NOTE: Watched season 1 only.
Series in one sentence:
A guy risks his life over a girl he has no chemistry with.
Series in more sentences:
Thousands of people get trapped in a virtual reality MMORPG game and are told that when they die in-game, they'll die in real life. A young boy who had the luck of being the game's BETA tester knows the way, but almost feels forced to risk his neck for other players because of this fact.
Eventually he falls in love and does everything for the sake of a girl he once met on the first day of their imprisonment.
This could've been a romantic masterpiece, but the series portrays the relationships the main character has with the people around him with laziness and haste.
The main character, Kazuto, introduces himself as a lonely hero who does not bother to keep contact with the friendly players he meets along the way, but at the same time, feels and fights for every single loser he comes across, which confused me. I was honestly hoping for this kid to be an asshole. We don't have enough asshole main characters.
The fact this boy is able to treat any person he just met like he has known them for years doesn't make his relationship with his girlfriend, Asuna, that special. Not to mention there are huge gaps between their initial meetings. Whenever they met, they did nothing that implied they felt anything for each other. I actually felt more chemistry between the other girls Kazuto met along the way, who were charming and had a distinct personality, while Asuna is, dare I say, bland like a piece of dry bread.
She started out alright; and used to be a common noob impressed by Kazuto's skills, until she returns to the series as a strong and serious leader of a guild. Sure, alright, but then why does she turn into a little girl again that needs to be saved by her hero, or does she cry like a baby when she saves Kazuto from something? She was all over the place.
And after this mess, out of nowhere, Kazuto and Asuna fall in love.
The problem with this series is that it wants to keep on going, which is why nearly every episode introduces a new group or person, and in that same episode they make Kazuto immediately care for these people, but then make him run off again before the episode ends. It's like they wanted to cram as many events as possible into the first season, which leaves us with this rushed series that makes huge jumps in time, without establishing any relationships you should care for.
When the series announced to me "2 years later", I could only think "What happened in those 2 years?". These 2 years could've been 2 seasons and could've given us a slow but proper build-up to Kazuto and Asuna's relationship.
I already cared little for the story the moment the rushed romance got introduced, but when these people then started crying for a self-aware software child who for no reason calls them her parents -and they've also only known for a day- I was officially tired of the melodrama.
Every relationship in this series was mentally exhausting and meaningless.
The series barely saved itself thanks to the last few episodes of the season. The moment Kazuto's little sister (niece, actually) entered the story, things started becoming slightly interesting, even though the "villain" in this part of the series is inhumanly cruel and I'm not really fond of Japan's obsession with niece and nephew romance stories. Still, it inserted some drama I actually cared for. I almost wanted this series to be about this brother and sister playing this game behind each other's back, and then discovering who they are when they've already fallen in love. It would've made for better drama. Inappropriate, but still better.
Besides all this, there was one other thing that bothered me about the series, and that's that the all the gamers portrayed were way too serious. The series didn't really parody online gamers and the behaviour they're notorious for.
Where are all the nerds with zits and sweaty foreheads? Where are all the people yelling "lol" every second of the day, the people who troll others by tea-bagging them while they're knocked out, the people who chase girls around and call them a bitch when they ignore them? Where are the Spanish players who refuse to speak English, or Japanese in this case? Why are there so many old men playing this game? Why are there so many insanely beautiful girls playing this game? What's with all these crazy people who desire to be a villain and like to kill others for no good reason? I understand that after months of being trapped, people either turn bitter or accept this world to be theirs and set up systems similar to the one in the real world, but come on.
Even when the plot switches over to this new virtual game, one where no one dies, all the players in it act like it's a big deal. Who does that in a game?
The series only shows the widely hated "roleplaying gamer", a gamer that is least common of all. I can accept it from the first game, but the one in the later episodes has no excuse. It's just a regular game with no risks.
It would've been more interesting if Kazuto was the only one in it who acted serious, and the other players would roll their eyes at this traumatized child and go of grinding while talking about some movie they've watched earlier that day.
So many missed opportunities.