English Dub Review: Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld “Code 871”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Yanai reveals to Higa that he is a former associate of Sugou, the one who kidnapped a bunch of SAO survivors in the Alfheim servers back in the first season, but now Yanai works for the NSA and plans to help them capture Alice. He also blames Kirito for killing Quinella, who Yanai apparently had a crush on. Kikuoka and Rinko quickly piece this together on their end, as well as finding out that another AI has broken free of its limit, and uncovering the Code 871 restriction that Yanai placed before seeing 871 on Yanai’s labcoat and connecting the dots.

In Underworld, Sinon faces Gabriel in his Subtilizer account, while the Japanese players are quickly being overcome by the addition of Chinese and Korean players, not helped by them feeling all the pain in the game as if it were real. Siune, one of Asuna’s friends, tries appealing to the Red Knights by attempting to explain the situation, but Vassago quickly turns the crowd against them. Some believe her though, like Moonphase and Mei Xiang, though it’s not enough. Thankfully, Suguha and Lilpilin arrive to save Sheyta and Iskahn, but it’s not enough and Asuna tells everyone to stand down. Vassago confronts her, revealing that he was the one who tipped off the Knights of the Blood Oath about Laughing Coffin’s hideout despite being their leader, apparently to make Kirito kill someone and…make him a hypocrite? I guess he didn’t know Kirito had already killed someone by that point anyway. Meanwhile in the real world, an abandoned server starts booting up.


OUR TAKE

The unintended theme of this week’s episode is “shit that you could remove from the story and not make any difference”. First off is Yanai, a character who already had zero presence until recently but now is suddenly talking about both being connected to two former antagonists, neither of which we have EVER seen him interact with (unless he did as the tentacle monster, I didn’t go back to the Fairy Dance arc to check) prior to this, so his involvement with them doesn’t really end up mattering much at all. The most foreshadowing we’ve gotten for it is that there was some vague mention of someone “corrupting” the Underworld in its development, but that doesn’t point to him having a special connection to Quinella or even why he put in the 871 code on everyone’s eyes. And despite being yet another character who has been retroactively added to have a link to Quinella, somehow HE doesn’t have a crammed in flashback scene with her like Renly and Sheyta did. Also points off for making me remember Fairy Dance.

This theme also includes that of Moonphase and Mei Xiang, who also aren’t going to play much of a part down the line, even if they do provide some “good” Chinese and Korean players, but the other big part of it is Vassago apparently being the mastermind behind the destruction of his own guild in SAO, which is not the demented twist that the show thinks it is. All it shows is that the guy is just a pointlessly destructive asshole who hates Japanese people for even stupider reasons that we will get to soon. I guess the point of adding all this is to make it seem like elements from previous seasons are all coming together, but all it ends up doing is just adding a bunch of erroneous padding that will ultimately feel meaningless. Yanai being retroactively from Sugou’s group doesn’t inform his character any better than simply being a creep who fell in love with an AI, other than imply that he’s a creep BECAUSE he worked with Sugou, and clearly creeps in this show don’t come from just one group. Same with Vasaggo being from Laughing Coffin or Gabriel being a player from GGO. It might be neat for people who wanted to connect the earlier arcs but it doesn’t really add anything in the long run. And yet the biggest example has yet to come, as the post-credit scene indicates, as the penultimate novel of the Alicization arc concludes next week.