[Nyx]

Well, I'll start off by saying SAO was meh...
It started off great, but then it started getting worse as the series went on. It got annoying when Kirito's and Asuna's forced relationship came into play and they completely abandoned the whole MMO thing. It started to get boring, especially with Kirito somehow attracting EVERY female side-characters.
Then it got into the second arc... it was really awkward, because they were getting super serious over a game, and Leafa was really annoying. The fairy dude just made me want to flip a table, and the whole ending was mediocre. It's one of those typical happy endings.

I can agree with you on that. I felt it got bad right after they got out of SAO. I hated the fact that Kirito and Asuna got into a relationship, because from that point pretty much all of Kirito being OP stopped and the action just got really dull, such as when they used the little girl AI thing to kill the Grim Reaper... Things like that just pissed me off. The next time we seen him being OP was when he got into the world tree and had to fight the fuckers that were flying around...

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I haven't seen the first season of SAO.

Is this bad?

It isn't bad, just means that you haven't bothered to start watching the Anime!

I'd say go watch it, just don't expect anything great to come out of it, though the action is top notch, it can imho compete with Naruto and maybe even Dragonball...