I'll try to make this as short as possible. The story is still in the middle of the war between the human empire and the dark territory. And the first episode gives us... tentacle rape!
That's it for the story. I just scratched the surface of stuff not making sense, plot holes and more, but I don't want to write too much.
Story 2/10
Let's talk about the main character first. Kirito is not conscious until the seventh episode, which I actually like. After all these season where he is the OP guy saving everyone it is kind of refreshing seeing him broken. Sadly, he wakes up after seven episodes and just returns to being the OP guy he was as if nothing ever happened. He saves everyone and his harem grows even further (I still don't understand why sao is not tagged with the Harem Genre. All these girls literally say that they like him (in Japanese like means love most of the time) and anilist still doesn't tag it with Harem). Moving on to Asuna. She gets a bit more screen time than she got in the last seasons, but her personality is still non-existent and sometimes I thought that her vocabulary only contains the word "Kirito". I am not going to talk about the other characters, because they didn't really change. Except one character, who also didn't change, but in my opinion is worth mentioning:
Higa is one of the only characters who I really liked. His Japanese slang and his laid back style just spread positive vibes and every time he was on screen I was pretty happy. Even in a situation where he was shot by a traitor he acted cool and didn't overreact.
Characters 5/10
The World Building is a complete mess. Nothing makes sense anymore and old concepts like the Augma don't have a use. The Anime states the year where all of this is happening to be 2026. Imagine our world having artificial souls in around 5 years. If the Author wanted to make the Anime seem realistic, which I think was his goal, then he completely miscalculated the dates. The Underworld is the worst of all. Everything seems possible there and no one knows what the word "limit" means. I am not going into detail here, because I think it is quite obvious that the World Building is quite messed up (btw the korean/chinese players can speak perfect Japanese, but the American players have a big accent in Japanese AND English).
World Building 1/10
The animation is pretty decent. Everything looks fine and I would say the quality is intermediate. The only thing I hated was the 3D ocean turtle. This thing looked like a ps2 in game animation on a 4:3 monitor with 480p.
Animation 6/10
This is (including enjoyment) the most subjective category, so no long text here. I liked the art style. It was basic, not overdone and good to look at.
Art/Visuals 6/10
The OST was surprisingly fitting and I enjoyed it a lot. The director (or whoever made the music choice) had good taste and knew where and when to play specific songs. I especially liked the opening. It had a fitting vibe and it always got me pretty fired up before every episode. The ending was not exceptional good, but did the job it was supposed to do. I am actually pretty tired of writing (and I don't think anyone will read that far), so I am going to stop here.
Sound 5/10
I define Enjoyment as "the state or process of taking pleasure in something". I definitely didn't take pleasure in watching sao, but after every episode I wanted to watch more. But also every time something didn't make sense (which was approximately every minute) I asked myself why I decided to watch this and why the author didn't make the anime more logical.
Enjoyment 5/10
Please take this review with a grain of salt and keep in mind that this is my personal and probably biased opinion. If you want to see how I rated the other sao seasons, please take a look at my anilist profile.
If you scrolled down just to look at the score, please at least read the story and world building block. They explain my rating pretty well. Have a good day!
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