Anime: Sword Art Online: Alicization

Review
When something suffers an "alicization", I think it's safe to assume that bullshit terms have gone too far. Sword Art Online (SAO) have always being a show about a lot of info-dump of no sense whatsoever, throwing words at random to refer from technology to biology for minutes or even entire episodes. It was never a teaching moment though, these terms, as is common to the anime industry, are spouted for the sake of making everything look complex and mature, a superficial feeling that many fans enjoy. The previous entry of SAO, the Ordinal Scale movie, already gave us new terms and corny presentations about augmented reality and villains who wanted to kill teenagers to satisfy their sick pleasures. Alicization comes, unfortunately, to do more of that, and it starts with a massive explosion of made-up words.

It starts by showing us another world, another Kirito, another game. It throws words about a massive church enforcing banal rules that no one can break, special knights, special powers, and so on. If you know Kirito, however, you know he is a guy who enjoys death experiments with virtual reality, so you know this is a new game, but one that is deadlier, more realistic, and more insane than previous ones. In fact, this is like a full-dive of his mind unto a world inhabited by damn intricate artificial intelligence, and this is the place he will be spending most of his time in this new chapter of the series.

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1. Once again it has ideas
   Alicization starts a mess. It makes no sense whatsoever seeing that young Kirito being friendly with a random blond-clone of himself name Eugeo and a blond version of Yui named Alice. It seems for a while you are watching some alternative crappier version of SAO, but after a couple episodes it show us this is yet another game, another deadly experiment into which Kirito willingly dives (at first). Why? Well, because he is Kirito and his only skill is being a cheat inside virtual worlds.
   
   However, after you are slowly (and I mean _slowly_) presented to this new season, you start to see that all those terms, things about a damn SOUL TRANSLATOR, about shady corporations, and about the research team of that shitty villain of the first season, everything hides two ideas that are among the most interesting things to me: playing god in a simulated world inhabited by AI and crafting a true AI by making it evolve through experience.
   
   Yeah, that's awesome
   I mean, I am a fan of the programmer god idea. How can we say we are not just complex AI living in a simulation made by a more evolved civilization? This concept has already been explored in a few medias, with movies such as the Thirteenth Floor and games such as Star Ocean 3. It has even been debated by serious scientists and thinking about it means we, at some point, may be able to play god by crafting our own simulation. Alicization goes one step further and makes use of this simulation with the intent of crafting a real super AI, one capable of defying rules and making human-like decisions. Hell yeah. Sadly though, we must remember who's the guy behind SAO and how he lacks basic understanding of human nature. Oh, and also how SAO really struggles with pace since forever.
   
   It's fucking slow. Fucking slow.
   Pace was the problem with most of SAO's seasons, although the first one was the most severely affected by it with random jumps and entire episodes where people just talked about the same thing without doing shit. I felt as if the author and the team behind it were noticing this problem. The second season only really struggled with that by its mid-season transition and the spin-off was somehow balanced. Yet here we may have perhaps the most damn annoying pace of any anime series I've ever come to fully watch. This is ridiculous, completely ridiculous.
   
   It starts with about three episodes, one of them being nearly an hour long, for things to finally get the starting kick. Nothing happens there besides presenting you to those terms which really don't matter and to three simple characters, one of them being Kirito. It's slow. It later gives you that info about AI and putting shady government officials and agendas, which is highest point of the show by miles. After that, however, it's a fucking disaster.
   
   You know the drill
   Forgetting about the real world events until the very last second? Yeah. That's SAO for you once again. After teasing the AI development and making you think this will be something far more intricate, Alicization goes back to the Underworld (the new game) and there it remains until the very last minute of the show. What happens in these twenty or so episodes is a bunch of nothingness, such as half an hour of Kirito and a girl climbing a wall and talking about things we've seen dozens of times through the show. There is an annoying amount of conversation happening in the middle of deadly combats where the heroes simply forget there is a villain ready to slice their throats just a few meters away. The villains also stop doing whatever they are doing so two heroes can talk to each other for one or FIVE minutes before making himself remembered. Yeah. The wall-climbing episodeS (yeah, plural) is about Kirito and the girl being close to falling to their deaths, yet speaking, being tsundere, and ultimately achieving the MOST IMPORTANT THING OF THE SHOW, which is convincing the girl (I won't spoil specifics).
   
   The final fight also give us about three episodes of people discussing love in the middle of combat. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Oh, there are flying swords fighting too, which may be perhaps the most stupid event of a shounen I've experienced. There is so much useless stuff happening or simply nothing happening at all that it becomes really tough to pay attention, which in the end doesn't really matter because the villain's idea is stupid and Kirito is the same crappy guy we've got to know in previous seasons.
   
   Yes, Kirito
   Once again, Kirito. The guy broke the coding of Sword Art Online back in the first game, became a cheap asshole cheater in the fairy game and Gun Gale Online, and even mastered real acrobatics to play Ordinal Scale. Now he is in a game that is based on... err... willpower. Willpower. It doesn't even try to look like a game anymore. It has menus, it has terms, it has items, and everything else, but now it seems any kind of logic, which is central to programming anything, is forgotten right at the start. It is a game based on reading people's brains, crafting AI by cloning the human mind, and simulating a world where they believe they are alive. Yet, somehow, their powers and skills are all about willpower. You know the consequence of that, right? Yup. Kirito rules once again. At least this time he doesn't need to gather a full harem (he has one back home, remember), and for the first time he starts acting like a good guy towards the girls (although he is lying for the whole time inside the game).
   
   Oh, the rest
   Well, A1-Pictures tries once again to trick us with a stunning first episode following by a declining quality. There is no real issues here though, mainly because action rarely happens and when they do it's almost always about flashing swords. The special effects and CG work, however, are really good this time around, which is at least a positive in this pile of bullshit. The sound department remains largely the same as always, so if you've seen previous seasons there is nothing really different for you.
   
   

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Comments
I really cannot believe it. I thought SAO was walking down a path of redemption with the second season and the spin-off. Hell, the spin-off was actually fun to watch. The Ordinal Scale movie was shitty, surely, but I could manage to do with that because at least it was forced to be better paced and it had some fucking awesome animation. Here, however, there is nothing. Once again, SAO is an utter disaster.

Sincerely, I cannot really say which is the worst between this and the first season. Both presented awesome ideas, such as the death game experiment and the AI-filled simulation, yet these ideas were only actually explored or mentioned for one or two episodes at most. After that both seasons were all about showing how awesome Kirito is and how crappy is the major objective of the game and the reasoning of villains. Both seasons also really destroy the concept of logic, which is basically the essence of programming games in general.

Alicization, however, manage to beat the shit out of the first season when it comes to having a ridiculously slow pace and uneventful scenes. It is the epitome of the text-dump animation, the highest level of nothing happening for entire episodes. At some cliffhangers it manages to get you and make you want the next scene, yet it just takes a few seconds for you to be disappointed. Nothing really happens, and when it finally does it is completely boring.

One and a half episode of two people climbing a wall and talking. Three episodes to present the first important event of the story. Nearly four episodes discussing what is love. Hell, there is even a moment where some major character shows up after a lot of build up and simply gives up living because... no reason. All the emotion is superficial and all deaths are cliche to extremes. Perhaps the only part were it really did at least something was showing snob nobles trying to rape commoners, which is fine but... something completely fucking expected-and boring too.

Oh, it also ends up in a major cliffhanger, which may be perhaps the very first thing of real importance happening since the government guys tell us about the simulated world and AI crafting. Yeah, wait for the next season.

Ah, Alicization, the arc where Kawahara Reki finally makes SAO good… not.

A) Over half of the duration is still wasted on people just infodumping.

-There can be 3 episodes in a row where the characters are doing nothing but sitting down and talking before something happens.

-There is a scene where women are being sexually violated and the villains are spending half the episode in infodumping the videogame terminology.

-There is a scene where the heroes are in a hurry to escape from a prison. And yet they stop in the yard and have a five minute dialogue out in the open where everyone can see them.

-There is another scene where Kirito is hanging from a wall, ready to fall to his doom, and instead of trying to climb up to a safe spot, he starts a friendly chat with a girl that is also hanging next to him and is about to fall to her doom.

-There is a part where Eugeo is given the chance to kill the big bad of the arc, but he stops because he’s thinking about his brothers. Brothers they never bothered to show us, so this part has absolutely no emotional gravity. How deep can the themes be when you stand there listening to someone talking about his mommy, and how much can you care when his mommy was background decoration the whole time? All these hours of talking and they didn’t even bother to flesh out the characters we are supposed to care about. Reki Kawahara really improved his writing.

-Whenever Kirito and Eugeo have a chat, usually with one of the two being heavily injured, time literally freezes. They can be talking for ten minutes in the middle of a battle, while the bad guy is standing frozen right next to them. It happened with the goblin leader and the administrator and it was laughably bad.

-And if you think what they are saying has any depth to it, it just amounts to the generic protection syndrome of shonen heroes. Nagging about the human rights of NPCs, fighting the evil authority, and screaming about their nakama. All this talking just to get something with the same depth as Fairy Tail.

B) And if you think the infodumping bullshit is at least making the videogame seem logical, you don’t even get that.

-As long as you wish something in the game, it’s going to happen. Why do they waste all these hours explaining something that eventually is not going to make any sense, since it comes down to wishing? The main characters are constantly breaking the programming just for winning in every fight. The infodumps are pointless.

-Kawahara thinks he is fixing the plot holes of the previous arcs by making it seem like using your imagination to win was always part of the videogame, thus it’s not a plot hole, while telling you at the same time this entire world is supposed to be a realistic military simulation for training soldiers. If you go to fight in a battle where you think all it takes is to wish for the enemy to be defeated, you are going to die. Because there’s nothing realistic when your army goes to battle and wishes the enemy to be defeated, exactly as he was trained to do in the simulation. The very premise of the arc makes no sense, and Kawahara has the nerve to say it’s not a plot hole anymore.

-Injuries mean nothing in this setting, since they can heal someone even from the brink of death by transferring their hit points to him. Kirito in specific, can do that even when he is injured himself, and still acts completely fine the whole time. Eugeo at one point, has his eye blowing up, and he just gets a new one in the next scene, with no permanent scars or anything of the sort.

-Death has no gravity. Why should anyone care about Eugeo or anyone else dying? He’s just a program in a videogame. Kirito can murder everyone in the setting and nobody will be actually dead. This is all fake feels.

-Kirito and Eugeo can’t lift a sword, but after a battle with bottom rank monsters, now they can and they cut down a tree with a few strikes, despite saying it would normally take centuries to do so. It’s like they jumped from level 1 to level 90 by beating a couple of goblins.

-Kirito and Eugeo are in chains. They want to break the chains with something that is a hard as them. How do they manage to do that? By banging one chain with another chain until they break. Holy shit, this supposed realistic simulation allows you to break anything, by hitting it with itself. Why do they even have prisons if anyone can escape that way?

-The final battle is a non-stop line of power ups that happen just because the characters wanted it. Kirito gains his Sword Art Online uniform because he wanted it. Eugeo turns into a sword because he wanted it. The prime minister fuses with the administrator because he wanted it. They can say anything and it can happen with make belief alone.

C) Not even character motivations make any sense. Everyone behaves completely nonsensical for the sake of the plot moving in any way the author feels like it, and not because it makes sense.

-Why is Kirito helping Eugeo to cut down the tree for all those days? He has no reason to do that. Eugeo doesn’t know of a way to help him escape the videogame, they don’t have any means to cut down the tree any faster, and Kirito can always leave and go to the city whenever he feels like it. This part makes no sense. At least until you realize the plot was written backwards because Kawahara Reki is completely incompetent when it comes to writing.

-Selka enters the same cave for no reason. She was told Alice was captured inside, so what was she trying to achieve by going there? Alice is no longer there, and she has no means to defend herself.

-The spirit of Alice tells Kirito to come find her in the city. Why does she appear during the Goblin battle of all times? And why does she speak to Kirito, someone she doesn’t know of, and not to Eugeo who knows her very well and would give him the motivation to go to the city? Oh, that’s right, it’s because Eugeo is not the protagonist. Kirito is the one who beats the monster, saves the girl, and get to talk to plot devices that unlock the next mission, even if this is this has nothing to do with his own story. He just hijacks the plot of others and steals their glory. See guys? Kawahara Reki finally became a good writer.

-And then the two of them decide to go to the city. Which again doesn’t make any sense, since Eugeo has no motivation to do that. He doesn’t know Alice is alive. The spirit appeared only to Kirito, only he knows it.

-Then Kirito wastes years in training as a swordsman. How does that bring him any closer to getting out of the game or finding Alice? It’s like there is no urgency at all. Then he breaks the law and she instantly comes to see them. So why didn’t he simply break the law since day one and be done with it? Because Kawahara Reki is such a genius writer.

-Then Alice and Eugeo get mind controlled so we can have some sort of internal conflict in the plot. Other shows do the mistake of trying to have legit reasons for why childhood friends turn against each other. Kawahara Reki is such a genius writer, he does not fall for that nonsense. He just takes away peoples’ memories and rewrites them however he feels like it so there can be conflict. But don’t worry, a nakama monologue is enough to break the mind control, since it’s that serious and well thought out.

-Then the evil administrator wants to go to the real world. How will she do that? It’s never explained, it’s just there as a weak attempt to make her seem threatening instead of a simple computer program that will go offline if you pull the plug.

D) Women are still completely useless damsels in distress.

-Asuna is completely incapable to protect herself in the first episode (despite constantly telling you she is strong and dynamic) and Kirito saves her once again.

-Alice does nothing but cooking in the first episode, falls down in the most convenient moment, and needs rescuing from the boys who do all the work and fighting.

-Selka enters the same cave so she could get captured idiotically and the boys would have to rescue her.

-The female swordsmen are just there to be sexually assaulted by one-dimensional evil rapists, so the leads can jump in to save them and treat them as trophies thereafter. After they are rescued, they do nothing but cook for the MEN and being all frustrated when the MEN have to leave. Kawahara Reki really improved his writing since the first arc, when Asuna was doing the exact same thing for Kirito all the time. They are basically waifus with only 20 minutes of screen time, so good luck giving a shit about them. Also, most of said screen time was spent on them getting sexually assaulted than being fleshed out. Also, they are programs, they are not real.

-Kayaba’s lover is not sent to prison, although she helped him in killing thousands of people for no reason. As punishment for her crimes against humanity she becomes the head of the simulation project, and everyone’s fine with it. Because that’s how Kawahara Reki’s logic works. You sexually assault one woman? You are the worst piece of shit on the planet. You kill thousands of people for no reason because you were in love? You are a hero!

-The only non-passive female character is the big bad, and only in the sense she is not molested and saved by Kirito. No, she’s far more respectable than a piece of meat that exists just to be f*cked. Which is why she’s whoring herself to a guy she just met, therefore being a piece of meat that exists just to be f*cked. And then two years worth of semen galloped endlessly into the main villain. SAO finally went hentai… I mean got good. Extra laughs when they try to make it seem like love is not something you get as a reward. That’s rich, mentioned in a show where Kirito adds every girl he meets into his harem as a reward for helping them.

E) Also, despite everyone saying SAO finally became good, because it’s not time skipping in every episode, and thus the plot is not going to feel disjoined, or the characters won’t be acting differently in every scene, the plot is still doing exactly that. Entire years are skipped at points. Therefore every time you see someone changing after a dozen time skips where he did things we never saw, is still character rewrite caused by lazy writing.

F) The villains are still one dimensional evil rapists, as before. One is the Laughing Coffin member, the others are cocky nobles.

G) Kirito can still overpower everyone, without any logical reason. The Laughing Coffin member, the goblin leader, the elite swordsman, the integrity knights, the administrator. Many praise Kawahara for finally making it hard for Kirito to defeat an opponent and even gets injured in the process, but it’s just fake suspense, since Kirito still jumps out of nowhere to rescue someone at the last moment, still beats every enemy regardless of power, and still saves all the girls, who are still nothing more than damsels in distress.

H) The fights are still crap. Despite the sakuga animation, the choreography makes no sense or is unimpressive.

-When fighting the goblins, all of them besides the boss disappear from the screen when Kirito and Eugeo fight him. Also, the boss stands still in the middle of the battle for several minutes, which Kirito talks to the injured Eugeo.

-When dueling the elite swordsman, there are a lot of stuff showing inside their minds as motivation, but the actual fight is just them pushing each others’ swords for several minutes.

-The final battle with the administrator is just people getting power ups out of nowhere because they wanted it. No strategy or planning, or something that is actually good.

Therefore SAO is still shit and nothing more than low effort pandering for gamers.

I greatly enjoyed season 1 of Sword Art Online after many years of ignoring it, because I thought it was some stupid fad. What made SAO season 1 one of the most enjoyable animes I've watched was the epic romance that it became. One which transcended the virtual world to the "real world". I gave up on season 2 after a few episodes and only picked it up years later, and tolerated it because it had some touching stories and character interactions, despite the overly played gun theme.

From all this I had high hopes for this season. While I feel the animation was top notch, sound was well done, and background music adequate, the story was severely lacking. After every episode I felt let down. Like "What? Is that it?" The pacing was extremely slow and the characters lacked depth. I found myself ultimately not really caring about Eugeo or Alice. It just seemed like too much of a fake virtual world, that never redeemed itself like the first SAO. Asuna, Kirito's true love, is a completely disregarded second rate character who has no significant role in this season. At the end of all this, I just felt cheated. Like what was the purpose of all this conflict and suffering? So few characters and most of them not worth mentioning. Maybe if this had been packed into a single season it would have felt less like a waste of time. Every episode seemed like some cliff hanger without any real substance.

I'm finding it difficult to even write a review of any respectable length. Guess my expectations were higher than what this season delivered. I'm definitely not expecting much from the next season. Like what? 24 more episodes? Is Asuna going to play any significant role? If not, I can't see this going anywhere significant. Thank you for the excellent first season. 2nd season offered something watchable. Beautiful animation and visuals with Alicization, but ultimately the lack of depth of the character and story really killed it for me. Was this just some sort of profit motivated scheme? Not expecting much from the next season. Re-watchability = zero. Hard for me to say, since I'm certain a lot of effort went into creating this, and the animation was really quite beautiful at times, but the whole thing ended up feeling very flat and two dimensional.