The story is so well paced that I even lost my stop at the bus and skipped some classes to read it (cuz of my bus, but I loved that experience and regret nothing).The Worldbuilding of Aincrad makes you really interested in the lore of that world, we have so much conflicts in the NPCs that it even represents the players, I can't say much more about the worldbuilding besides the fact that each floor is a whole new experience, you need to read to understand, but it will be fun, mainly and especially with the Quests being so well-made and interesting.The author makes an interesting theorycrafting with those RPG mechanics, I'm sure that he loses a good time thinking about on how to use it, cuz every single mechanic that was introduced was also used, most of them I would dream to have on an actual RPG/MMO.

The RPG mechanics, if you are a fan of RPGs, you will love this work, every novel that I read that tries to talk about those mechanics make it so boring (And most of the time they don't even remember about those mechanics later in the work).

The development of the characters, it seems like every characters (important to the arc) develops a little, even Kibaou (Yeah, that 'annoying' guy with the spiky hair), the Asuna from the first volume is completely different from the Asuna we have now, she went throught 2 phases of personality.The care for the details, the story even has a tone of mystery (Mostly on volume 4 and 5), basically every detail introduced in the story will be used, ESPECIALLY in the quests, this fifth volume was the pinnacle of that.The balance between the ladies and the guys is really thigher, basically for each woman introduced, there's also a lad with equal importance in the story being introduced as well, this makes the story feel really more natural, unlike the main-series, where we have like 5 girls per guy.This is the Aincrad-only novel, if you liked the first arc of SAO just a little bit, then I would 100% recommend you this novel.įirst of all, yeah, I know, it's fricking SAO, except that this one removed every bad element of the main-series (I even dropped the main-series at this point), I'm gonna give you a list of things that are different and upgrades:

Sao progressive volume 7