“Sword Art Online is the worst anime of all time.” That's a perhaps surprisingly common sentiment among anime fans, many of whom may enjoy isekai shows but dislike how SAO has become such a representative of the genre, or who eschew extremely popular anime titles in favor of those a bit more off the beaten track.
And there is no doubt that Sword Art Online, for better or worse, is a hugely popular series, both within the isekai genre and in anime as a whole. Debuting in 2012, the initial anime -- about a boy named Kirito who gets stuck in an online game and must fight to survive alongside thousands of other players -- has spawned several additional seasons, as well as its own spinoff series, making a massive cultural impact in the process.
Despite its undeniable popularity, Sword Art Online has also gained a fair amount of detractors. Few, if any, anime can be said to be perfect, and SAO is certainly no exception. Although, admittedly, it’s not difficult to see where the cracks in the show lie, even without digging too deep, and critiques go far beyond simply pointing out (for example) the odd instance of poor animation or off-model background artwork.
One of the biggest criticisms has been leveled at Kirito himself, Sword Art Online’s main protagonist. Countless viewers see him as a fairly generic character -- someone with little to distinguish himself from any other teenage male MC aside from his god-like power levels -- yet whose unearned combat prowess, ridiculously good skillset and penchant for saving the day has led him to be sarcastically dubbed “Our lord and savior Kirito.”
Clearly playing into this male-centric power fantasy aspect, the show has nearly every relevant (or for that matter, irrelevant) female cast member falling for Kirito somewhere along the way, creating a harem situation and frequently reducing at least some of these women to tropey love interests rather than fully-fledged characters in their own right. For instance, Kirito’s main love interest Asuna is depicted as more or less the perfect girl -- attractive yet modest, rich yet humble, smart yet polite, strong yet feminine, independent yet loyal… and of course, an amazing cook.
Alongside this fantasy-wife status symbol, Sword Art Online features numerous other women, each with their often not-so-unique collection of fan service-friendly tropes, and most of whom develop romantic feelings for Kirito somewhere along the way, from the cutesy idol-like Silica to Kirito’s own cousin Suguha/Leafa. However, do these types of criticisms really mean that Sword Art Online is the worst anime of all time -- and if not, why are so many viewers eager to label the series as such?
Upon even a moment’s reflection, it’s apparent that Sword Art Online simply cannot be the worst anime of all time. Assuming it’s possible to objectively award any anime with this label, surely it would be a series with a plot that’s so disjointed as to be incoherent, pacing so uneven that it practically causes whiplash, animation that’s so bad it’s laughable or themes that practically go out of their way to cause offense? That anime may well exist, but SAO obviously isn’t it; whatever its faults, the show at least meets a baseline of competency.
Evidently, Sword Art Online is possibly as much, if not more, over-hated as it is overrated. Anyone with a burning passion for any hobby can be guilty of hyperbole, including anime fans -- and if someone happens to dislike a certain title, it can be tempting to be overly harsh on it when that same show becomes wildly popular. As such, among many anime viewers, SAO has been made into a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the medium, and “worst” is sometimes conflated with “overrated.”
It therefore regularly appears in ‘worst-of’ lists by users on sites such as MyAnimeList, Reddit and Quora -- tellingly, often alongside similarly popular past and present titles like Shakugan no Shana, Guilty Crown, Toradora!, Fairy Tail, AnoHana and Re:Zero. In other words, Sword Art Online has achieved such a level of commercial success, both in Japan and abroad, that it has become a very easy target.
This is especially the case since Sword Art Online’s success helped to popularize not just one trope or character archetype but an entire genre, and to such an extent that people can’t help but draw parallels to later isekai titles. In the same way that the mid to late-90s and early 2000s saw a slew of post-Evangelion shows such as Serial Experiments Lain (1998), Boogiepop Phantom (2000), RahXephon (2002) and Texhnolyze (2003), so have the mid-2010s and later seen a mass of post-SAO anime, including Log Horizon (2013), No Game No Life (2014), Overlord (2015), KonoSuba (2016), Re:Zero (2016) and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (2018), to name only a few.
It may be several years yet until the current isekai craze dies down, and likewise, quite some time until Sword Art Online fades somewhat from the collective anime consciousness -- particularly with a second anime film, Sword Art Online Progressive: Scherzo of a Dark Dusk, slated for a 2022 premiere and a live-action Netflix series still (presumably) in development. Until then, SAO will likely continue to feature on plenty of worst-of lists as the true whipping boy of the anime community.
