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I found SAO to be less-than-overwhelming as some other people apparently have. After watching this anime on top of the countless others that I've seen, in my opinion, this series doesn't add up.
Not to say that I didn't somewhat enjoy SAO. After all, I did take the time to actually keep with this anime and not drop it, so there was some hook to it that made me see through it to the very end.
That hook was, at first, the entire concept of an MMORPG. I am both unfamiliar with MMOs in general, and anime dealing with the game genre, so I had plenty of curiosity to spare for Sword Art Online in the beginning episodes. However, that curiosity was soon replaced as the main reason for liking the anime when Kirito's character was developed early on. I very much enjoyed the premise of gamer-kid-is-a-badass-in-game, and the series itself balances his badassery with his normal kid life very well. At equal points, it shows his frustration and hopelessness of being trapped in a video game for an indiscriminate amount of time, and shows his strength of character to be able to beat the game eventually, and deal with the problem on his own throughout the course of the Sword Art Online arc.
Other than these two hooks, however, nothing else was interesting enough to be memorable. The romance between Asuna and Kirito was rushed and felt weak. Asuna, herself, was really intriguing in the beginning but that soon unraveled into the love interest and eventually damsel-in-distress so quickly that I forgot about the mysterious but pretty badass character that she was in the beginning. It almost felt fanservice-y, how quickly Asuna devolved to fit the Kirito x Asuna plot device. Also, the sister-who-wasn't side story and the other random female "moe" characters (the Cait-Slipth people) were just unnecessary and didn't have enough material to actually be worthwhile. The entire sister drama is still horribly confusing in general.
Aesthetically, SAO was pretty decent with it's backgrounds, but there wasn't anything that really set it apart. The music was nothing special, and the voice acting, even, was rather bland.
Overall, I'd give the series a 5/10. It was okay enough to be watchable, but definitely not a staple of anime, or to be particularly memorable.
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