I started watching this last night. I thought it was funny how the first episode stressed that people in real life don't look as good as their personas but then around episode 3 and later everyone is your standard anime character level of cute and pretty, almost like the character designers forgot what they setup in episode 1.
Anyways, I'm liking this. The animation is pretty insane in every episode. It's like Fate/Zero without the reliance on mediocre CG and the storylines are pretty fun. Does anyone know how many episodes the series is set to last for?
I'm also curious to know if the whole death aspect is for real and if the amount of time passing is legit. I wonder if there's some Inception like time trickery where it feels like months but it's actually just hours passing in the real world. Taking a realistic approach, which I'll admit is usually the wrong to approach anime, how are these people still alive? Did their parents go out and buy hospital grade IVs and food tubes to pump water and nutrients into their bodies? Are they crapping all over themselves in the real world and having to have their linens changed by their parents multiple times a day? What about that dude that Kiriko met on the first day and all the other single people who lived by themselves? Who is providing this service for them?
All of that makes me think that SAO time doesn't pass at the same speed as it does in real life. If you could cram seemingly months into hours, then I could totally see this just being a launch day event where when the series ends, everyone gets out of the machine only to discover that only like 6 or 7 hours have actually passed and that nobody died, they were just kept asleep in the machine until the event ended.
