User blog comment:Fedora Lord Para 348/Para's Anime Reviews/@comment-3463132-20160119141740

Just a few points about SAO:

" It's a survival series. Just show Kirito trying to survive in a world where everything is trying to kill him!   "

It is a type survival series but your approach doesn't work because it's not truly the same- there is nothing whatsoever that forces players to actually go out into the world and fight monsters. And the monsters themselves don't go into the villages- they have safe zones. You said it yourself, Kirito is a badass nerd who's good at gaming and gets a ton of girls. This is shonen writing at its finest (sarcasm).

So while they are trying to survive, it's not a horror-survival series like what you'd like to see. It's not the genre- it's an adventure series. The writer just put in a way for people to not spam-die-grind since it's a video game. Log Horizon has a similar thing in that dying will start to remove your memories, to help make you think the combat matters even thought they respawn.

" You can ask  any  MMO player, of any MMO. "

Thanks for asking, and yes, it is entirely possible for Kirito to easily outlevel everyone else even going alone- especially going alone if he can pull it off. World of Warcraft works like the OG party-based combat game, Dungeons and Dragons. Experience per monster doesn't change, meaning if you have a party of 5 the experience is divided 5 ways. If you manage to solo an encounter, you will instead gain all the experience to yourself.

So while it starts off harder, you increase vastly faster than a group would (D&D-wise, WoW places far more emphasis on requiring groups). And as we're told- Kirito has the extra experience, to make the solo journey less hard. Not to mention some uber-item that he doesn't change, ever, which should be a hint how bullshit OP it must be.