Sword Art Online

Sword Art Online or sordo artu onrain was originally a light novel by a writer named Reki Kawahara, which later got adapted into an anime. When Reki was a 13 year old boy, he was often bullied in school for being a nerd, and he spent a good deal of time in his room. One day, Reki decided he would put his time and effort into writing a novel. In 2012, he asked several producers to adapt his work into an anime, and after getting to know many CEOs of a Japanese anime companies, he accomplished his dream.

The story follows a nerd named Kirito, who lives in Japan in the year 2022. There is a 
massive hype about a Virtual-Reality MMORPG called Sword Art Online being released on the NerveGear; a virtual-reality console that puts the user in a hyper realistic 3D environment.  On release date, Kirito is playing the game, after 4 hours of gameplay he realizes the game is garbage and that he just wasted his money, but as he is about to log off, he sees that there is no option to log off. That is when the Game creator annouces that they can't log off unless they beat every boss in the game, and if you die in game, you die in real life.

Every episode's summary:

1. Kirito is wandering around an area
2. Kirito meets character of the day.
3. Character of the day has a problem and spends 5 minutes explaining what the problem is.
4. Kirito attempts to help, and something from the game escalates the problem.
5. There is a fight.
6. The fight ends in 2 minutes when Kirito makes up a special move and wins.
7. Character of the day either dies right in front of Kirito (cue the sad music and 2 hours of crying) or thanks Kirito. The rest of the episode is devoted to this.
8. Kirito is revealed to have gotten just a little bit closer to completing the game.

The only exception to this is the episode where Kirito and Asuna go on their honeymoon by a lake. After at least 1,000 episodes (of which only 3 have actual plot progression), Kirito predictably defeats the final boss and wakes up.