Sword Art Online: Alicization War of Underworld Part 2 Review by phirohttps://anilist.co/user/phiro/ To start off I do want to claim that I am writing this review a few hours after I completed the anime which of course may influence my score significantly. I will split this review into 7 parts. 1. Story 2. Characters 3. World Building 4. Animation 5. Art/Visuals 6. Sound 7. Enjoyment 1. Story Ill try to make this as short as possible. The story is still in the middle of the war between the human empire and the dark territory. And the first episode gives us... tentacle rape https://static.hentaigifanime.com/upload/20210106/229/468134/detail.gif What I actually liked about that scene was that the pig guy broke the seal of the red eye. It was kind of refreshing seeing someone from the bad guys break through it. Why the mage is somehow a tentacle monster is not explained but its already normality for me that the plot in sao makes no sense at all. The next scenes and also episodes are just very good animated fighting in which Bercouli dies and somehow flies away with the pontifex as a ghost WTF?. The small side love story between Scheta and the Champion is actually pretty wholesome to watch. Following that is basically just the appearance of every single important character from sao. They somehow all managed to enter the underworld and fight along with Asuna and the others. The next big plot twist appearing is Yanai the guy who tentacle raped Asuna in season 1 being a traitor. I put twist in quotation marks because this was at least to me clear since a few episodes and wasnt really surprising. This twist is actually completely ignored and the guy just dies a few seconds after he revealed being a traitor. By the way did I mention that while all of this stuff is happening Chinese and Korean players are invading the underworld and killing everything and everyone without questioning it? Well this is actually irrelevant because Kirito wakes up at the perfect moment and just kills them all We also get to know the background story of Vassago which basically tells us that he hates Japanese people because his halfbrother was Japanese makes sense.... Now that Kirito is awake he just kills all the bad guys gets encouraged by the ghost of Eugeo at least 3 times I am not joking and kills the antagonist Gabriel. Now he just has to go to the system console and log out. But he wasted too much time playing who got bigger pp with Gabriel and now he is stuck for 200 years in the underworld with Asuna because she wants to stay with Kirito in the underworld. Despite all that Alice made it to the real world and gives an interview She sadly has to go during the middle of the interview because Kirito and Asuna woke up They reunite delete the 200 years old memories and go back to the underworld where they find... STAR WARS Yes you heard right. The underworld invented space shuttles and the integrity knights are now astronauts. 530https://i.ur.com/m8cLFpO.png Thats it for the story. I just scratched the surface of stuff not making sense plot holes and more but I dont want to write too much. Story 2/10 2. Characters Lets talk about the main character first. Kirito is not conscious until the seventh episode which I actually like. After all these season where he is the OP guy saving everyone it is kind of refreshing seeing him broken. Sadly he wakes up after seven episodes and just returns to being the OP guy he was as if nothing ever happened. He saves everyone and his harem grows even further I still dont understand why sao is not tagged with the Harem Genre. All these girls literally say that they like him in Japanese like means love most of the time and anilist still doesnt tag it with Harem. Moving on to Asuna. She gets a bit more screen time than she got in the last seasons but her personality is still nonexistent and sometimes I thought that her vocabulary only contains the word Kirito. I am not going to talk about the other characters because they didnt really change. Except one character who also didnt change but in my opinion is worth mentioning: 530https://i.ur.com/HJ2XjmE.png Higa is one of the only characters who I really liked. His Japanese slang and his laid back style just spread positive vibes and every time he was on screen I was pretty happy. Even in a situation where he was shot by a traitor he acted cool and didnt overreact. Characters 5/10 3. World Building The World Building is a complete mess. Nothing makes sense anymore and old concepts like the Augma dont have a use. The Anime states the year where all of this is happening to be 2026. Imagine our world having artificial souls in around 5 years. If the Author wanted to make the Anime seem realistic which I think was his goal then he completely miscalculated the dates. The Underworld is the worst of all. Everything seems possible there and no one knows what the word limit means. I am not going into detail here because I think it is quite obvious that the World Building is quite messed up btw the korean/chinese players can speak perfect Japanese but the American players have a big accent in Japanese AND English. World Building 1/10 4. Animation The animation is pretty decent. Everything looks fine and I would say the quality is intermediate. The only thing I hated was the 3D ocean turtle. This thing looked like a ps2 in game animation on a 4:3 monitor with 480p. Animation 6/10 5. Art/Visuals This is including enjoyment the most subjective category so no long text here. I liked the art style. It was basic not overdone and good to look at. Art/Visuals 6/10 6. Sound The OST was surprisingly fitting and I enjoyed it a lot. The director or whoever made the music choice had good taste and knew where and when to play specific songs. I especially liked the opening. It had a fitting vibe and it always got me pretty fired up before every episode. The ending was not exceptional good but did the job it was supposed to do. I am actually pretty tired of writing and I dont think anyone will read that far so I am going to stop here. Sound 5/10 7. Enjoyment I define Enjoyment as the state or process of taking pleasure in something. I definitely didnt take pleasure in watching sao but after every episode I wanted to watch more. But also every time something didnt make sense which was approximately every minute I asked myself why I decided to watch this and why the author didnt make the anime more logical. Enjoyment 5/10 Please take this review with a grain of salt and keep in mind that this is my personal and probably biased opinion. If you want to see how I rated the other sao seasons please take a look at my anilist profile. If you scrolled down just to look at the score please at least read the story and world building block. They explain my rating pretty well. Have a good day