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.

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 shows 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.

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.