What I mean by "Asspull the animation" is basically everything that benefits Kirito comes out of nowhere. He gets killed but suddenly becomes some super ghost demon virtual super fighter thing that defeats antagonist of the SAO world without any explanation(will power doesn't count). Then in the new games he explores like ALO and GGO and retains his strength from SAO due to a 'glitch'. I mean come on, that is some excrementty writing. Also, Asuna, who is supposed to be powerful like Kirito, becomes a damsel in distress. I guess she didn't get the 'glitch' either. Sloppy, inconsistent writing that I think belongs more on fanfiction.net than in an animation studio who could be using their money on a more worthy project. Though I do find it funny is that Accel World got animated first.
Ah, so you meant animation as story-wise instead of visual-wise. I can agree on those. Ghost Kirito I was waiting for an explanation for and felt like they dropped the ball when it didn't come. Though If I was going to guess, it would probably be described that the antagonist of SAO ended up respecting Kirito for his strength, but even then; They probably could have pulled it off better if they say had Kirito die, but through one of his lingering attacks, caused the antagonist to bleed out and the game end before the NerveGear got around to frying Asuna and Kiroto's brain, put together with their usual ritual they did whenever a character died (slow down the action, sad music, ect) to make people think he actually died before wheeling him out in the world-destruction scene.
I personally found the explanation of the 'glitch' which causes Kirito to keep his stats adequate enough (not the best, but if looked at from the right angle it sort of made sense) since ALO was described as a stolen copy of SAO where the world had been changed. Not to mention, if I had to guess I would also assume that ALOs antagonist probably tried to grab Kirito too, but either screwed up, or wasn't able to get to him before he logged out which would have resulted in a partial-half copy, which also explains why most of his items and skills were corrupted. Then he just forgot or never bother resetting them under the assumption that Kirito would have been too much of a chicken to go back into the Virtual World after SAO.
For Asuna though, Her not having her powers makes more sense than Kirito having his. I mean, if you were kidnapping someone in-game like that, of course you would manually go through and ensure that her stats were reset with her log out capability removed. I wouldn't be surprised if he, as the GM even changed her character Class to nothing to be extra sure that she couldn't get out. I'd be lying if I said that I wouldn't have preferred if Asuna kicked the ALO antagonists ass though, but I essentially screamed out in joy when he got cut up in the real world. The good thing for Asuna though is that, from what I've heard, after the GGO arc in Season 2, the arc right after is dedicated to Asuna being a bad-ass in the real-world and in ALO.
I am hoping that Season 2 ends up better story-wise though. Since GGO is suppose to have another Death-is-Final scenario, it would give them a chance to try it over again.
How is Accel world? I haven't heard much about it other than it seemingly takes place 20 years after SAO and one of the Main Characters looks like the child of Asuna and Kirito. I'm planning on downloading it once my bandwidth resets next week. I would stream it like I usually do, though of course Hulu has to be a dick and grab an exclusive license for the Entire gently-carressing North American Market when they only serve one country.