I said… are you ready to taaaaaaalk? ‘Cause boy have I got a talky episode for you. I guess the consequence of SSSS.GRIDMAN and Goblin Slayer coming to an end is that now I only have SAO to watch on Saturdays. Be careful what you wish for, boys and girls. The only other Saturday show that I would have any interest in is Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen, but that won’t debut for yet another week. What makes this even sadder is that it appears as though the barrage of dreadfully dull exposition from the previous episode is still continuing. It just never ends.

Essentially, the big bad lady started running out of memory space, so she came up with the dastardly plan to overwrite people’s souls. It’s just weird to me that all of this can unfold right under Rath’s nose. Sure, the obviously evil scientist that flashed a grin at Asuna is probably keeping up with all these events, but no one else has a clue? Really? Anyways, Quinella ended up playing herself, because she eventually created two versions of herself. Obviously, they would both vie for control over the other. I mean, goddamn, how could you not see that coming? This is like cloning 101. Nevertheless, Quinella and Cardinal proceed to engage in a duel, but it boils down to individuals yelling out “System Call” over and over in order to essentially cast a spell. That’s all it is. They’re just spellcasting. You wanna know what would make the repeated utterings of “System Call” less annoying? Just establish it in the very first episode that you do a system call by thinking it. This way, two combatants can just fight without needlessly distracting us with the same phrase over and over like a broken record.

Then right after the very brief duel, we go right back to more paint-drying exposition. Basically, Cardinal needs someone to help her fight Quinella and her army of thralls, so she has been stalking our heroes for years. She even offered them advice when they needed it. Personally, that would make me pretty uneasy if I were in the boys’ shoes. The idea that I have had absolutely no privacy just makes my skin crawl. I mean, what hasn’t Cardinal seen? You can’t tell me that Kirito has been a pure-pure boi for the past two years. You can’t convince me that the guy hasn’t even tried to virtually jack-off in the Underworld. Right now, people are cybering like mad all over the internet. The Goldshire inn in World of Warcraft is a hotbed for internet sexing, but it’s not the only one. And of course, Blizzard holds onto every player’s chatlog. It’s just RPing and they’re doing it out in the open, so I suppose the current participants don’t care all that much if their sexual exploits are being tracked. But what happens when we do get VR MMOs on the scale of something like SAO? What happens when two individuals can do more than simply RP? What happens when two individuals can perform the act of sex within a game? Is privacy suddenly going to be important again?

Good lord, this dry conversation never ends. Cardinal opines that their true god doesn’t care about them. It’s just silly, because why would you assume that Rath is your god? Y’know, someone isn’t god just because they created you, right? I never quite understood this thought process. Personally, although I consider myself an atheist, I’m not going to sit here and assert with absolute confidence that a creator doesn’t exist. It’s very much possible that someone or something created this universe. You might think, then, that I’m more of an agnostic. Well, no. I still don’t believe in God or gods. After all, the idea of gods entails more than just simply being a creator. The idea of gods entails worship. A hypothetical creator should have vastly more knowledge than me. They more than likely would also have vastly more power than me. But does that mean I should worship them? Of course not.

More exposition! More! We are eventually informed that there are evil souls lurking in the Dark Territory, and the day that they invade is nigh! And even though Quinella and Cardinal are similar in a lot of ways, for some strange reason, they diverge greatly on this topic. Quinella is confident that she and her brainwashed knights (like 30 of them?) can handle an entire army of baddies. Obviously, Cardinal has a little more common sense compared to her sister. But why is that? In any case, we now know that even if Kirito and his buddies take down Quinella and save Alice, this whole Alicization business is far from over. There’s going to be a war in the Underworld, and it’s going to be the dumbest, most pointless war ever. Why? Because who gives a damn? One, it takes place in a virtual world. Yes, actual human souls are involved, but this is all simulation at the end of the day. Two, the bad guys don’t even have a legitimate reason to fight. Again, they were made evil. Actual wars are born from actual conflicts. You can take an entire course on how WW1 started. And finally, three, the real war is in real life because you just gotta convince Rath to stop this cruel experimentation on human souls. It’s going to be hard to buy into the idea that Kirito and friends will have to personally participate in the war when you can just tell the nerds outside the game to pull the plug on the whole thing.

Cardinal eventually reveals that she can’t accept the world that Rath has created. So although she wants to stop Quinella at all costs, her ultimate goal is to burn it all down. Welp, that’s not going to happen. This pretty much tells me that Cardinal isn’t sticking around for the long haul. I bet you that she’ll die in the final battle against Quinella. Even so, the girl then tells Kirito that if he helps her, she’ll keep a few Fluctlights around. Like I’ve said in a previous post, we’ve seen that Rath has been working on robots, so this is a sure sign that at least one of these artificial souls will make their way out into the real world. It’s going to be Alice, because at the end of the day, this is just yet another stupid harem anime.

But wait, doesn’t the story currently imply that Eugeo is kinda in love with Alice? Just a teensy tiny bit? And if this is the case, can Kirito truly cuckold his own best friend?! Well, not exactly. Thanks to Quinella, we’ve seen that it is possible for an individual to create copies of themselves within the Underworld. It wouldn’t shock me if we end up having two Alices. Might we even see two Kiritos one day? Three? Four? Oh lord, don’t scare me like that. But seriously, Kirito will have to return to the real world one day. After all, he’s got an army of waifus outside of this stupid game. But what if one part of him never wants to leave? SAO is the type of series that wants to have its cake and eat it too. I can easily imagine a version of Kirito staying behind in the Underworld just to play in this stupid sandbox.

Kirito eventually questions why Cardinal, despite being a copy of Quinella, lacks the same selfish impulses as her big sis. The girl reveals that she, too, has desires. As a result, they hug. Barf. Let’s just skip ahead. Fifteen minutes into the episode, we finally get to the point where Kirito agrees to work with Cardinal for the time being. But of course, being the generic hero that he is, he promises her that he’ll find a compromise that will allow the Underworld to continue existing peacefully. Ironically, this means that war is coming. Not only is there going to be a war, there will be a ton of new faces to introduce. After all, the Dark Territory must have its own society if it is organized enough to go to war. God, this stupid story just goes on and on forever. Kirito also tells Cardinal that he doesn’t want her to disappear either. He just met her. He barely knows her. Hell, how can he even be sure that he can trust her? What if Cardinal has just been spewing a bunch of lies just to get him on her side? I doubt it, but it’s possible.

The two of them finally return to speak with Eugeo, and Cardinal promptly inform the blond kid on how to undo the synthesis dealio: just remove the triangular prism and put the missing memory fragment back in its place. I just love it. We go from two people sitting and a room and chatting to three people standing in a room and chatting. This must have been a super cheap episode to produce. The gall of this storytelling format, though. Seriously. Two straight episodes of just non-stop exposition. Look, the bottom line is that the team will have to raid Quinella’s bedroom. But this story is painfully unoriginal, so we have yet another 100 floors to climb. Kirito might be dismayed and thus indicate that the author is somewhat self-aware, but that changes nothing.

Haha.

But before I talk about Eugeo, let’s set the stage. After two painful episodes full of exposition — why did Cardinal tell Kirito everything but not Eugeo? — the boys had to climb nearly all the way to the bottom of the tower in order to retrieve their weapons. And now, they have to climb all the way back up the tower in order to rescue Alice and presumably defeat the big, bad pope lady. Remember: religion, bad! Technology, good! On paper, this premise sounds like something straight out of one of those inane dungeon crawling JRPGs. Ascend a floor, explore, fight some baddies, repeat. Luckily, this tower appears to be mostly empty. Oh, there are still baddies to fight, but just the Integrity Knights. And since Alice is Synthesis Thirty, there really isn’t a whole lot for Kirito and Eugeo to worry about. At one point, they even have the luxury to take a break, sit their butts down on the stairs, and eat lunch. Big, bad pope lady sure doesn’t really worry all that much about security, huh?

Alright, let’s talk about those Integrity Knights. Shortly after retrieving their weapons — god forbid the bad guys actually defend the storeroom — our heroes run into some dude in red armor and a bow. We’ll later find out that he’s Deusolbert Synthesis Seven. Not only that, he was the guy who took Alice away from Eugeo all those years ago. The battle itself is nothing special. First, Deusolbert attacks them with a bunch of arrows. Standard stuff, really. Then he powers up and attacks them with flaming arrows. Kirito blocks a major attack by spinning is sword rapidly. Yes, that’s right. By spinning your sword rapidly, it turns into a shield. Even though he couldn’t really stop the attack altogether, he somehow managed to surmise that the cooldown on Deusolbert’s flaming arrow is really, really long (should’ve worn haste gear, tsk tsk). So as long as he can survive the attack, then Eugeo can retaliate. Our black swordsman is actually stepping aside and letting someone else have the spotlight for once! Aw, he’s all grown up!

Obviously, I hate all the “System Call” nonsense in this series. No, I get it. They’re in an MMO, and when they utter those words, this is akin to executing a command within a program. It’s also analogous to casting a spell. You utter the magic words and voila! You could argue that wizards and witches are doing the same thing. They just don’t realize that their world is programmatic in a way. But that’s the thing, though. Why bog every battle scene down with a relentless barrage of characters yelling out “System Call!” over and over? We already know how it works. Just have the magical fireball show up. Imagine if a wizard had to yell out “Fireball!” every time he wanted to cast a fireball. That’s stupid. Then again, a lot of the mechanics in the Underworld seems stupid. When Eugeo closes in on Deusolbert, he thinks back to Kirito’s advice from episodes ago. He remembers how he needs to infuse his weapon with the power of belief! As a result, he starts thinking about Alice, and this somehow gives him the strength to beat the Integrity Knight. Lame.

Anyways, bad guy is down, so it’s time to move on, right? Well, Deusolbert wants Kirito and Eugeo to finish him off. After all, his punishment for losing to them will be much worse, so he’d rather just die in battle or whatever. At this point, Eugeo finally realizes that he has met Deusolbert before. He realizes that Deusolbert was the guy who took Alice away. As a result, he starts seeing red. He wants to, uh, kill the guy who already wants to be killed. So right off the bat, this scene loses a lot of emotional impact. Not only that, we’ve been told over and over that these Integrity Knights aren’t exactly operating out of their own free will. Like Alice, they’ve been taken away and brainwashed by the Administrator. They have no memories of their former selves. Deusolbert doesn’t even remember the incident with Alice. But even after Kirito explains this in very clear terms and starts to leave, we see Eugeo lingering behind with his sword out. He had a tough time accepting the fact that Deusolbert isn’t really responsible for Alice’s current predicament. I mean, if you wanna pin the blame on the guy, you might as well also blame Alice’s entire village (including Eugeo) as well. It’s just difficult to take Eugeo’s outrage seriously when he sat on his ass for years because he was too gutless to go save Alice by himself.

And this is why I think Eugeo kinda sucks. Kirito had to tell him episodes ago that following the rules isn’t always the right thing to do. And now, we see that he doesn’t really have much a moral code if he isn’t already supplied with one. You get the feeling that maybe the author wants to give Eugeo a dark side. Up until now, he’s been such a polite, soft-spoken boy, but when his love for Alice is tested, that’s when he really turns nasty! Oooh, what a contrast! I just find the whole thing funny. First, good luck winning Alice’s heart with Kirito around. Second, what is killing Deusolbert even supposed to accomplish? Will it really make the kid feel better? Will he able to sleep soundly at night knowing that he murdered a soldier in cold blood? The punishment doesn’t fit the crime anyways. Alice broke a law, so she got “arrested.” Was the law she broke stupid? Yeah. Is it also bad to brainwash her? Sure, but Deusolbert didn’t do that. I’m not saying that Deusolbert didn’t do anything bad, but are his crimes serious enough to be executed?

Anyways, Kirito and Eugeo run into a pair of loli Integrity Knights at the end of the episode. Y’know, SAO used to be bad because it was jam-packed with shameless wish fulfillment. But if you could somehow look past the whole “Kirito is our lord and savior” nonsense, there was still a story about VR technology to sink your teeth into. Can you use virtual reality as a form of exposure therapy? Can you use virtual reality to escape from your responsibilities in real life? These ideas were explored poorly in the past, but at least they were explored. In Alicization, however, it sure as hell feels as though the focus has shifted back to just bog-standard fantasy fare, and as a result, the conflict is about as generic as it can be. Damsel-in-distress has been kidnapped, and we gotta save her! Saving her means climbing a really tall dungeon! And instead of fighting a monster of the week, we get an Integrity Knight of the week instead. I just find it hard to get excited for yet another meaningless battle, and maybe the world agrees with me. After all, Alicization certainly isn’t bring in as many views as its predecessors.

What do you do? Anyways, let’s get right to it.

These two girls approach Kirito and Eugeo and claim that they’re nothing more than just two sisters-in training.

For some reason, Eugeo lets his guard down and gets stabbed right in the gut. I guess he just assumed that children were totally harmless. Well, now he knows that little anime girls are nothing but trouble. Kirito also gets stabbed, but… well, we’ll get to him in a bit.

So what do the girls do? First, they proceed to drag our heroes up to the tower. I’m fine with this part. No real complaints here. The girls also, however, feeding us their backstory. Um, did anyone ask?

Basically, the Administrator was running some sick experiments. She rounded a bunch of children in a room and told them to kill each other. Why? Just so she can test her Resurrection magic. It’s not like slapping a phoenix’s down on some dead person. If you don’t die right, you don’t revive right.

My biggest beef with this sequence, however, is that like practically every other sequence involving the Administrator, it’s delivered to us in the form of exposition. Nothing but one barrage of secondhand information after the next.

Some kids actually exploded, but do we get to see that? No. We just see some silly visual representation instead.

Some kids come back to life as weird chunks of flesh. Again, does the story show us something disturbingly gnarly? Of course not. We’re simply told that this had happen. What a goddamn boring way to tell a story.

Anyways, the two girls ultimately turned out okay, because they’re apparently good at killing each other painlessly and efficiently. As a result, they got to become Integrity Knights, but not quite.

They wanted to prove themselves, so when they heard about Kirito and Eugeo, the two girls decided to take matters into their own hands. See? Aren’t you glad you learned so much about these two throwaway characters? Aren’t you glad they answered a bunch of questions about themselves that nobody ever asked?

So we get to the 50th floor, and this ganksquad is just waiting for our heroes to show up.

The girls start bragging about how awesome they are, but they forgot that they’re in SAO. Kirito quickly reveals that he’s not paralyzed at all! In fact, he knew they were dangerous right from the get-go! But if he knew this, then why did he bother to play along? What was the point of letting the girls drag them both up the stairs? What was the point of letting Eugeo get paralyzed?

I also like how Kirito tells Eugeo what to do in plain sight of the enemy, but they don’t do anything about it.

Kirito then turns around and reveals everything to the two girls, and those knights are just like, “Shh, don’t interrupt the hero even though we’re here to capture him!”

Finally, even though there are five knights here, Kirito only fights one of them (complete with bad special effects).

So Fanatio, the knight fighting Kirito, has a weapon that shoots you with lasers and leaves gaping wounds in your body. She eventually gets the upper hand on Kirito, so do you know what she chooses to do next?

She gives us backstory nobody had asked for. What the hell? Who the fuck cares where your sword came from? I certainly don’t!

Instead of just taking Kirito out, Fanatio took her time. I don’t know if this allowed Kirito to gather himself, but I like to think it did. So when she fires another laser at our hero, he blocks it with a mirror of sorts. Enough of the attack reflects back and knocks Fanatio’s helmet off, thereby revealing that she is, um, a she. Was I supposed to think otherwise?

All of a sudden, the story acts like we’re supposed to be surprised to learn Fanatio’s gender. Like dude, c’mon. Okay, okay, some men like the color purple (like Samuel L. Jackson), so the color of Fanatio’s armor isn’t conclusive. But who honestly heard Fanatio’s voice and didn’t think that they were listening to a woman?

Not only that, she starts wigging out on us and accusing Kirito of not taking her seriously now that he knows she’s a woman? Uh, what?

So our hero turns the table around on her! Hah, it is you who is sexist against yourself! Hehe, hoisted by your own petard!

Another swordfight with silly special effects ensues…

…oh for fuck’s sake…

Annnnnnnyways… Fanatio admits that Kirito and Eugeo aren’t pure Hitler evil, but she still has to defeat them ’cause it’s her duty!

So she starts unleashing an attack that even hurts herself! Oh no, not your detestable face!

Finally, Eugeo decides to be useful…

…and encases Fanatio in ice.

But he also starts getting all triggered, so Kirito has to pull his buddy back from the brink and talk about how hate won’t save Alice.

“I’m still adding her to my harem once this is all said and done, though. Just saying.” Whatever. That’s the end of the episode. I’m sure they’ll quickly defeat Fanatio in next week’s episode and move on.

I’ve given up on trying to seriously blog this show, so let’s get this over with. As you can see from the screenshot above, Kirito’s black, hairy kamehameha is really impressive.

It’s so impressive that it sends Fanatio flying… perpendicular to the attack and into the stained glass window above them. Why? How does it even work like that? I doubt the people storyboarding this show even cares. They probably just thought it would look cool that way.

Yeah, bro. Don’t overdo it even though you probably would’ve died if you didn’t.

Something something women lipstick…

Anyways, Eugeo is still mad at the Integrity Knights. He won’t forgive them, because he feels they’re not putting their powers to good use. But I feel as though we’ve already established the fact that they’re being brainwashed by the Administrator. In fact, it was a huge plot point just a couple weeks ago that their memories are often erased on a whim. So he just being a whiny dick to counterbalance Kirito’s all-too-cool demeanor or what?

…right…

So it turns out our black swordsman did a little too much damage to Fanatio.

As a result, he’s going to have to use their trump card against the Administrator in order to save some random knight whom we barely know anything about. But don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind him being a good person and trying to save everyone that we can. It’s just this show is just so boring and poorly-executed that I have no goddamn reason to care about anybody that we meet. It’s like playing a dungeon crawler with a paper-thin plot, then suddenly bursting into tears over some random NPC on some random floor. It just doesn’t work.

This next part epitomizes my biggest beef with the show. It’s no secret that I have very little respect for the SAO series as a whole. Nevertheless, the god honest truth is that I really wanted to like the show when it first started. If you really care to try and verify that, go back and read my first four or five posts on the series. I tried to give it a fair shake. Unfortunately, the Gary Stu-ness of the main character was just too strong, so I ended up being exasperated with Kirito. Nevertheless, both SAO and SAO 2 (the whole Sinon arc) had some interesting ideas that were just poorly executed. Interesting ideas regarding the nature of virtual reality, simulacra, online relationships, so on and so forth. I feel like Alicization has pretty much left most of those ideas on the wayside, focusing instead on a dreadfully dull ascent through a featureless dungeon for a girl whom I have so little emotional attachment to. This elevator girl demonstrates exactly what I mean.

At first, I was like, “Who cares about some random elevator girl?” Basically, her Calling is to operate this lift, and she’s been doing it for over a hundred years or something. Even though they all have souls, the Axiom Church doesn’t allow her to be human. She doesn’t get to have human dreams and human pursuits. Eugeo has to dig out the fact that the girl honestly just wants to be free. This actually harkens back an interesting moment in the very first series. I don’t remember the exact details anymore, but Asuka essentially wanted to sacrifice the “lives” of the NPCs in order to defeat a floor boss, and Kirito didn’t want any part of that plan. We kinda have the obverse situation. In Aincrad, the NPCs are just objects. They don’t have any humanity to them. But they are given the appearance of humanity in order to make Aincrad just as real as the real world. It’s all a conceit. It’s a ruse to trick the actual human players into embracing virtual reality over the real world. In the Underworld, however, there are no NPCs. Everyone has a real human soul. And yet, we’ve gone and robbed them of that precious humanity so that they would end up acting like NPCs. The conceit runs in the other direction; we’re tricking you into thinking that these poor souls are nothing more than NPCs. Okay, okay, so what is the story ultimately getting at? Nothing really. Because this is just one small moment in a sea of nothingness that is Alicization. The series has drifted so far from its original themes and motifs that small moments like these are the exception rather than the norm. Instead, we just continue to climb the tower so that we can save yet another waifu… which brings me to my next point about Alicization.

We spent episodes with Asuka before she unfortunately became yet another damsel-in-distress. But even when she got stuck in her bird cage, she still got enough “airtime” to help with her characterization. In some ways, you could care about her as a person. Likewise with Sinon. I can’t help but laugh at the idea that you would try and overcome your fear of guns by playing an MMO centered around guns, but whatever! At least we spent half a season developing her character and getting to know her. Alice gets captured right off the bat and disappears for a bajillion episodes. She has no characterization. Eugeo is just the anti-Kirito. Our hero’s cool and collected, Eugeo is emotional. Our hero’s sage-like and wise, Eugeo is childish and naive. So on and so forth. He doesn’t have a strong, distinct personality either. And yet, this entire plot completely hinges upon him and his need to save Alice, who is a complete blank slate. It’s fucking terrible. Previous SAO series were bad because they were dumb and full of wish-shameless fulfillment. But Alicization is even worse because it’s just plain boring and (as far as the characters are concerned) poorly written.

Anyways, I feel like I’ve spent enough energy on this episode already, so let’s wrap it up. They get to the 80th floor and meet Alice. She wants to know why the boys have come here, but she doesn’t give them a chance to speak. Well, either that or they just choose to say nothing. Honestly, I don’t get it. Eugeo just whined moments ago that she doesn’t understand why the Integrity Knights would use their immense power just to serve the Axiom Church, but now that he has the chance to speak to one of them — Alice, no less — he keeps his dumb mouth shut.

Likewise, Alice keeps calling them and “their designs” evil, but nobody wants to get to the bottom of anything. They just wanna “talk” through their swords.

So Alice pulls out her golden sword…

…and creates huge swaths of ugly golden sparkles.

And of course, for a show this barren of decent storytelling, it has to indulge us on the origin of Alice’s sword like we give a fuck. No, no, don’t try and convince me to care about the random characters. Instead, devote precious time on the weapons’ backstories. After all, I cared so much about Fanatio’s mirror sword, so I’m certain that I’ll care just as much about Alice’s golden sword.

Anyways, Kirito tries to restrain Alice, so Eugeo can use his ice powers. The girl’s sword didn’t get frozen, however, so she freed herself.

Then in the ensuing clash, both Kirito and Alice get blown right out of the side of the tower.

Eugeo tries to chase after them, but the tower quickly “heals” itself back up. He is thus separated from his best bud and the girl he loves. Better get used to it, ’cause this is what Kirito does with everyone’s waifus.

I was going to try and do three updates today, but after SAO, I just feel drained of all energy. And sadly, I don’t even have a game to play anymore since I just beat Tales of Vesperia. Ugh…