Another Felix

My 2 cents: great premise, but rather weak execution and missed potential for the Aincrad arc.

The Fairy Dance arc is just not very good and full of preeetty dubious things.

The Phantom Bullet arc is great on its own and my favorite. The Calibur mini-arc is pointless and bad. Mother's Rosario is either great or mediocre depending on what you expected (I'm an easy prey for tear-jerking stuff, so I liked it).

@Alistair This basically sums up how I feel about each of the arcs too. It feels so weird in the first arc when there's so much potential stuff to do and instead it's crammed into 14-15 episodes with large timeskips between each episode and a fair chunk just being relationship stuff.

Exactly. Too few episodes, and mismanaged to the point they have to rely on large time ellipses and a brisk, unsatisfying ending just to cram in somewhat unnecessary things.