Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-4830106-20140921022402/@comment-11188061-20141215045259

The greatest part about SAO is its original one-shot, award winning story, no doubt. The light novel afterwards isn't too shabby either.

However, the biggest problem here is that the original story was never fleshed out in the first place. We never saw the story progress in chronological order where Kirito starts out as a newbie, goes through various conflicts (well, just like your typical everyday story, but the format is timeless) and eventually reach where he is.

Making an anime basing off the original Arc of the light novel itself was a tremendous mistake. there are insane timeskips everywhere, and the story in SAO is later fleshed out in short stories and mediums like games. Ironically the 'saving Asuna from pervert idiot' Arc in ALO has better pacing in that sense, and if the recent GGO isn't SO FUCKING DRAWN OUT LIKE OH MY GOD, THAT'S THE MOST BORING SHIT I HAVE TO GO THROUGH UNTIL I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE AND QUITTED (note: apparently GGO included the Excalibur Arc - which is cool, since it shows off some actual raids - and Asuna's story - holy shit, this is THE best story out of everything in SAO), it could be a really successful Season 2.

Except that it wasn't. Most boring combat EVER I've seen, like if you've lived through RWBY once there's just so many things you CANNOT ACCEPT about GGO battle scenes. And one forumer I noticed at Animesuki nailed the impression about SAO completely: with Kirito relegated to the sidelines, the story is ironically so much better.