English Dub Review: Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld “End to Eternity”


OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

As more real life players from Japan show up to assist Asuna, Bercouli fights tooth and nail across time against Vecta to save Alice, eventually using his time slashing sword to mortally wound him even though he dies in the process, sending a message to Fanatio to take care of their child, we she apparently didn’t even know she was pregnant with.

OUR TAKE

While this week definitely saw an epic final battle for Bercouli, who has probably been one of the more consistently written and likable characters throughout this arc, it still nonetheless showed much of the flaws this show has when it gets a bit full of itself. One of those flaws being that its emotions tend to overpower its reasoning even when things happening on screen may not fully match up with the intended emotions. Case in point for that would probably be Bercouli’s death scene which somehow sent a telepathic message to Fanatio (something that has never been established to possible before) in order to inform her that she is pregnant (which is certainly a hell of a way to find that out) followed by him taking apparently being able to become a ghost that flies off into the sunset (also never established prior since typically everyone else just dies and that’s it) with the projected memories of Quinella (which I’m glad they clarify is just Bercouli’s memories since it was sure out of character for her to neither be happily killing animals nor nude). I get that they wanted to have an emotional send off for the character, which his prior fight certainly helped with, but this really pushed it a bit over the top.

Though my main worry for the remainder of the episodes is Vecta, or rather Gabriel now, as he now has lost the Dark Emperor account but is still keeping the rather weird behavior. Sword Art Online’s villains have also always often been over the top caricatures who seem to powered by an urge to rape and kill, but Gabriel almost feels like he’s from another series altogether. I get that this fight was to show how powerful he is in order to set up how massive his take down by Kirito will be later, but it feels like he was already committed to the whole “soul eating madman” bit before he even entered this world. Now we’ve got him coming back in account that I think we’ve seen before, the Subtlizer account that apparently did battle with the heroes in GGO at the start of the season before things really took off. And it’s not really the bombshell I think the show wants it to be, but I guess we’ve got nine more episodes to expand on that. Still, RIP Bercouli, you were too good for this show.