winds up finding out that kirito is her brother and is heartbroken.

I guess they are trying to form some sort of love triangle romance. But that's what makes the second half of this series so shitty. For one, the love triangle isn't believable. It's hard to even feel bad for sugu when she has her heart broken because her love isn't believable at all. We have no context to understand why she would love the main character so much other than that he's the main character and she loves him. At least with Asuna x kirito we have some scenes that show them together and growing closer through shared circumstances of terror, fear, joy, etc.

What makes this fact the problem with the series is that nothing else really interesting happens at all. Many people complain that they feel the episodes are getting shorter in the comments on the videos. You know why this is? Because more and more screen time is given to this drama that doesn't really matter and less and less time is given to actual story progression. The pacing of this show turned into a fantasy show to soap opera between story arcs.

And that's why the second half gets 2/5 stars. The fact that death isn't a consequence means there's no tension in any of the scenes for the second half and they lean to heavily on the "romance."

Because you can't separate these halves you get 3/5 stars as my over all review for the series. If the second half of the series had never happened, and they just ended the first half with asuna and kirito waking up and living happily ever after, that would make this series worth 4/5 stars.

There can be little doubt that SAO is one of, if not the best new shows of the season. That being said, I have some significant issues with the pacing and ending of the first story arc, and since the reviews for this show on CR are almost entirely 5-star ravings of how amazing the show is without any critique, I'm endeavoring to fill that void. There are plenty of things SAO does well, but if you want to know about that, read the other reviews. If you are curious to know why this show isn't the second coming of Trigun, read on.

Beware: minor spoilers ahead, but I'll do my best to be vague about specific plot points.

Episodes 3-6 were relatively weak. Instead of continuing from where the first two episodes left off, the plot jumps two years into the future and tells isolated stories about side characters you have no reason to care about, while the main character himself is never in any real danger, so the tension of the death game the first episodes create is lost. Would have preferred more time spent in the first few months with all the chaos and tension which would have arisen from thousands of trapped and terrified gamers.

Episodes 7-13 are better, with the two main characters relationship being developed, allowing the viewer to actually care about their well-being (as opposed to the side characters in the early episodes, whose peril is supposed to invoke serious drama, but when you've only known them for 15 minutes, their death is rather meaningless). There are still side characters who pass through with their own drama which I felt detracted from the main story, but at least now the main characters were developed enough to keep you engaged and rooting for them.

Episode 14 (big spoilers here) was horribly disappointing. An epic boss fight begun in the previous episode is ended abruptly and with barely a whimper. The villain is revealed, and then defeated via what is essentially magic (the main characters performing feats outside the bounds of the game's programming, aka the writers cheated). Finally, the mass-murdering creator of the game, when asked why he did this, literally says "I forgot." How compelling...or not.

The next story arc has only just begun, but looks promising and I will continue to watch SAO every Saturday. However, I wish the writers would take a better look at the pacing and give the anime time to develop all characters at a reasonable speed, not just the main two protagonists. I realize this is based on a manga which goes into greater depths on many plot points, but this anime has enough potential on its own not to be shackled into retelling the meta-narrative of the manga in an abridged form.

Beautiful and engaging, this series makes you see and think what some might do if trapped in a world where life is safe only if you engage the dangers that surround you. The main characters in this story pull at your heart strings as they struggle to escape this trap of epic proportions. Action, suspense, life, death, and love, this story keeps you hanging on every plot twist and turn, making you want more. I hope to see what challenges Kirito and Asuna overcome if they continue the series as far as the manga progressed.