Review of Sword Art Online: Alicization - War of Underworld Part 2
The second part of War of Underworld is a clusterfuck of magnificent proportions. Though the main storyline is consistent, the subplots are very chaotic and constantly changing what's happening. The story has lots of twists and turns while maintaining the goal of extracting Alice from the Underworld. Some episodes feel like collections of various deus ex machina while attempting to fit as many different characters into the episode as possible to create a big crossover. The anime also decides to display a blatant disregard for the concept known as death by randomly having characters that died appear both spiritually and physically. Basically every concept thatwas previously established about the Underworld is thrown out of the window in favour of creating as many climactic situations as possible. Despite all of these things the story does keep going and manages to stay interesting all throughout.
The characters, while reasonable overall, feel artificial. In situations where they have no clue what's going on, they magically know what to do and just do what the writer wants them to do to create a cool moment. Part of the villains was initially portrayed as having a motivation but that motivation is ignored and they are portrayed as cartoonishly evil which is suboptimal.
The animation is good/fine. In some scenes there is a very clear difference in the way the characters are animated compared to the background. I don't know whether this is intentional but it is a bit jarring. The sound is still great and the music matches what's going on most of the time only sometimes missing the tone set by another deus ex machina. The Japanese voice acting is good and the English voice acting isn't but luckily there isn't a lot of it.
Overall this season is poorly written and overly reliant on deus ex machina. If you care about the story and consistency in writing, you may not like this season. If you mostly care about action and cool moments, you're likely to enjoy this season.