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

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Asuna gets Alice’s light cube out of the cluster before the time dilation resets, but tells Rinko that she’ll be staying behind with Kirito, even if their souls die while they wait to get logged out. Gabriel awakens in laughter once he’s logged out, though he soon realizes that he has somehow died, and is dragged into hell by his first victim Alicia, a la Yoshikage Kira. Critter, the techie from Gabriel’s team, makes one last effort to secure the bulkhead, though that fails and he goes to retrieve Gabriel…only to find his and Vassago’s body, and so decides to retreat. However, when they get the bodies, they find that Vassago’s has mysteriously disappeared.

Though before they retreat, they set the reactor of the base to explode, forcing the ghost of Akihiko Kayaba to inhabit one of the spare robot bodies in order to shut it down and fight off the one bad guy who stayed behind, supposedly to die. But Kayaba’s robot body gives out under the extreme temperatures, forcing Rinko to give a dramatic speech to get him moving again, including reminding him that he’s Kirito’s greatest rival, because everything has to be connected to Kirito somehow. And then the robot body disappears too. With everything finally calmed down, Rinko is ready to log Kirito and Asuna out, even if it’s been 200 years from their perspective.

Inside the Underworld, the two meet up right after the battle and decide to live their lives together for the time being, with Asuna somehow gaining wings (which she sure could have used in the past few battles she was around for) and flying off with Kirito to their new adventure.

OUR TAKE
We begin the big wind down as the last of the antagonists are driven off and the main conflict is officially resolved, finally giving the spotlight back to people who aren’t Kirito. Though like last episode, there are still plenty of cases of things just happening to keep the emotion levels high even when they come with next to no explanation. It’s too a lesser extent than last time, where logic was thrown completely out the window so that Kirito could get a well animated win after sitting out most of this half of the season, but it’s still enough that it’s distracting as hell. First off, very glad to be rid of Gabriel and his soul eating nonsense, who will be joining Yoshikage Kira in Creepy Blond Anime Serial Killer Hell, but how exactly DID he die? He was very clearly killed before the time dilation went into effect so it’s not like his soul overloaded like they’ve been talking about, and nothing about that indicated that he should have an out of body experience before passing on, so what the heck was that all about.

Vassago, on the other hand, we do know was not able to log out, as Kirito turned him…into a tree, keeping him from dying. But then why was his body effected by that and why did it disappear after Critter found him? Just how dangerous are these machines that they could potentially do that to a human body? Good thing it happened to unrepentant bad guys though, so we don’t have to give this any further thought, I guess! On that note, Ghost Kayaba has just been hanging around the base the whole goddamn time (seems like maybe he could have helped in some way in fighting off the attackers before now) and comes back for an eleventh hour assist in taking over one of the established robot bodies to save the base from exploding! But that would be too easy I guess, since he has to get shot a whole bunch so that his robot body will bleed for dramatic effect, have a fake out shut down so he can be revived by a pep talk, and then vanish mysteriously instead of explaining literally anything that just happened there.

But hey, now we’re down to the final two episodes of the season, which are guaranteed to be just character resolution stuff! A shame then, that the characters are terrible, but I’ll take what I can get.