One of the first anime I watched and one of the closest to my heart. I feel this was the first among many times that I've seen an anime I enjoy with a lot of squandered potential. I'll dive deeper into what I mean and break down my thoughts on the episodes individually from how I remember it. I believe one of the best points of SAO more than the anime is the concept. It appeals to the NEET and otaku fantasy as well as to many gamers. To be able to live in a fully immersive world where you truly experience the game you are playing. To swing your sword the way you see fit rather than relying on pre existing animations. To move freely and feel the breeze, the atmosphere, the air and the weather. To be able to taste the food you eat and even the drops you get. SAO as a game is a developer's string theory in a sense. The ultimate dream project. The first bits were an interesting introduction to the series, the SAO game and some important characters. Klein had an interesting introduction and Kirito as an MC had his entire character setup introduced to the viewers in roughly 3 minutes. Kirito as an MC might I say is incredibly simple and just the generic overpowered trope MC. If you like it great if not that's a shame. I'd say he was done pretty well later on in the series but he wasn't so bad this season either. Overall it was a great setting up of the SAO world and the plot twist that it was a death trap game was pretty crazy. Not too impactful since it's episode 1 but if you immersed yourself in the anime and filled in the shoes of the players who were there it was pretty terrifying. The fact that they had to use their original bodies as their avatars revealing their identity to everyone else who was playing the game. The fact that they were stuck in a game where it was no longer a game but a quest for survival. It would've been pretty terrifying for them.

At this point I consider this the ultimate setup for a death game fantasy world simulation. A perfect chance for world building especially considering that every single floor is huge, each floor has a boss that takes immense teamwork, skill, strategy and stats to defeat, and all the stakes are at risk with no escape until the game is cleared and no room to take risks and die to understand enemy patterns unlike other modern day games. To add on, it took a month as well as a full boss clearing squad, several sacrifices, and a beta tester with high stats and previous experience in order to beat the first boss. To give you an idea of how much content this was, SAO Floor 1 was said to be roughly 10 km in diameter with each subsequent floor gradually decreasing in size. The final floor was still 3 km in diameter so you could probably guess that every floor was humongous, unique in design and filled with mobs that had chances at giving unique drops. Not to mention the plethora of additional features such as sub skills, quests, NPCs and jobs. For more perspective, if you were to recreate SAO with a canon level of content and no functionalities, it would likely take you 20-30 years to make(MEANING ONLY MODELS, MAP, ANIMATIONS, EFFECTS, NPCs, UIs, etc.). Making it workt he same way in VR alone would take far longer probably extending it to a century! Obviously the show is fiction so Kayaba was somehow able to make it possible in a year but this is just putting into perspective how much larger it is compared to high quality modern day open world games like Elden Ring, GTA V, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, etc.

After rambling on about how humongous this world is, you'd assume that this would be a full fledged anime right? Nope. This gets 14 episodes including filler arcs. If that doesn't speak about how rushed the pacing in this anime is and how little world building there is compared to the potential, you may understand my disappointment. Overall the 14 episodes were alright. Nothing too good but not exactly bad either. They were enjoyable to say the least and Kirito had some great fights with awesome animation quality for its time. The Moonlit Black Cats segment was a great emotional 2 episodes and did a lot for Kirito's character development. Asuna's relationship with Kirito was pretty mid and felt kind of forced. The Heathcliff real identity reveal was pretty dang cool when I saw it for the first time as a 13 year old, but there's been far better plot twists since. Also Kirito just randomly learning Hamon and getting yellow eyes was some genuine bullshit but hey it fits with the OP plot armor MC trope so I can't really complain. Overall that was Aincrad and I don't have too much to say about ALO honestly. It felt like an improvement in terms of world building and plot compared to SAO but once again a measly 12 episodes doesn't do it justice. Felt more like a filler arc than anything. Obviously I didn't like the Asuna (almost) rape scene since she is a minor and I find it very unnecessary to add that. Overall it is what it is and the anime was ok.