This show is... Terrible. The action is poor, the characters are unoriginal and uninteresting, the plot is god awful, and nothing lands save for a few things, which it abandons pretty soon. The one thing that stays consistently good is the direction. It somehow makes you feel emotions that the piss poor writing doesn't earn with just how well directed it is. But, still not worth it.

I was swept away in the game, it was so cool. I'm new to anime, but I just it!

It is genuinely impressive on how many levels this show fails. It has become a reference point for bad writing. This is a story written by someone who has admitted to doing no research beforehand, and made by a company prone to reusing footage. It fails on so many levels, that its popularity doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Yes, this show was released around the time death games got popular, the animation looks slick to the very untrained eye, and a few worthless characters are killed early on to give a sense of danger to the whole thing, but I can't believe that it is still popular that it has already gotten spinoffs, movies, and other series. How are people still watching this mess?CharactersNone of the characters have any actual personalities, especially not the females. Pretty much all of the women onscreen are only on the show to serve as a love interest for Kirito or to draw the eye of anyone watching for the attractive anime girls. None of them have any personality other than some of them having hobbies, and having a hobby does not equate to having a personality. The side characters also don't serve any purposes, other than to propel the "plot." The main character, Kirito, is mainly just a blank slate because the writer thought that being the most overpowered character ever written is a personality. Plot The story of the first arc had some potential, but unfortunately is it very poorly executed. None of the characters act like gamers. All the characters are very weak. The villain has no motivation. The fights are terrible (just watch them without music, without the amazing soundtrack no-one would be defending those fights). There are countless filler episodes and very little plot progression. The game doesn't make sense as a game. There are a lot more problems, but the main thing is that the author can only give exposition in a bar or a cafe. Seriously, if you have seen this, think back to any time you heard a clunky speech of poorly-disguised exposition. Chances are, it took place in some kind of a restaurant, which is a pretty lazy way of conveying information to the audience. Also the villain HAS NO MOTIVATION FOR KILLING THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE. Now I'm going to talk more about the Fairy Dance arc. Some of the things I mentioned previously regarding filler, exposition, and fight scenes are also here, but the plot has some extra problems. Like incest. There is an incest subplot just thrown in there and the poor writing just makes it gross and uncomfortable. If there was better writing, if Kirito's cousin had a personality outside of wanting to bang him, and if she grew over the course of the arc as a person, then it could've worked I guess. Asuna, Kirito's "wife" from the first arc has been reduced from a poorly animated badass to a caged damsel in distress. The villain of this arc has motivations, making the finale slightly less anticlimactic than the first, but they make no sense. If you lay out everything that he's trying to do, and think about how government cooperations work, and everything anywhere near his plan, it makes no sense as to why or how he would do this. There's also an uncomfortable and unnecessary rape scene with tentacle monsters that doesn't make a lot of sense in context and doesn't need to be there. For some reason Kirito is now friends with a mass-murderer and can walk immediately after being bedridden for 2 years. There's a lot I don't want to get into about how NOT A GODDAMN THING MAKES SENSE, but this review would just end up even longer and there are plenty of video essays on YouTube that go into more depth in much more entertaining manners. Sights and SoundsThe character designs and settings are ok, I guess. Most of it is pretty generic and bland. Like I said, there is a lot of reused footage and still panning shots. I wouldn't be as annoyed as the panning shots as they're common in anime, but panning over a frozen image can only be excused if its an establishing shot, not an excuse for a fight scene. For some reason people defend the fight scenes saying that they're the best thing about this show, but if you watch them with out the spectacular soundtrack, they're pretty pathetic. I can't believe that such a talented composer is working on such trash. Or they might not be anymore, I don't know. The music is still good. The voice acting is not. I watched this with the English dub, which is terrible. I also watched some of the original Japanese dub, and it really isn't any better.

Most of the characters have a severe case of blandness and no amount of badass swords can save it from it's predictability.