Sword Art Online has been a plague upon the anime industry for seven years by now. It’s first season was an utter disaster, with terrible pacing issues, dozens of nonsensical asspulls, and bullshit being spat in our faces at every episode. The interesting ideas never played out, the possibilities were never explored, and by the end we had a harem-building show with shameful attempts at maturity and complexity.

The series, however, sought improvement. The second season was better and even finished on high notes, while a casual spin-off managed to be some form of real entertainment. All of that was, however, a fluke. A very lucky break for an author that somehow glorifies himself as a bullshit submachine.

Sword Art Online: Alicization brought back the pacing issues of the first season and increased it ten-fold, offering us a show that had basically nothing beyond two or three useful episodes. This lack of content becomes quite obvious during the recap episode before War of Underworld, where even with only 23 minutes to recap 24 episodes, it feels empty, filled with time wasters, and barely moving forward the plot.

So… what about this time? Does War of Underworld bring back the series on a track of redemption?

Of course not. This is fucking Sword Art Online.

A different major problem

If the previous season was void of meaningful content, at least this new one isn’t. War of Underworld rushes to the conflict happening between the US-backed PMC and the nerdy guys from Rath. We have plenty of combat, the evil guys attempt some plans, the good guys try to protect Alice, and it also offers more about real world events than the entire last season.

However, because it tries to do something, SAO stumbles over its other major problem: the bullshit. Yeah. I mean, for every event there is some ridiculous outcome and asspulled reasoning. If the show started as military guys trying to steal IA technology, it becomes about a villain who sees the souls of his victims, about people only logging in for killing intent, about nonsensical dance of “possible and impossible” events. It is a LOT of crap per minute. A LOT. It makes the first season look like a watergun of piss against this submachine of heavy bullshit.

There is no logic whatsoever

SAO was about videogames and about telling us that virtual life can be as vivid and important as real life. It was supposed to be about online friendships, a new paradigm of meeting people that came with the advent of the internet. This theme, however, was just briefly approached in the first season and finally, here, it is slightly touched again.

The path to get back to this root theme, however, is incredibly surreal.

For example, the villains get hold of the main control room while the heroes retreat to a secondary place. The script, however, automatically tells us that it is impossible to breach the heroes’ room, so the only way for villains to succeed is by entering the game. Yeah. They don’t have accounts and cannot hack any… yet, oh, here there are, admin-level accounts that are surprisingly free to use. Oh, and these accounts happen to be the most important ones from the evil side. How nice of them to leave these free for the villains, right?

The heroes in real life, in fact, are way too stupid. They don’t notice the villains making severe ingame changes, they can’t track a single thing inside the game, and they only decide to log in because fucking Asuna needs to intervene. Hell. The worst of it is that first it is said that only grunt-level characters are available to log in, but magically people can convert accounts from other games just to save Kirito’s ass. Yeah, how nice.

And it is swarmed by lazy moments

There are some nice fights here and there, which is a first in Sword Art Online, but the narrative misses the mark when it attempts to tell a war tale by personal point of view of its participants when we barely knew any of them prior to the war. The result is a bunch of sudden “memory” scenes about knights and people you never even heard about before, trying to evoke some sadness or purpose to them as they kill or get killed.

Instead of strengthening characters, these moments only serve to break momentum. We know how SAO loves a text-dump, and these moments are exactly that: text-dumps taking over half an episode to give some asspulled reasoning to a character we barely knew before that.

This personal approach to warfare needs a lot of investment in characters to work. SAO would fare way better if it told us about the happenings and consequences of its conflict from the point of view of characters we know more about, such as Alice, Kirito, or even Asuna. Well, not happening though.

A new virtual harem

The previous season was surprisingly low on harem vibes. There were plenty of cute girls, but Kirito somehow avoided being heavily seduced by them. Sadly, the opposite did not happen. This season, when the girls that knew Kirito meet with him again, they immediately want to bang.

To further enhance the melodramatic take on Kirito’s super-seductive aura, he is in a coma-like state, begging to be cared for by the cute girls. Yeah. Fuck Kirito, die already and let this show get a bit better with your dead corpse as a fertilizer.

It’s SAO, in resume

Nonsensical bullshit, harem vibes, useless text-dump, pacing issues. That’s SAO for you. The visual style is still decent though, following the sharpness of the previous season and offering some good special effects. There are some nice combats in this season, but the overall choreography still relies a lot on flashing movements and attack calling.

Well, SAO cannot solve a problem without being tempted by two more. War of Underworld finally gets to fill its scenes with some meaningful events, but it heavily relies on bullshit interventions for them to happen. There is no natural progression to the tale, no human feeling to its characters, no logical resolution to problems.

You get to see a show about military attackers raiding a technological facility, then suddenly the villain is talking about watching souls depart the bodies of victims, about Kirito being treated by four ladies who want to bang him, about people who can only be defeated by a “non vengeful blade”, about random players suddenly able to convert accounts from other games where nothing of sorts was even mentioned before. There are ridiculous jumps of narrative to push us to the next set of events. SAO at its best ever, which means it surprises us at every turn at how bad it can get.

Well, of course this season also ends with a cliffhanger. A terrible one at that. I can only expect Kirito to turn up in next season and yell “Waifus! Assemble!” before fighting the big baddy. Yup.