Top Ten Sword Art Online Arcs

From what I've seen, Aincrad is the most popular arc of the franchise. However, the second or third choice for the best arc is often Mother's Rosario. In my opinion, it is the best arc of Sword Art Online, of all time. It's a short arc, consisting of only seven episodes, and was really just a side story to fill up Season 2 of Sword Art Online. But that doesn't mean it's just "filler." If you miss out on this arc, you've missed out on half of what made SAO a masterpiece. The happy intro song and the tear-jerking outro song define this arc.

It's about a girl named Konno Yuuki who suffers from AIDS and is going to die very soon. Before that happens, she wants to create a happy final memory with her friends by defeating a floor boss on New Aincrad so that their names can be shown on the leaderboard. Despite Yuuki being the strongest swordsman in the franchise, they need someone else, so they challenge random players to see who is worthy of helping them. It turns out to be Asuna Yuuki, one of the main SAO heroines, who is chosen.

This arc starts out very slow, I will agree. The first three episodes are a bit boring. Then, it quickly becomes my favorite arc ever. The emotions and the story are powerful. Don't get me started on the last episode, which is the best and saddest episode I've ever seen.

This arc, unfortunately, contains my least favorite villain, and it is a villain that exists in real life: AIDS. It's technically the villain of the arc because it kills Konno Yuuki, my favorite SAO character. Okay, maybe not a "villain," but you get the point. It's definitely the best SAO arc due to the emotion, plot, and excellent writing of Konno Yuuki.

Oh yes, the classic, the original that started Sword Art Online and the main reason people still watch SAO despite a handful of terrible arcs. If Fairy Dance had come first, the universal opinion of SAO would be different. The premise of this show was originally, "If you die in the game, you die for real." This is the premise that made SAO so interesting in the first place, and all of the SAO arcs that have some kind of actual danger element to them are the ones that are pretty good.

This arc, in particular, is such a classic. It introduced most of the characters we know, such as Kirito, Asuna, Klein, Silica, Lizbeth, and Heathcliff. It's an awesome arc, but one huge flaw is the pacing. In Episodes 1 and 2, we're on Floor 1 of Aincrad. In Episode 3, we're already at Floor 22! And in the next episode, we're at Floor 47 or something like that! Seriously? Just four episodes later, we're almost at the end of the game! WHAT? It's too quick, and we get to barely see anything of Aincrad but a few floors. Then the arc ends anti-climactically at Floor 75 because Kirito finds out that Heathcliff is actually the game's creator, Akihiko Kayaba.

Speaking of which, the villain of the arc is Akihiko Kayaba / Heathcliff, the creator of the game. He's a pretty interesting villain. SAO isn't known for having good villains, but this guy is widely accepted as the least terrible because his motivation is slightly interesting (although he forgot it). He locked up a bunch of people in SAO to see how they'd handle themselves in a game if they knew it meant life and death.

Ordinal Scale is the only SAO arc that's not based on any of the original light novels by Reki Kawahara, although it got adapted into one after the arc's release. This isn't part of any season. Instead, it's a full-length movie taking place between Mother's Rosario and the Alicization season. It's about two hours, or roughly as long as half of the Mother's Rosario Arc. It's incredibly well-written and interesting.

A new engine called the Augma is released, allowing for augmented reality games such as Ordinal Scale, which has bosses from the original SAO game. A dark secret is revealed: the SAO survivors who lose against the bosses suffer from amnesia. It's revealed that the creator of the Augma, Shigemuru Tetsuhiro, is trying to steal memories of SAO survivors to revive his daughter Yuna, who passed away in Sword Art Online. Excellent villain! It sounds weird, but trust me, it's badass and amazing. One of the best arcs we've had for SAO.

This is a love-it-or-hate-it arc. People who are huge fans of Sword Art Online typically have very high opinions of this arc, while some who only watched the Aincrad arc decided it'd be good to hate it because it's set in a world of guns. I'm on the loving side because of a number of reasons. This is among the most interesting and exciting arcs of the franchise.

Some of the top players in the video game Gungale Online have mysteriously been killed in-game when they've received a gunshot by someone who goes by the name Death Gun. The government of Japan asks Kirito to find out the identity of this serial killer. This story is so interesting and awesome! We meet Sinon here, who is perhaps one of the few very developed characters in the entire series. Kirito gets a female avatar, which adds some hilarious moments, and don't forget the fact he uses a lightsaber, for goodness' sake!

The villain, Death Gun, is also my favorite villain in the series. Technically, it's two people. There's Shinkawa Shouichi, an SAO survivor who played for the murder guild Laughing Coffin. He's pretty badass, but overall his character is slightly hollow. His brother, Shinkawa Kyouji, is one of the most developed characters ever in the franchise. He's super creepy and unsettling, but at the same time, you feel bad for him when he explains why he does what he does. Overall, this arc is amazing.

Ah yes, the Fairy Dance arc, AKA the lowest point of SAO. The fact that this came right after Aincrad, one of the best arcs, is just humiliating. Everyone has already mentioned what made this arc so disappointing: Sugou Nobuyuki (pedophile villain), Asuna's devolution, and too much sexualization. There's also the incest romance where Suguha has feelings for her cousin Kirito, although that was handled decently. However, there's another flaw of this arc: the boredom.

Kirito must get to the top of the World Tree in the video game Alfheim Online to save his wife Asuna, who has been kidnapped by Sugou Nobuyuki. Cliché! There's not much sense of danger because if you die in Alfheim Online, you'll just respawn. Unlike Aincrad, where the players had to stay alive or else they'd die, or in Phantom Bullet, where a mysterious Death Gun was killing player after player, this arc is just so uninteresting. I don't hate it (surprisingly), I mean it's still SAO after all, but it is easily my least favorite arc of the whole series.