>>1478555As a long-time fan of the Light Novel, at first I thought the anime was an offense to Reki Kawahara in how badly it was handled.
Now that I've had time to unrustle my jimmies, I like to think of it as a half-decent graphical representation of things that otherwise might have been hard to picture in your mind, but I still give the anime a 7/10, whereas the LN is a strong 10/10 for me (it was 8.5~9/10 until I started reading Alicization. The Alicization arc is pretty much everything I could ask of a story combined, love it).
I also highly recommend reading Accel World, or even watching the anime (Sunrise handled the AW adaptation miles better than A1 did with SAO - it was actually pretty good). I'm one of the fans that believe at some point SAO and AW will merge together as a story, but I better stop at this before I go fanboy mode.
