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

I have to be straight with you all - I'm just floored by how many people blindly love everything SAO. I absolutely love the Aincrad arc, and Alfheim was pretty enjoyable. S2 was fine, Alicization was pretty good imo. They all have their flaws (and boy are there a lot of them). But this? My God I cannot fathom how anyone is rating this higher than a 5, which is much higher than I'm willing to rate it. ** There are some spoilers in here, so read at your own risk. No major plot spoilers, though! ** Positives of this season: There's finally a real protagonist againinstead of switching back and forth between people no one really cares about (looking at you, Alice and Eugeo). The art is actually really good except for the EXCESSIVE amount of CGI. This series has to have one of the largest budgets of any series (speculation of course), but they have to cut corners on a metric fuck-ton of CGI? Get out. BUT the 'regular' animation is really crisp and quite good. The primary antagonist is truly hateable as well. Unfortunately, that's where the positives end.

Negatives of this season: As previously mentioned, absurd levels of CGI. Also, absolutely random powers by characters that go unexplained. "Oh wow I love Kirito too I need to protect him" [insert OP power here]. So goes the world of SAO: WoU. Callbacks to literally every character from previous seasons. Sachi? You got it. Yuuki? You got it. That shitty guy and the idol from Ordinal Scale? You got it. Kayaba? You got it. Eugeo? Oh yeah. The guy trying to rape/marry Asuna? You betcha. It's super frustrating and obnoxious - it feels like they're trying to pray upon those of us losing interest in the franchise by bringing back the 'glory days' of SAO, but it has the exact opposite effect for me. Let those people die and move on, don't bring everyone back.

There are so many things I want to say about this series in general, about the progression from Alicization to WoU, etc. but I don't want to spend hours typing it all. In the end, what you all need to know, is that this is an absolute clusterfuck of an anime that I wish I had dropped prior to WoU. Even though there are characters I really enjoy and I want to know how the Asuna/Kirito relationship ends up, I cannot continue watching the series; I refuse to subject myself to such punishment. Do so at your own risk, I suppose.