Good but a bit overrated

Written by theman773 on December 15, 2012 at 4:04 PM

Sword Art Online seems to be the big show for this season and it was also written by the same guy that made Accel World.
First off, I'll start with what's good about the show. The battle scenes are awesome due to the style of the animation and how smooth it looks. The first few episodes introduced a dark, grim, and interesting world where the players are forced to create their own little society where most of them are focused on getting out of the game alive. The show made me feel like I would enjoy to play an mmo like that where most of the economy relies on the player base and not NPCs.
(This part has a few vaugue spoilers, no characters named, just plot stuff)Where the show falls short is the story and it makes sense considering it was primarily a love story written by a 14 year old boy. Besides a few characters introduced in the beginning and a couple in the middle of the series, all the other characters in the series are introduced in an episode and either killed off or flat out go away for the rest of the series, this is where most of the "sad and grim" parts of the series everybody talks about comes from, personally, I didn't have enough time with the characters that died to actually care for them when they did die. The story sort of fails for me because it seems like it's trying to be a jack of all trades when it comes to genres, it's got action parts, adventure parts, romance, comedy, and it also tries to have another romance (completely falling on it's face near the end). In the end the story is just a mess and would have been much better if the writer had just focused on one or two genres instead of trying to cover all the bases. Also, at times, the characters seem to forget facts that were previously stated in the show like there being barriers in certain places and such.
In short, Sword Art Online is a decent but highly overrated anime with good action scenes and a plot that falls flat on it's face.