×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Sword Art Online II
Episode 15

by Nick Creamer,

Hoo boy. So. From what I've heard, Mother's Rosario (the larger arc that will be taking up most of this season) apparently only has enough story to fill part of a season. In light of that, Sword Art Online needs to find something else to do with itself - meaning this week, Kirito decides to get a cool sword!

Yeah, this episode is a whooole lot of thumb-twiddling. We start off with Kirito and Sugu at breakfast, where Suguha reminds Kirito of one of their prior Alfheim adventures. In a fairly bizarre little flashback, we learn Kirito and Sugu were once swallowed by a giant worm that apparently pooped them out in some kind of icy Alfheim underworld. There, they witnessed a four-armed giant bullying an elephant-jellyfish thing, which Sugu demanded Kirito rescue. After saving the weird creature, Suguha named it Tonkii, after which it apparently grew wings and flew them up to the surface.

Also they saw a cool-looking sword on the way up I guess, maybe they should go get that now.

The rest of this episode's first half was basically dedicated to Getting the Band Back Together. There's a fanservice-happy scene of Asuna in the bath receiving a call from Kirito, everyone (with Sinon now a member of the gang) meets up in Alfheim, and we get a bunch of big panning shots of the whole group looking either happy or battle-ready. The various group members all monologue some exposition regarding Alfheim's magic system, and finally the group sets off to enter the ice dungeon. And then…

Well, then we get a five minute quest dialogue dump from an NPC.

After this episode's first half, I was very ready to jump into some kind of dungeon action. That's SAO's normal pattern - either the first or second half of an episode is a wash, but it tends to pay for itself with excitement or solid character drama in the other half. Here, my familiarity with that system actually tricked me. After a full half-episode of basically nothing happening, I was sure the second half would be full of excitement - instead, the episode actually doubles down on the nothing happening, and subjects us to an interminable speech providing backstory of a generic MMO quest in a game the viewer isn't actually playing. There's an explanation of the sword, an explanation of the elephant-jellyfish and the giants, an explanation of why the land is icy, an explanation of the dungeon itself - but the viewer isn't really given any reason to care about any of these things. It's information for its own sake, possessing no emotional significance for any of the characters, and not even reflective of any larger stakes or conflicts. Even after the speech is done, our heroes end up asking each other if the GMs would actually allow any of the grim consequences of their quest failing to take place. But even the worst case scenario here is “Kirito doesn't get his sword and Alfheim has a world event happen.” Those are not particularly compelling stakes!

So yeah, this was not a good episode. It fell into some of the worst traps exposition dumps can encounter, and frequently felt like it was just trying to fill air time. Even the animation was extremely limited, with the show frequently relying on long still pans and many reaction shots. The return to season one's heavy fanservice didn't even feel like a disappointment - that just kind of seems like what Sword Art Online does whenever it runs out of ideas. And this was definitely SAO running on empty.

Fortunately, our heroes have actually arrived at the dungeon now. With only two more episodes to complete this mini-arc, I'm guessing/hoping we'll be diving right into the action next week. We all have our bad weeks, and I don't really have any worries SAO will dust itself off after this one.

Rating: C-

Sword Art Online II is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.


discuss this in the forum (369 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

back to Sword Art Online II
Episode Review homepage / archives