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

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Sinon finds Alice crying over Bercouli’s body and informs her of the situation, including that Alice needs to keep moving towards the World’s End Altar. Vecta may be dead, but Gabriel very much isn’t and will probably be back in a new account, so Sinon stands by to face him when that happens. Soon enough, he makes his grand reappearance in his Subtlizer account, which Sinon knows as a player that tormented her in GGO.

Back on the battlefield, the Pugilists are being slaughtered by the Red Knights, though at least Integrity Knight Sheyta has found a newfound love for the champion despite only knowing him for about an hour. Asuna and Klein get a chance to talk about Kirito, but are interrupted by Vassago’s reappearance as PoH, the leader of Laughing Coffin who the two immediately recognize. On top of that, a new batch of Red Knights have arrived, this time from China and Korea. Ok, now they ARE screwed. Although not all the knights are hostile, as one Korean player, Moonphase, and a Chinese Player, Mei Mei Xiang, see that the cover that the knights are fighting off Japanese hackers is pretty suspicious and decide to go in and see for themselves.

And back at the Ocean Turtle, Yanai reveals himself to be a spy for the attackers and points a gun at Higa.

OUR TAKE

Okay, I don’t want to hear anyone say Kirito doesn’t have a harem ever again. The one argument they had was that Sinon didn’t love him and now that is debunked. Dude has a harem of women despite being engaged, but this story’s never going to call him on it so I might as well not bring it up again. I just wanted to point out that it’s messed up. Hardly the most messed up thing in this show, but it’s up there.

Anywho, the main focus in this episode is basically a brief reprieve in the action before both Vassago and Gabriel revive in their custom accounts to bring a second wave of Red Knights and the battle escalates further. To the end of making things feel pretty hopeless, it works pretty well, although a bit on the over-dramatic side. Vassago being the leader of Laughing Coffin back in SAO does kinda sorta make it feel like this is the final boss of that group, it’s just that it would have been a hell of a lot more meaningful if we had actually met him there as opposed to here. Get rid of the Laughing Coffin connection and it doesn’t change much about his threat level, since he’s still a psychotic weirdo. As for Gabriel, the whole visual of him rising from an evil sludge only to look like he came from a Call of Duty game is even more hilarious, especially since he’ll be taking his Evil Emperor mannerisms into this persona too. It’s not like Sinon is in any real danger in this fight, so that tension’s out the window.

It’s also becoming increasingly obvious that we just have way too many characters to balance here, but the story doesn’t seem to think so since we’re adding EVEN MORE with these two foreign players. I guess it’s neat to see some different perspectives on this, but as you’ll soon see, that isn’t really going to contribute to much and will only bog things down. Oddly enough, the brief and sudden romance between Sheyta and the Pugilist Champion does add a bit more lived in feel to the world, mainly because THEIR lives are actually at stake here. The addition of real world players, while making use of familiar faces, is really just over-complicating the conflict. But we’ve still got a handful of episodes left, which we will return to in two weeks.