Review of Sword Art Online: Alicization - War of Underworld Part 2

This is a review for the entirety of the series. "If there is a God, he has abandonded us". Having watched the entire series, from the beginning to the end, I can responsibly say that this is but one giant stroke of Kirito’s d*ck. Excuse moi for the language but there is no other possible way to express it. “It can’t be that bad”, “It gets better later on”, lies, such lies. SAO IS that bad, and it NEVER gets better. It only gets more pretentious, and somehow even more insulting. I can’t decide whether this series underestimates its audience or overestimates its own ability inoffering an engaging story. The ones of you who might have thought like me: “But it’s MAL’s 3rd most popular series, since the franchise is so big it must be doing something right, I don’t mind trash anime as long as it’s entertaining anyways” …save yourselves. Run and never look back. You don’t have to do this. Even if you have nothing else to watch. You don’t have to make yourself do this.

First of all, Reki Kawahara can’t write to save his life. Reki Kawahara is that one lucky guy every anime fan has ever fantasized of being: Hitting the jackpot with a fanfic that he thought of when he was in elementary – middle school and proceeded writing it in high school, without even being that serious about it. Haven’t we all sat in class, having our mind race away and thinking our ideas are the best ideas ever and fantasizing about getting awards for them, while in reality they are the cringiest middle school shit? Well for Reki Kawahara that became a reality somehow. I don’t know who to blame for this, probably A-1 Pictures. 2012 was a time when the industry’s standards were pretty low, I’ll admit to that, but… how? How did someone look at THIS series and went: “Oh yeah. THIS will be our next big franchise! THIS will influence the industry from now on!” Why? How? Is this the proof we needed that God doesn’t exist?

SAO’s modus operandi is basically this: Take a pretty neat idea, dress it up with nice character designs and fluid animation, and now write everything in the worst possible way you can imagine. I am watching anime for 15 years. I have never stumbled upon something as long and horribly written as this. The characters, with Kirito as the primal offender, are incomprehensible at best and empty at worst. Kirito doesn’t have a personality. No, seriously. There is NOTHING behind those eyes. He puts reverse harem shoujo heroines to shame. I can’t even begin to describe you how much nothing is there, because that would be like trying to prove something that does not exist. Only SAO Abridged managed to give him some personality – think about it. We needed a fanon parody to give our main character personality traits. Asuna is fine and likeable and the only good point of the first series. Problem is, the heroines that follow after her have exactly the same personality as her. And sure enough, by the end of the last series, she is reduced to a damsel in distress and just another addition to Sultan Kirito’s harem, despite the fact that they’re supposed to be a couple. They even supposedly stayed together for 200 years... only for that to be wiped off.

To break it down: SAO begins its first arc with presenting its neat idea and its hook – you die in the virtual game, you die in real life. I can understand how some people got attracted to that, it’s a very interesting premise. …And then it wastes its first 7-8 episodes in episodic vignettes showing girls besides Asuna get a crush on Kirito, because… do you seriously need an explanation? Because it’s Kirito, our Lord Savior, our Main Character, Mr. Blandy McBland himself, King of Self-Inserts and Professional Harem Instructor. “SAO is not harem” save it. Swallow your saliva right back up. Signs of it were there from the first season and by the last I can’t even name the members in two hands. There is an interesting mini arc somewhere in there, with Kirito and Asuna solving a murder case, and that somehow makes things even more frustrating: There could be so much social commentary in the case of a guy killing his wife because she ‘changed’ = gained more confidence in the game, comparing to how she was in real life. And that’s the most irritating thing about SAO: it makes you think it could have things to say, but right when it makes you think that, it slaps you in the face with the worst wish fulfillment stuff possible. During the next 7 episodes, half of them is Kirito and Asuna in a house doing nothing worthwhile, and the other half is about defeating the final Boss, which happens in the most anticlimactic way possible (they never even reach the final level of the game) and then our bad guy responds to the question of why he did all this by: “I don’t know I don’t remember.” F* you, and your mom, and your sister and your job and your broke ass car and that shit you call art. And somehow in the midst of all this, there is an AI loli that we met for only one episode that we’re supposed to think of as Kirito and Asuna’s daughter. “Papa! Mama!” She meows at every turn. No mercy.

If all of this sounds completely disjointed, it’s because it is. The episodes themselves are disjointed: Kirito and Asuna fight deadly monsters. They pause to eat sandwiches Asuna has made, because she has maxed her cooking skill, because of course, because Kirito has taught her that she needs to enjoy life, because of course, and they flirt. Then they go back to do battle stuff. Then allies appear to comment of how awesome Kirito is. Then suddenly something like politics. The tonal whiplash is hitting you worse than Mohammed Ali ever could have.

If you thought this couldn’t get worse: You THOUGHT. The next arc is about Kirito’s little sister. Who is not actually his real sister; she’s his first cousin! Not much difference you’d say? No, no, no: In Japan, first cousins can apparently bang, so no problem your otaku friends will say! It’s CULTURE! So, despite the fact that they have grown up together since babies, and despite the fact that they only recently learned that they are cousins and not siblings, somehow that in Suguha’s mind makes it ok for her to pursue Kirito romantically. And of course, there is another guy that likes her that she rejects for Kirito, again, her brother Kirito. AT THE SAME TIME, Asuna is captured by a perverted guy that threatens to rape her in front of Kirito. Because, what else to complete SAO’s set by some good old fashioned sexual violence straight out from and ‘80s OVA. And Suguha’s arc is so bad, it gets to the point where you say well, you know, at least this villain had clear motives.

Enter the Gun Gale Online arc, where Kawahara remembers that he needs to give Kirito some trauma to give him a bit of a personality. To say that this rings as hollow as possible would be an understatement, because Kirito had exactly zero psychological problems (or a psyche in general) in the first arcs. So he adds stuff that were never seen or mentioned in the first series. Gun Gale is the anime’s second season so the narrative and structural problems of the episodes have been mostly fixed, but the substance remains as bad as ever. Sinon’s character arc is interesting – SAO does it again, interesting ideas, turning them to mush – as she uses the game to face her own trauma, but she’s very quickly reduced to the same beats as Asuna and Suguha: Strong willed woman completely dependent on Kirito, rejecting another guy for him and suffering an attempt on sexual violence at her expense. SAO is copying even itself.

Then we have an arc focusing on Asuna about a girl who is terminally ill and uses the game to escape reality – again, great idea. This part of the story focuses on Asuna’s conflict with her mother and is quite decent at that font, probably because Kirito is missing from most of it. Unfortunately, it quickly melts into heavy and cheesy melodrama about Yuuki’s death and drags on for far too long.

There is a movie in between that’s not really worth mentioning (cool fights, cheesy storyline) before we proceed onto the next arc: Alicization. God give me strength to unpack this one. This is where Kawahara thought that he could seriously analyze the philosophical aspects of man against machine and what a soul really is, full Ghost in the Shell style. Why Lord? What sins do we have to pay for and you punish us like this? Oh. Watching anime for far too long. Understandable.

The franchise needs to go on, the cow needs to be milked, and Kawahara has exactly zero new ideas: IT’S COPY TIME! What piece of western fiction is unbearably overdone in anime? Alice in Wonderland. COPY THAT. What female warrior character design is really cool? Saber from the Fate Series. COPY THAT. What recent popular series begins with three childhood friends under a tree? Attack on Titan. COPY THAT. What issues does Ghost in the Shell tackle? Eeeeerrrr… we never actually understood that, so if you could just spout any mechanical gibberish mumbo-jumbo to justify why things happen in our story as we want them, that would be great, thanks. Oh, Kirito was so successful as a character that we can’t have only one of him? COPY THAT and just make his eyes green and his hair blond: Ta-daaaah, now you have Eugeo! AND Kirito's software copy! Because one of him is not enough! And if all that weren’t enough already… care to make it a tiny bit racist? Like, having bad Americans, Chinese and Koreans attacking the good Japanese?

Are. You. Kidding me. Seriously, no shame? No shame at all?

Many people say that SAO gets better in Alicization. You shut your mouths. Just because a story has slower pacing doesn’t mean that it suddenly became deeper or more meaningful. SAO never believes in the themes it seems to present – anything and everything is just an excuse so that Kirito can swing a big sword or two and save pretty girls. His harem has grown so big I can’t even name all the girls. For some reason, Asuna is perfectly fine with it and not at all jealous. And I guess that’s better from having catfights ‘that’s MY Kirito” style (there was one and it was just as bad as one could think). Even one of the villains constantly screams how much he loves Kirito (that was long overdue now that I think about it). The other villain is a psychopath and a serial killer and that’s as interesting as it gets, but Sinon escapes him because she has kept as an amulet an electrode Kirito had on his left nipple back when he saved her in S2. It would be funny if the story didn’t try to sell it completely seriously.

Either Kawahara can’t write, or Kirito’s entire concept is this series Achilles’ heel, and it collapses because it’s also its central theme. Let’s not even mention the sheer disrespect of being called the Black Swordsman – Kawahara was writing his fanfic and he wanted to use Guts’ nickname from Berserk. Dishonor on you, dishonor on your family, dishonor on your cow. But let’s look past that: The entire series is based on having a character that works as a self-insert and then constantly kiss his ass and lick his d*. Now YOU can defeat powerful foes and have all the girls fawn over you! You don’t have to do anything man, just exist and scream very loudly from time to time! The girls will love you, everyone will praise you, you will escape every pinch and you’ll come out on top every time!

OP characters need very specific qualifications to work, like actual stuff to say and palpable tension with relationships that matter between other characters that don’t have to do with the protagonist, like One Punch Man and Jojo Part 3, which SAO doesn’t have. And when you don’t have them, the entire story becomes pointless to watch because it’s God damn predictable. It’s no surprise that SAO’s most watchable episodes are the ones where Kirito is in a catatonic state. This gives time to others characters to show off cool powers and relationship dynamics. Now ONLY IF they didn’t feel the need to mention his accursed name every five minutes.

I didn’t mention Alice in all of this, probably because I don’t have to: She’s exactly the same as Asuna, Suguha and Sinon: Strong willed female character that is in dire need of saving. Actually, what Alice. She’s Saber. Kawara is pairing Kirito with Saber. Because why not. He sells and he can do whatever he wants. Also he even stole the concept of three waifu Goddesses from Mushoku Tensei. COPY THAT. But I believe that the point where we cleared every possible level was when Kirito remembered Sachi again, a girl who died in the first episodes of S1. You know when was the last time her death actually counted? SAO Abridged. Kawahara copied character beats from SAO Abridged. From the fanon parody. I wish I was making that up.

And that brings us to another point: WHY does he sell like this? Are the novels better written than what we see on screen? If I’m to believe light novel readers, the adaptations are plenty faithful. So it’s not that. If it strikes a chord with 12-year-old boys I don’t know and I can never know because I never were one. “It’s not for you then”, “It’s not the first series that does this”. I know I never was its target audience, but if the story is good, we can all enjoy series that do not include us in their target group – shounen and shoujo series are being enjoyed from both men and women equally. And yes, it’s not the first series that does it, but usually such series have one season and that’s it. They don’t become multi-media franchises and they definitely do not influence the industry like that. Was he just lucky? Is most of it hate watching just out of curiosity, like I did?

I don’t believe the people that say: “New generation anime sucks, old anime series were much better”. I don’t believe in that at all, in fact, I think we have better stuff now and more frequently than what they used to have back then. But a small part of me can’t help but accept that each season is filled with isekai series with game mechanics that are all basically the same thing: Medieval fantasy world, game statistics, bland overpowered protagonist, harem. A waste of time, money and energy. 12-year-old boys will not remain 12 forever – give them another couple of years and they’ll start realizing they are being fed the same thing over and over again. Others will take their place, but how long will this keep up? As much as Magical High School Academies series, I guess.

Even if that’s the case, we have a saying in my country: The higher the monkey climbs up, the more its ass is showing. Right now, Kirito is hanging right from his big ass sword with his pants pulled down, showing his butt in full glory and expecting all of us in the audience to come and kiss it while we sing praises at how amazing he is. And I wish I actually saw him like that because that would have been at least a sign of existing personality from his part.

Kick that hollow casket to oblivion where he belongs and make him take his harem with him. There is no saving it now and enough is enough.