English Dub Review: Sword Art Online – War of Underworld “Raids”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Alice flies towards Rulid Village, having to confess her knighthood in order to use her authority to get people to flee (probably should have done that when she first showed up if she wanted to stay there so bad but whatever). She and Amayori then get to work driving off the Dark Territory threat. The next day, the village begins to recover, so Alice and Kirito make their way back to the capitol.

In the real world, the Ocean Turtle is still under siege by the intruders. Higa taps into the backup power to keep things running, though Kikuoka is still on thin ice with Asuna, and Kirito is still stuck due to the power overloads from before. They’ve only found out that he went into the Underworld with his own memories, but now the recent damage has caused his ego to “deactivate”, meaning is mentally out to lunch for the time being. What’s worse is that the enemy has most of control over the facility, but clearly want something on it, otherwise they would have just blown the place up. They must know about the project and be after Alice’s AI, which is now shut off from both them and Kikuoka. That is, unless they enter the Underworld and take her that way, which looks to be their plan.

OUR TAKE
Looks like we’ll be going back and forth between the Underworld and real world much more often than last time if this episode is any indication. Now that shit has hit the fan over at the Ocean Turtle and we might be getting more guests arriving, it makes sense that we’ll be checking in on them more. We only ever got a quick look at the troops barreling into the base at the end of the first half of the season, but now we’re getting some faces and hopefully names. They don’t seem to be especially interesting character designs, being more or less variations on the “gruff evil mercenary dude” type aside from their techy who looks almost like a Nega-Higa. So that’s what I’ll call him until we get a name.

And on the Underworld side of things, this episode sees Alice finally get her groove back (not that she went that long without it) and head back to her life as a knight in order to stop the incoming attacks by the Dark Territory. This is essentially just a resolution to the stuff introduced in the first episode to establish Alice’s character arc for the remainder of THIS arc, which is primarily that she wants to return to her normal life before she was a knight after she fulfills her duty to protect the world with the power that she has. Returning to said life might be easier if she had her memories from that time, but as longtime viewers are aware, those memories were destroyed by Eugeo in an act of stupidity which I can only assume was caused by his brain being in the process of losing a LOT of blood.

But thankfully the story as it is now looks to be pretty promising going forward. Kirito is still out of commission for the time being and the pacing of events are about to ratchet up quite a bit in both worlds, not to mention we’re also due to get a look at the Dark Territory finally, which up until now has been limited to having inhuman monsters and one faceless knight. Sword Art Online might be many things, but it at least knows how to make its scenes and characters look good, so I very much look forward to seeing how big in scope this conflict might truly get. And next week we’ll be getting some time with our new antagonists.