Overall Rating
Average
Story: 2
Dialogue: 3
Animation: 5
Entertainment: 3
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As many knows, this anime has been very popular among viewers, but this DOES NOT make it anywhere as good as they say it. It has lots of flaws, which becomes blatantly evident in the 2nd half of the show. But this does not take away the entertainment.
Anyway, let's start off with the characters first. The characters is probably the weakest thing about this anime. Most of them, come and go and are forgotten by the next episode, they are that forgettable. The main male character, Kirito is stereotypical. Calm, good at everything he does, gets the ladies, basically what I'd call a perfect character. Asuka, the main female character is boring, charmless and quite useless. And even worse, she becomes totally useless in the 2nd part of the show. "The main characters have no depth, what can we expect from the side characters right?" - True to this, the side characters are shallow with no depths and fail to make an impact, both enjoyment and emotional wise. Which leads me back to my point, the characters are the lowest point of this show.
The pacing of the show is another low point, because it's the definition of "rushed". The time skips makes it even worse, and fails to keep engagements. The time skips is another reason for the poor characters, because it fails to make relatable and fails to develop them.
The anime does alright even with bad characters and pacing from episodes 1-14, but when the game "changes" from episode 15 onwards, it goes downhill even more. Even worse characters, with atrocious writing, and overall is just horribly forced and rushed.
Anyway, pushing all the negative asides, the animation is brilliant. The colors is beautiful and the style just magnifies the beauty of the setting. If I had to pick, I would say the animation is the best thing about this anime. The "enter a video-game" concept has been used in anime before, so SAO does not follow a unique theme, but the series still creates a good atmosphere for the theme. The "survive inside a video game" concept is also an attractive notion, which was basically the first thing that attracted me to the show, sadly this falls through the cracks in the second half as well. Another thing that shined for me was the music, the soundtrack is pretty good as well.
To sum it up, SAO is an anime with handful of flaws from shallow characters to bad pacing to forced second half, but it's still entertaining enough to make a person complete it, and has a brilliant animation with nifty soundtrack.
Here's to hoping the upcoming second season doesn't screw up, cheers!
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