Sword Art Online: Alicization - War of Underworld: Part II - Reviews

The final season of the Alicization arc is the worst anime or show i have ever seen. The whole arc was pretty pointless and unnecessary and just felt like a drag for the story. Sword art online should have ended at season 1 because it had the perfect ending anyone could have hoped for. This season has so many problems of being an absolute drag for the story,shit character writing with no development,very bad plot twists, unnecessary harem when kirito is already in a relationship with asuna i really don't see the point,so many unused good characters,bland ass protagonist with heavy plot armour (hot voice though), reusing the old villians without them having a origin story or reason and even the new villians had very bad writing, forcing love between two side characters, shit ending and cringy ass moments. there are so many other things i wanna write but i will stop here because that would take me alot of time. I would have given it 0 score but the site isn't letting me. This anime is the definition of wasting god like animations. The only reason i watched this far was because of kirirto's voice actor and animations but i have decided that I won't be watching this shit any further and i am dropping this here and won't be watching the two new movies and people who actually liked this garbage are definitely biased af or just haven't read or watched good shows or books.

This anime is just so fucking frustrating to watch, the fight scenes and the animation are pretty good which is the only thing that kept me from dropping, but beyond that this anime is garbage. Generic-ass mindless/psychopath villains left and right, one dimensional characters that can't think for themselves, and soooo many fucking plot-holes throughout the story driving the main plot (Kirito can randomly fly after waking up with ZERO explanation? Wtf is that?); it's ridiculous. If you want to watch for the half-decent fight scenes check it out, if you're looking for something with a solid cohesive plot I HIGHLY recommend you watch something else.

SAO A-WoU has a very well developed plot line and good character depth as it builds on the continuing series that started with Sword Art Online. Alice is an interesting character and she is the focus of this part of the story. The arc taking place in 2026 in the real world is perhaps the most intriguing even though its in fantasy VR worlds were most of SAO takes place. The fight for control over AI will surely be central to the next installment. There is some preach and slant to the narrative and its not always between the lines but over all Alicization is a good action drama. The world building  is detailed and the relationships between characters feel genuine and not contrived. The SAO universe , tropes aside, is a better than average franchise because of the aforementioned attributes; its fleshed out well. If a viewer is looking for fights, fantasy, flashing colors and fan service, they will find that here in varying degrees. If the viewer is looking for a hero saga they will find that. If a scifi action show is your thing, thats here too.  The loyalty and romance between Asuna and Kirito remains part of the plot but is in the background for much of Alicization as Kirito has a separate life while trapped in a VR world. After watching Alicization Underworld a second time, the quality of this series became more apparent. The core story outweighs any agegroup/demographic intended target audience with its flash bang and standard tropes because its a well told saga with all the classic elements of a good story. Alicization and the Gun Gale cour in season two, (not the stand alone alternate series), are SAO at its best. 

Sword Art Online: Alicization - War of Underworld 2nd Season

Well, the first part of this war was already a disappointment, but to bring this to a new level is something you didn't see coming.
Not sure how many times I joked about what we watched and what happened this season. If anyone has experience with Kingdom Hearts Writing and the Youtube Channel "Just a Pancake", that person will know what I'm getting at. This season is a pure definition of "Random Bullshit Go" "That's not even my Final Final Form" and "Okay I believe you" - these 3 memes represent the entire plot of this season. And having Simito fight the Anti-Miller at the end made me completely cry. How and why did one almost end in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann? What's with the ending of Alice? Why, why, why?

The ending of this war had the potential to deliver one of the BEST dramatic scenes there could be, but it was ruined and spat on while it was still on the floor. God's sake such potential and then just "Nah Timeskip".

Well, this season follows directly from the previous one and the war enters its final round. The season starts with the best and most epic battle of the whole season so far. Bercoulli not only had one of the most interesting skills seen in Shounen but also a good execution of it and a massively dynamic fight. Honestly, I was shocked at what I saw, every single moment of this fight was breathtaking. Not only visually, but also in terms of pure dynamics.
Unfortunately, this was the only standout performance of the entire season.
Right after this spectacle, the plot continues to revolve around some poorly written war that makes no sense whatsoever and feels more like the never wanted Digimon season where everyone goes to the Digiworld to fight a war. To make matters worse, the villains are endlessly overpowered, always having a new buff that makes them even stronger. Each character has a boss rush moment to show how cool they are, only for the boss to show that they are not yet defeated and get stronger again. And this drags on until Kirito-Kami-kun wakes up and... the cycle continues.

In the end, there is a final fight between Simon and the Anti Spiral and yes. I honestly don't even know what else to say about it.

Conclusion 3

I'm anything but a fan of this series, but Sword Art Online still entertained me well enough. We used to sit and watch 2-3 episodes every night while we had dinner. It was alright, nothing great, just an average show to enjoy. But with this season it became one of the best comedies out there. It's a shame really, but making fun of it also had a certain charm.

[Enjoyment 3]

At this point I only have myself to blame when it comes to watching this awful excuse for entertainment. 

Story - 1/10

Being that this is just a pick up from the last “season” things haven’t changed in the least. We’re back with more unwinnable situations for our heroes, that are resolved by someone new coming in and snapping their fingers. This goes on for episode after episodes, with the same scenario playing out in the same way. One of the worst versions of this is when all seems lost for one character, but from his coma Kirito still saves them, thanks to an accessory he apparently gifted them, without any of us ever knowing it. These episodes make up about seventy five percent of this season, with just a few little extras added in here.

Most of those extras revolve around the members of RATH attempting to revive Kirito so that he can save everyone in the Underworld, or later working to remove Kirito and Asuna from the system so that they don’t die for real. To do this the computer engineers must crawl around ducts, evade capture, and as you would expect, defeat high skilled special forces soldiers, because as we know a bunch of nerds are clearly better at such things than these trained killers.

Once Kirito is awakened from his catatonic state, though not after yet another episode dedicated to him whining about the events in S.A.O., along with a strong dose of self glorification where he talks about how much girls want him, he does the normal Kirito things of easily defeating bosses, completely overriding any game commands and specs, and making any decent drama in the series, turn to junk.  

They could have actually saved the show by making Kirito fallible, where his final act wasn’t just that of a mentally unstable person who wants to hide in a computer game, instead of actually being with people who love and care for him, but one where he risked himself to save the woman he loves. Instead Kirito asks all the members of Earth, err the Meta verse?, to lend him their power so he can let off one more Spirit Bomb to defeat Kid Buu, oh wait that’s another series, but then again it isn’t, as it’s exactly what we saw here. He’s then free to leave and return to a life of normalcy, but he instead voluntarily chooses to stay in the game, where he may die, because he’s a sick and unstable person who wants to just be a video game character, and his equally off kilter girlfriend decides to stay with him. 

When we finally return to the real world the show decides to just completely go off the deep end. Now that RATH is required to make Alice public, as a way to preempt the U.S. military from trying to again grab her, they hold a press conference to unveil the technology. During the event they (the writers) have Alice just come right out and say that her creators are gods, and she is no different than a human, despite having to be charged in a wall socket. Not to be outdone, the new head of RATH states that these robots will soon be just like humans, including marrying with humans. So there we have the entire premise for the Alicization arc, that the writers for this show want to mainstream their sex robot fetish.  

For about three minutes there was a very interesting scene where a RATH engineer reveals that they were able to create AI from the people who entered the game and left, therefore having a human and AI version of the same person. The big problem is that you’d expect that storyline to play out in the final episode, but instead all we get is a thirty minute promo for “Sword Art Online: War of the Under Outer Space Mutant Battle of Alien Supremacy” fifteen arc story they’re going to use to dupe fans out of more money.  

Animation - 5/10

Not much has changed from before, there are some fights, lots of flashes to cover up their less than detailed animation, and for the first time a whole bunch of fan service and horrible rape fantasies of the writers, to further show why this series has fallen so far down the toilet.

Sound - 4/10

I gave the last installment of the show a low sound score because they seemed to completely forget they had Yuki Kajiura on staff to write music. Well this time around they made sure to stick some of her songs in there, with the only downside being it sounded like the same two over and over.   

As it seems is always the case with the show, the theme songs are just bad. Both sound like they belong in a romance/slice of life show, which I guess may make some sense, because it always felt like the writers here didn’t want to make the show they were paid to deliver.

Characters - 2/10

At this point it’s hard to even refer to any of the blobs on screen as characters, as they’ve just morphed in to the worse types of “scream, then power up” anime trash out there.  

You’d think Kirito couldn’t get much worse, since for a vast majority of the season he’s nothing but a comatose NPC stroking a few swords, but they made sure to make his few episodes count when it comes to reminding us why he’s just an awful character.  

His episodes mainly consisted of a rehash of a previous scene, where he sits and cries about how he stood back and did nothing while his S.A.O. team was killed (they love to milk this plot in lieu of writing real emotion or drama) as well as having this conceited turd blabber on about how he’ll come out of the coma, because he knows how all these girls want to hold him (not even exaggerating here, that’s his actual quote.)

The worst part of Kirito is that his self absorbed and delusional desire to be the greatest video game character leads him to completely abandon his friends and family, in order to continue playing make believe in a game where he gets to act like a god amongst commoners. 

Once again they fake us out by having Asuna seem like she might be the one saving the day for once, but instead she’s literally carried to freedom by our awful main character. Not to be out done in the “I’m an idiot and I’m risking my life for a computer code” category, she also decides that friends and family aren’t really worth it, and she’ll risk staying in the game with her selfish boyfriend.  

As usual everyone else is relegated to almost background performers, as they are just there to show up for a single fight, or to talk about how amazing Kirito is. 

For many actors, the thought of playing a bad guy is often much more intriguing than playing a hero, as normally the villain is much more complex and entertaining. Well the writers for S.A.O. decided they wouldn’t just blindly follow that trend, and instead took the extraordinary step of making their villains cliche, annoying, and just as bad as their heroes. 

We already know that the ethnocentric writers had based the conflict of this series around the fact they are still sore about Japan being possibly the biggest ever recipient of the “F around and find out” award, by making the antagonist “evil Americans.” But when they dug deeper in to the characters, they just made them boring psychopaths. 

One is obsessed with killing because he believes he can actually eat souls, and what better way to do that than by killing these AI creatures and eating their artificial souls. The other has the mother of all daddy issues (pun intended) and decides he wants to take it out on all Japanese people, since his father was of Japanese decent, and abandoned, then tricked, him.  The thing is, in hindsight, both of these people are actually more realistic and level headed than our other characters, because they understand that taking out their psychotic desires in a game would actually leave no real victims (though they try to back date the story by saying one joined S.A.O. in order to use the game to kill, but that he logged in after finding out about what was going on in the game, despite them previously stating that the game was locked once it started.) By no means is either man a good person, but they can be forgiven if they succeeded in ridding us of Kirito.

As for the thousands of unnamed characters, it’s funny how they pose the American, Chinese, and Korean players (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence these are the three groups Japan has instigated wars and committed war crimes against) as evil, all because they joined a video game where they do what you would do in a video game. But the heroes are the Japanese researchers who are essentially playing god, as they believe they can create life from nothing, and manipulate it to their will. It’s a very strained way of trying to convince yourself that your (the writers) sick desires are actually normal and just.

One of the strangest character turns, which just shows either the writers didn’t know what they were doing, or completely ignored what they already created as a way to again attack those who don’t think you should be fondling your rice cooker, occurred off screen. As suddenly the evil administrator, who manipulated these AI and erased their memory so they would serve her will, is talked about as if she was a great person and someone who’s vision should be upheld by Kirito and Alice.

Sword Art Online was always best when it worked on building other characters. They had such a good opportunity here, since Kirito was absent for much of the arc, but instead they just turned Alice in to a duplicate, ignored any other decent character, and then bought Kirito back with double the smug superiority. 

Overall - 1/10

For a long time it wasn’t the easiest thing to be a fan of anime, as most people only knew the strange hentai world. Fans would converse in hushed whispers, and you’d take more care to hide yourself buying a DVD than the typical pantless weirdo going in to an adult video store. While things have certainly changed, and anime has become much more mainstream, this last iteration of the Sword Art franchise almost takes the genre back decades, as it is everything people thought about anime, that us fans tried to show them wasn’t true. 

I never thought Sword Art Online was an all time great series, it did have it’s moments where it was very entertaining, and made you want to come back for more, mostly when it stuck to the video game format. But increasingly with this arc, and the last, I couldn’t even stand to watch a full episode, often quitting in the middle to watch something else. The show lost any real sense of what it was, going from a series about being trapped in a game, to one where they just substituted the game world for the real world so that our terrible MC can be a hero. 

There just wasn’t any reason for most of this season, or even the last, as it didn’t add anything to the show. The first part of the Alicization arc wasn’t the best, but they at least had a story and a complete beginning, middle, and end. This time they were just all over the place, and had just a few pages of plot, though mostly cliche, and just filled the time with 

There have been series that are, as a whole, worse than this arc of S.A.O., but it’s hard to really think of them. Shows can get away with not being great if they decide they’re in it just to make a a goofy show that you turn off your brain and enjoy. Likewise you can be a little full of yourself when writing if you put out a masterpiece. But these last few seasons managed to perfectly meld stuck up narcissism, delusions of grander, and just a lack of any and all talent and imagination. This season also doubled down on trying to position normal people as weird and out of touch, because they don’t want to French kiss their air fryer. The series became a chore that I continually regretted starting, but knew I had to finish just because I don’t abandon series. The creators should have ended things before ever getting in the the War of the Underworld arc, or just blended it in to the original Alicization arc, and it wouldn’t have been that bad, but as a stand alone two parter, it is as close to awful as anime gets.  

Positive Reasons for Score:

 * I’ve

 * Got

 * Nothing

Negative Reasons for Score:

 * The creator’s really went off the deep end by declaring that the people making AI were gods, and then digging even deeper in to the idea that they want these AI for the purpose of being more realistic sex bots.  

 * A vast majority of the series is still just worthless battles where someone instantly wins. 

 * Deciding to add a couple of rape fantasies cemented the fact that the writers of this show are the worst kind of narcissistic anime perverts out there. 

Ways to make the show better:

 * Stick to story over pointless, repetitive, hack and slash battles.

 * Don’t end the show with a long commercial for your next terrible season.

 * Don’t be preachy and smug about telling your fans they’re weird and out of touch, because they aren’t attracted to power tools.