SAO first season was great until they started doing huge time skips each episode...
Not to get too far off track from OP but SAO’s first second and third seasons were some of the worst garbage ever written just being completely honest; and there are tons of critical reviews that really go deep in depth on it too. Epic plot-holes, time jumps, total lack of character development, worst bad-guy motives ever... etc etc.
I *think* it got so bad that Reki Kawahara was possibly FORCED to change up the righting style so as to be much more... “complete” with SAO Alicization? Because there are almost no loose ends in this story arc and it’s doing great. It’s such a drastic change and improvement is why I think so, never did any reading on what happened there.
But yeah, SAOs story were pretty bad I’m afraid :( I like it, but that story is rough lol