Sword Art Online: Every Arc from the Anime, Ranked

Sword Art Online is a pretty stellar anime. I recently watched the entirety of its three seasons and was amazed at how it seemed to only get better as it went. But what part of the anime is its peak?

Below, I’ll be ranking every single arc in the anime from good to great. As a quick note, the Sword Art Online movies aren’t included in this particular ranking as I really wanted to focus just on the arcs in the anime.

Additionally, there are some light spoilers below but overall I do my best to leave any big spoilers out.

#7 Calibur

Starting this list off is the Calibur arc that takes place in-between the solid Phantom Bullet arc and the fantastic Mother’s Rosario. Although sandwiched inbetween two solid stories, Calibur is just sort of okay. The nice thing about this arc is that it sees the old crew reunited again for a mission together. As a big fan of Norse Mythology, I especially appreciated the allusions to it in this show. Norse influences are felt throughout the Alfheim online world as the name itself is derived from those origins. However, in Calibur we get much deeper into Norse lore as well as some influences from King Arthur with the Sword of Excalibur.

However, apart from all that this arc feels like a filler, with nothing much of consequence happening that bears weight on the broader plot.

#6 Fairy Dance

SAO’s opening arc focused on Aincrad and the death game was such a powerful arc that having to transition immediately from that into Fairy Dance makes it feel especially weak in comparison. Indeed, the highlight of this arc is the character development of Kirito’s little sister (whose in-game alias is Leafa). Leafa is an underrated character, generally speaking, who really comes into her own in later seasons. In this season, however, she’s still struggling with her feelings for her brother, especially given the fact he only recently returned to the normal world after being trapped in Sword Art Online for years.

Apart from that, the other highlight of the season is Kirito vs Suguo, the creepy game world mastermind who is hell bent on taking Asuna for himself both in-game and in real life. While their standoff in-game is intense, their facedown in real life is one of the most intense moments in the entire show.

It’s nice seeing Kirito fight for Asuna for a change with another dude, instead of always having the females fighting over him.

#5 Phantom Bullet

Generally speaking, guns aren’t really my thing and I much prefer the sword and fantasy motif we get in most of SAO over a first-person-shooter vibe in season 2. That being said, Phantom Bullet and the Gun Gale Online world made for a surprisingly strong season, acting as a murder mystery in a war torn landscape haunted by the specter of a terrifying and mysterious Death Gun.

While there are some notable weaknesses to this season – including Kirito’s odd avatar and the fact he wields a lightsaber – it also acts as the first time we start to see serious character building. Whereas Aincrad relied on situational storytelling to bring out aspects of the characters and flesh them out, in GGO we witness the backstory of Sinon to help explain who she is and where she came from. What’s more, Sinon is far from a static admirer of Kirito: instead we witness her deal with her rather traumatic past, and her admiration for Kirito seems to stem in part from his role in helping her deal with her issues (apart from the fact that she’s obviously turned on by his calm-under-pressure demeanor and relentless power).

It’s not SAO’s finest arc ever, but it’s a decent one that helps bridge the gap between Aincrad and the meat-and-potatoes of what the universe will become.

#4 Aincrad

Aincrad is probably SAO’s most iconic arc, even if greater ones come later. This season’s biggest draw was the dramatic death game Kirito and friends were thrust into – one where the fates of characters in the virtual world would be emulated in the real one. This added an incredible amount of urgency to everything – the kind of urgency the anime attempts to reclaim in later season but never quite manages to achieve as successfully.

Although Aincrad ends up being really just one arc, this masterfully crafted season is really a collection of shorter stories rolled-up into one.

And while many find this season to be SAO’s peak, after watching some of the epic adventures Kirito and fam get into in later arcs, Aincrad feels more like an appetizer than a main course.

Still, it was an epic arc that launched the franchise, and in some ways it was so satisfying that it could have ended right then and there and it still would have been remembered as one of the greater anime of today.

Yet, it isn’t without its flaws. One of its greatest flaw is the time skipping. Just when we find ourselves getting immersed in a specific story or character’s drama, we jump to some later point in time, into a world that is significantly more developed and fleshed out but without our having been part of seeing that happen.

Perhaps the most frustrating part even beyond the time skips, however, is how eager SAO seems to be to defy the expectations it sets for the viewer. For example, we start out thinking it’s going to be a show about characters trying to make their way through all 100 floors of Aincrad but that theme turns out to be something of a subplot to what is actually a situational drama more interested in how different personalities deal with being forced to live in a world with danger around every corner.

Defying the expectations it sets happens several times throughout the season, and despite solid storytelling throughout, the show seems to undermine itself and steal some of its own thunder just when it could have delivered its strongest blow.

Later seasons do a much better job of setting up viewer’s expectations and delivering on the premise promised. For that reason, I’m ranking this season a bit farther down than most would, without denying that at its peak, it is Sword Art Online at its finest.

#3 Project Alicization

Assuming you’ve watched SAO from the start up until this point, you’ll notice a pretty startling difference between the anime’s third season and those that came before. Animation quality goes through the roof, and instead of a collection of relatively short arcs and stories sewn together we get one massive epic that is only building up to an even greater story to come.

The Underworld instantly brings to mind Aincrad in its setting, yet it feels much more real even than Aincrad did. Instead of paying attention to stats and in-game mechanics, you easily forget that Kirito and friends are in a “virtual” world since this one feels so incredibly real.

There’s a lot of philosophy going on in this season: and questions are asked that are very relevant today as how they pertain to the human soul and artificial intelligence. It’s also exciting to see Kirito start from the beginning again, working his way up through battles to gain new skills, and paired with Eugeo who acts as his foil for the rest of the season. Where Kirito is all dead calm and calculation, Eugeo is passion and love. Kirito clearly learns a lot from his friend and the relationship is a huge motivator for the remainder of the season.

Noticeably absent from this season, however, are Kirito’s closest friends – especially Asuna. Don’t worry, however. Asuna is going to make an epic return in the season’s concluding arc and she is still working away in the background towards Kirito’s good.

Project Alicization is a jolt to SAO’s universe, showing how much bigger and better this anime gets overtime, and putting to bed the qualm that it’s only a one-hit-wonder.

#2 War of the Underworld

Season three (which is made up of two parts and two distinct arcs) is SAO at its grandest. As I watched it, it became clear to me that much of what we had seen up until this point in the story was just pretext to a much bigger and more engaging conflict.

War of the Underworld ditches much of the gamer tropes that make up earlier seasons and replaces them with a sweeping epic that coalesces in a massive battle on the scale of something out of Tolkien.

There’s something for everyone in SAO across it’s varied and compelling seasons, and in this one we finally see SAO evolve into something of a battle anime. Here characters we got to know in the first part of the third season flex their muscles against new enemies. The result is some of the best animated fight scenes I’ve seen, ever.

The only weakness in this season is that I felt I wish I had known these characters a little longer, thereby making the potency of their fights even greater.

That being said, War of the Underworld does a fantastic job of tying itself back with Aincrad and the rest of what we’ve seen to date, even bringing characters like Yuuki back to add resolve to Asuna as she becomes the most bad-ass version of herself to date.

It’s also pretty incredible to see how much Kirito’s character has developed. Unlike most Shonen protagonists who stay relatively the same as characters while becoming increasingly strong, Kirito evolves dramatically as a character, going from a depressed and edgy loner in the first season to a guy willing to sacrifice himself for everyone else.

This arc’s greatest weakness is arguably its end. While the ending is not bad, much is left to be desired and themes that could have been explored in depth are only alluded to. For example, without giving away too much about the plot, the show has a fantastic opportunity to dive deeper into Kirito and Asuna’s relationship once again – the way it did in Aincrad during the arc that saw Asuna and Kirito living together as a family. Fans would have loved to see something like this to compliment the battle-focused season and yet this was largely skipped over.

Still, it’s an incredibly compelling season and the one I watched the quickest cause I simply could not get off the edge of my seat.

#1 Mother’s Rosario

A very short arc compared to some of the massive arcs that come in the season after it, Mother’s Rosario is still the most compelling stand alone arc in the anime. Although Sword Art Online has its fair share of impactful storytelling, Mother’s Rosario is peak storytelling, character building, and happens at the right time in the anime – in-between two epics that sprawl many, many episodes.

Instead of being about the fate of the world, Mother’s Rosario is simply about the fate of a single person. It combines some the best elements of SAO into one continuous thread – epic duels, a focus on characters, and the ever-presence interplay between the physical realm and the virtual one – without over-reliance on more familiar anime tropes.

It may not have the biggest, baddest fights, but the storytelling is without a flaw.