I first watched Sword Art Online back in early 2018 I believe and ever since then I... haven't been the biggest fan of this show. From everything I could remember, the show had great animation, some interesting (and even groundbreaking for the time) ideas, but the way it executed those ideas was simply terrible. Watching it now, I can't help but feel that my 19year old self was... pretty much right on the money I'd say, but having said that I did not remember it being this flawed. See, the problem isn't the fact that this show had some great ideas that were poorly executed; rather it had some great ideas that were executed in potentially the most bafflingly stupid, underwhelming and suspension-of-disbelief shattering ways possible. So let me explain...
Story.
First of all, as I stated a bit earlier, the concept is intriguing and unique, especially for the era Sword Art Online was written. As we all know (yes, even those who haven't even seen Sword Art Online yet) its story is about a VR video game which recently made it out of beta testing (in which a few players got to test the game and its mechanics early, this is important for later) and is now about to properly launch with a limited 10,000 copies release (if I'm remembering right). It obviously sold out, people are very excited to play, only for the players who are already completely immersed in the digital world of Sword Art Online to realize that there is no log out button. The creator of the game states that this is basically some sort of a cruel social experiment where every single one of the IRL players now trapped in the game is not only unable to log out until someone completes the game's 100 floors, but also if they die in the game, they will also die in real life. Not a bad setup right?
But here is where the problems begin. Immediately after the first episode (in which everything Ι explained earlier happened), the second episode makes something abundantly clear; the anime's pace is... fast, REALLY fast. In fact the second episode starts by stating that a whole month has already passed from the time of that incident. A whole month. Objectively speaking, one of the most interesting parts of the show would have been to show us how every single person has to adapt to the new reality, how the video game world works, how all the different people coped with the fact that their life is going to be nothing but struggle and danger in this twisted death game they are trapped in. Instead, we get none of that. It's a MASSIVE missed opportunity, if not for the emotional impact it could have, then for the easy exposition it could have given us for how this world operates. But I digress... To keep it short, Sword Art Online continues to randomly skip weeks, sometimes multiple months, every few minutes, and constantly tries to get us to care about characters that barely stay on screen for more than 10 minutes, only for them to be killed, and then the show expects us to be sad about them. If all that doesn't sound bad enough yet, when one such character who is kinda supposed to be a "love interest" type and a seemingly important character dies, the anime makes the completely BAFFLING decision to IMMEDIATELY jump cut to a Christmas Eve celebration. Happy festive music and all. It is times like these were you can't help but wonder why this was not written as a parody in the first place.
As if ALL of this was still not enough, the anime's atrocious pacing (which somehow never fails to only include and focus on minor events and characters instead of genuine plot progression and character development) makes it impossible for this anime to succeed as a purely action driven show either, since we almost never get to see any proper action or even of some of the 100 bosses that supposedly exist, and in the end we only get to see... 5(?), although some of them for extremely brief periods of time. In conclusion, the only good part about Sword Art Online is the idea of it, similar to me telling you to imagine the most beautiful scenary you can and describe it for me to draw, only for me to draw it like a steaming pile of shit.
Characters.
Hopefully this time I won't yap as much as I did in the "story" segment of this review, since you can clearly understand that most characters have minimal development given its extremely fast pacing. However, I will still describe some gripes I had with some of them. Starting with Kirito, the protagonist of this anime, his whole character arc is that he is a beta tester (later crowned as a "beater" which is really funny since he sounds like a serial masturbator) and is incredibly good at the game. For the purposes of the story though, he is only good enough to give us some basic exposition about how leveling up and other basic MMO concepts work. Other than that he is completely irrelevant in his own story. The words "edgy", "overpowered", "(wannabe) cool" and such perfectly describe his boring character, which essentially is a blank slate for edgy teenage gamers to self insert into. He has the stupidest plot armor in the world (I mean ffs he literally dies in the final battle against the creator but his "willpower" bugs the game and instead of dying he manages to kill him or some bullshit like that). Anyway, I'll stop here because doing an analysis on his character feels like an insult to pretty much every other character out there. Kirito also has a sister/cousin who I will barely talk about since she becomes much more relevant in the Alfheim arc which I don't really want to talk about much.
Predictably, she is a shell of a character as well with absolutely zero personality and her only characteristic being that she wants to be romantically involved with her brother/cousin. Classic. Yui is another absolute mess of a character who (without going into much detail) is a... humanoid antivirus and her whole character arc (becoming Kirito's and Asuna's "child") makes absolutely zero sense and pretty much introduces us to as much of a supernatural element as the author can get away with. Speaking of Asuna, she may as well be the only character that is relatively okay in this anime, who has a functioning personality, and while she is by no means well-written, she is at the very least serviceable and believable as a character. She, of course, becomes completely irrelevant in the Alfheim arc since she is mostly in a coma in that arc, leaving us with the 3 worst written characters (Kirito, Yui, Ms. Incest) as protagonists in the Alfheim arc, but again, I will barely talk about this arc anyway.
Alfheim Arc...
Speaking of Alfheim by the way, Sword Art Online consists of the Aincrad arc (which I have been primarily talking about in this review) and a second arc, known as the Alfheim arc. In this review I purposefully chose to not focus on Alfheim that much, since it is universally agreed upon to be the worst Sword Art Online arc by a mile (since the whole "you die in the game = you die in real life" premise doesn't even exist here, plus the terrible writting, the weird "damsel in distress" theme, the weird edgy rapey vibes, the incest vibes and much much more). For some reason though, I have seen a lot of people claiming that Alfheim is "the only bad part" about Sword Art Online. While I do agree that this arc is indeed completely redundant and absolutely atrocious at best, I wanted to focus more on the "fan favorite" part of Sword Art Online and point out the glaring issues that it has, since most people focus on the shortcomings of Alfheim instead and praise the Aincrad arc as something solid, or even something close to a masterpiece. Quite clearly though, while not as bad as Alfheim, my review serves as a reminder that the Aincrad arc is far from decent, given its numerous flaws in both narration, world building, pacing, plot holes, plot conveniences and character writing.
Conclusion.
In conclusion, the first arc of Sword Art Online is extremely overrated and only "decent" when seen through countless layers of rose tinted glasses, since I admit it was the starting point for many when it comes to their anime journey. Objectively though, it is an incoherent mess that can barely hold itself together and an absolute mess of ideas that may seem good on paper, but fundamentally failed to be put in any good use. A train wreck of narration, only followed by a tragedy of an execution.
