LogFAQs > #965367038

It was the first isekai that really got a real budget in a long time and it's the perfect storm of things that appeal to the tween-teen demographic that makes up the lion's share of the anime community. Edge and the like are unpopular when you get older, but when talking about children that sort of thing is basically the peak of what could be considered cool. Same thing goes with the content as stuff like "life in a video game" is a popular topic for that age group, look at Reboot for an American example, and that wasn't something that was really all that common to see prior to SAO (heck, the fact that most people compare SAO to .Hack kind of shows just how extremely uncommon it is considering the massive gap in time between the two being a thing).