Lets rip this bandage off and talk about SAO. I'm going to handle this differently than my other posts in this series. I'm going to split this show up by arc as opposed to season so each arc will get its own post (also because there is only so much Kirito I can handle in one viewing). This mostly because the first arc of SAO ended up being more enjoyable than I remembered and its really in Alfheim where my issues with it as a whole start cropping up. Welcome to the next stop on the Isekai World Tour!
Premise: The hottest and most anticipated new mmo has dropped. 10,000 lucky players log in to get a feel for the game and everything is going fine...right up until they log out. Suddenly they're transported to a town square as the sky goes red. The Game Master appears and tells them that they're stuck here until they beat the game and if they die in the game, the nerve gear will fry their brains. He congratulates on playing his little game and wishes them luck.
I surprisingly enjoyed this arc more than I did the last time around. Its not bad but its not amazing either (well, outside of two episodes) and I have a few minor issues that don't break the arc for me. Kirito is still op as hell tho. The first half of the arc was really good but honestly, it gets kinda boring when Kirito and Asuna get together. Its one of those things where the constant time skips makes me not believe their relationship because its not shown on-screen until they get together. I legitimately said "WTF!" out loud when Asuna tells another player that Kirito is her reason for living. The arc is at its best when its just Kirito bumping into people and helping them out. Easily the best episodes in the arc for me are episodes 5 and 6. They're a pretty sweet murder mystery about players somehow getting PK-ed in safe zones. Its a fantastic episode that gives a decent amount of insight into how certain aspects of the game work.
Kirito is a weird protagonist for this kind of story because the people he meets are more interesting than him. I would've loved to see an episode centered around Klein or the merchant guy. Outside of Asuna, the supporting cast isn't there consistently. I honestly would've preferred if this arc had been an anthology following Kirito as he helps people out during his traveling because the relationship with Asuna and her guild don't really add anything until the final two episodes. Actually now that I think about it, this show might have been better off if each episode had a different pov character in general.
I'm torn on the Yui episode, its an ok episode but its also a bit manipulative. Spoilers: Kirito and Asuna find an amnesiac girl while on vacation and adopt her while they try to figure out who she is and if and she has any family. She isn't a player, she isn't even human. She is a mental health algorithm designed to study and help people acclimate to SAO. The system admin forbad her from doing that so she could only watch on in horror at the players' mental anguish until her code bugs out and she seeks out the only two happy players in the game: Kirito and Asuna. See the problem yet? Yui is designed to poke, prod, and study people's mental state and because of that, she inadvertently sort of controls the responses people will have to her. So I'm not sure how much of their "family" was legitimately Kirito and Asuna liking her and how much was Yui's programming accidentally causing them to react that way. It leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth the more I think about it.
Final Thoughts: All things considered, the arc is ok and it held my attention well enough. As mentioned earlier, the second half of the arc is a let down compared to the first. The show makes a point of saying a few times how emotionally scarred and terrified the player base is due to being stuck in the game but it only really shows it in one or two episodes thanks to all the timeskips. Sadly from what I remember of the next arc of the show, its all downhill from here.
