Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-5105419-20131205130839/@comment-69.193.5.50-20170524190148

Hmm, not gonna lie - the premise of the Aincrad arc is super dark/depressing.

The anime managed to present it in a fairly light-hearted manner and with a heavy focus on the love story of Kirito and Asuna, but there are a lot of off hand remarks and statistics mentioned throughout that, if you really think about it, are incredibly mind numbing.

~4000 people died (half of those in the first month alone) and based on information from episodes 11 and 12, many of them may well have been small children, but most of them were likely underage individuals.

Many went insane, others committed suicide and others still became murders..

All of these details make you care that much more about the major characters.

I think a SAOP anime has a lot of potential and would certainly watch it.