Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-173.77.201.101-20141209004257/@comment-6697950-20141209055229

It has been confirmed that there will be 24 episodes actually, so the last episode will be the week after the next.

Anyway, for the Aincrad arc, aside from the main part of the arc, there were a lot of changes with the side stories, so I do not recommend skipping the first half of volume 8 and Progressive. Especially Progressive, since the anime basically changed 75% or more of it and omitted the rest after the first story.

For Fairy Dance, the book is of course more detailed than the anime, but if you don't care about the details, then you can skip it.

For Phantom Bullet, some content was omitted and this lead to some changes with the secondary characters. For example, the anime portrays Kyouji as an even nuttier person than he was in the novel, the scene where Shino threatened him with the gun model was omitted. The anime also omitted most of the Alicization references and the funny part of Kikuoka's conversations. So, whether you read it or not is up to you.

For Calibur and MR, the anime omitted minor details. But they used the abridged version of the Calibur introduction, so you might want to read the full version in the beginning of volume 4. So, whether you read volume 7 and the second part of volume 8 is your choice. However, the last short story in volume 8 was never adapted and it possibly never will be adapted.