In the year 2012, two groups of anime fans would interact in the ultimate debate: Is “Sword Art Online” (SAO) good or bad? For those that don’t know, here’s the premise for SAO: 10,000 people play the very first Virtual Reality MMO-RPG. They enter the video game world, Aincrad, for the first time on launch date and realize shortly after logging in, there is no logout button. The creator of the game, Kayaba Akihiko, shows up as a hologram and tells the players that they are now trapped in this video game and the only way out is to beat the game. Furthermore, if they die in game – they die in real life. In comes Kirito, the main protagonist, who was a beta tester and eventually (*Spoiler Alert) beats the game. In this post, I’ll point out everything I liked about the Aincrad arc of SAO in the ultimate pursuit of answering the question: Is SAO good or bad?

Now before I begin analyzing, I want to put a couple of things into perspective:

1. When SAO first aired, I was a junior in high school, as well as, in my infant years in the anime/manga medium. I had just started reading "Naruto" for the first time and was just barely getting into "Full Metal Alchemist," "Dragon Eye," "Bleach," and a couple more. More importantly, I exclusively read manga, no watching anime for me… yet (that was a few months later). In more recent times (three weeks before writing this), I finally watched the first two arcs of “Sword Art Online.”

2. I haven’t yet read the light novels of SAO, but I’ve heard that regardless of your opinion on the anime series, the light novels are a thousand times better.

3. This post will just cover what I liked about the Aincrad arc, I’ll cover the Alfheim arc soon and the other arcs when I finish watching them.

4. When I started watching SAO, I came in with two assumptions. A) SAO is the best anime ever, it’s perfect! & B) SAO is terrible in every way, I hate it!

5. This is my opinion entirely. Feel free to discuss and debate in the comment section, but please do not get offended about anything.

Also, Spoilers of course.

So Let's Start — The Premise

The Aincrad arc of “Sword Art Online” starts off strong. No really, hear me out. The premise, while not entirely original, is captivating and presented well. While there is a soft of an expositional dump in the first episode (like most first episodes in anime are), it was honestly a great introduction to the series and, in regards to the overall premise, there’s not really anything better they could have done with it.

The Opening Theme

I’m a sucker when it comes to Anime OPs (Opening Themes). I can usually tell by the end of the first episode of a season whether I’m going to listen to the OP every time I start a new episode or skip it for the most part so that I can jump right in. SAO’s opening, “Crossing the Fields,” is no exception to this rule. I loved every second of it. Now I will say that I had some exposure to this song long before I started watching, so I knew I would enjoy the music, but the animation is also decent. Except for a couple times where sword slashes and video gamey animations were repetitive, the overall opening theme was a plus.

Time Skips

Now we’re getting into controversial territory. I was okay with the time skips presented throughout the season. For a story that covers over two years and 100 levels of a video game, it would be impossible to keep the show entertaining if they tried to present story plots throughout each level. Luckily they did not do this. Instead, we got a decent continuity of the story through skips in time ranging from a couple of days to a couple of months. Could it have been executed a little better? Sure, but this isn’t something that I would particularly complain about.

Asuna

The main female protagonist, Kirito’s main love interest, and an all-around great character – Asuna. I love Asuna, you love Asuna, and she’s basically the only character in SAO that I didn’t really have any issues with and the only one with some character development. However, I will say this one thing – she begins the series not caring about food and then, as logic dictates, she maxes out her cooking skill. Call it sexist or whatever you want, I just call it irony or plot convenience (but we’ll talk about that later).

Kirito X Asuna

I’ll admit it, I really enjoyed the love story that bloomed between Kirito and Asuna. There was some very apparent foreshadowing and I don’t particularly like Kirito (more in the next post), but the way the two work together is brilliant in execution. While most anime will hint at a relationship and then just barely touch it at the end of the season, SAO has these lovebirds together halfway through. They even get married in the game! Their relationship is never forced and even in the second arc, they always fit well with each other.

Is SAO A Good Anime?

So we’re brought back to our initial question — is the Aincrad arc of “Sword Art Online” good or bad? With everything I’ve said in this article, you may think the answer would be yes, but as we’ve seen there’s still many things we have to look at. How is the character development? How are video game mechanics used throughout the arc? Most importantly, how is the main character portrayed? Instead of pushing all of that in one post, I decided it best to create a part two that will detail everything I didn’t like about the Aincrad arc and come closer to a specific answer to the overarching question.