I always felt that jumping ahead to the high floors was really jarring. Kawahara was clearly constrained by the length limit of the Dengeki Game Novel prize and I felt that Aincrad could have been so much more than 90% endgame content.
The side stories mitigated this somewhat, but I think that overall, the portrayal of Kirito's growth in Aincrad was patchy and not satisfactory, and that problem will really show if the anime does decide to air everything chronologically. I actually wouldn't mind if major plot threads (especially anything in the middle levels) from Progressive was used to make 'new' anime content to make the story more cohesive, making the Aincrad arc long enough to take up both cours.
A short divergence on volume ten (I hope you can overlook this Belian)... things get really big and the stakes are shown to be much higher, perhaps even more so than Aincrad. The Alicization arc actually has two concurrent wars that eventually converge - one taking place in the Underworld and one taking place in the real world, which I think will please many fans who were disappointed at the lack of real world plot threads in Aincrad - I myself was very excited to hear the plot summaries.
edited 10th Jul '12 5:08:55 AM by Thrombin
Well, I just saw the first episode of the anime. Holy shit quotient overload. Guess I gotta read it now.
Anyway, this would never ever happen in real life. Such dangerous software would never be released to the public in the first place. But once you get past that...holy shit is this amazing.
...Is the manga loyal? I have trouble with walls of text on a screen. I really prefer paper books.
The chapters are fairly short (so far), so it's actually not so bad.
Although I already feel bad for the monsters.
edited 10th Jul '12 6:50:32 PM by Ruise
Loves feel-good animation a whole lot.The manga is loyal, but still a poor man's substitute. The anime is probably going to eclipse them both, but the best experience is going in and reading the light novel totally blind (well, as close as you can get).
You can try copying the Baka Tsuki texts onto more palatable word documents, which might do the trick.
edited 10th Jul '12 6:41:00 PM by Savoie
@ translation team working on rondo: no, at the moment the translator is too busy rewatching SAO over and over and over again..... the one working on rondo and volume 10 are also different people, even if they collaborate a little here and there.
@ sword art progressive: look here
◊.
For those of you that can't read katakana, it reads, sword art online progressive,then in hiragana/kanji mix, Aria in the Starless Sky First Floor aincrad date bla bla bla(please be able to read the date at least), <<The black swordsman>> and the rapier user <<The Flash>>, the story of how these two(sorry, the other kanjis are beyond my level)
edited 11th Jul '12 4:03:51 AM by Pryun
Wait, that was a rhetoric question? *smacks self* sorry, had no idea, I assumed you were actually asking something and was wondering what you were asking.
Anyway, he is probably working on monochrome concerto...(hopes real hard that he is working on monochrome concerto.)(spoilered to keep anime viewers from getting confused.)

Yes.
There was a surprising author blurb in it too - Kawahara is writing up a new SAO series called Sword Art Online: Progressive, to be released in autumn. It's a basically a retelling of Aincrad with a lot more detail, something which I felt was really missing in volume 1 since it timeskips and glosses over floors all over the place. I wonder if some of the stuff he's already written will be used as 'new' material for the anime?
edited 10th Jul '12 4:35:39 AM by Thrombin