Sword Art Online Alicization Episode 12 Review
Sword Art Online Alicization continues to do what it does best – give us a short but reasonably interesting action sequence followed by a lot of sipping tea and talking. Oh boy.
It isn’t that the information conveyed in the second half of this episode isn’t important. It kind of explains the fundamentals of how Underworld got to the state it is in and why it is a little messed up. Though, to assume that only one of the original four humans passed on the idea of ambition and that no soul after managed to just figure out it wanted more is kind of overly simplistic and we could open the whole nature vs nurture argument on this one but let’s just shrug and go along with the logic here that whatever you are taught as a kid sticks.
The problem is more that once again Sword Art Online looks at the most boring method of delivering information to its audience. First the episode sends Eugeo away to have a bath because he got wet during the fight and that means Kirito doesn’t have to worry about keeping any secrets about not being from Underworld and can have an open conversation. That’s fine and fairly necessary if we’re going to learn what we need to learn. But why then do we need to watch Kirito and the Cardinal whatever sitting drinking tea while she slowly narrates events? Surely they could have shown the audience what happened and let us experience it rather than just telling us that this happened.
Admittedly, it would have needed multiple episodes to show us that kind of flash back. If only they had some more time in this series. Oh wait, they wasted half of last week on a conversation between Eugeo and Kirito that added nothing to either character and just delayed the fight until the end of the episode. And previously… well we could trim minutes more or less everywhere from this series.
It isn’t that I’m not interested in this story. I actually really like the ideas so far. It is more that the execution and the pacing have been lacking. Even the brief moments of action haven’t been enough to break this up or make it overly exciting to view. There’s a lot of potential in this story, but I’d struggle to recommend this given 12 episodes in and it still feels like we’re setting things up and unless you are already a big fan of the series, listening to all that exposition isn’t going to be high on a viewers list of priorities.
One thought on “Short Battle Followed By Attack of The Exposition”