Reviews for Sword Art Online II (5.86)

Review
Sword Art Online has a lot to prove. The fandom gets all giggly when talking about it, but the first season had tons of boring slice-of-life and an absurd exageration of siscon by the end, not to mention all the nonsense it spat with each episode. I resumed my amusement of the first season as "the best when it comes to make things worse". Anyway, jump to 2014 and the second season, smartly named Sword Art Online II (SAOII), is finished. My sanity told me to keep away, but my curiosity got the better of me and when I noticed I was watching the first episode.

First of all, SAOII has nothing to do with the game Sword Art Online Kirito and his girls played in the first half of the first season. Now the game of the moment is Gun Gale Online (GGO), where Sinon, a lonely and traumatized highschool girl plays in a vain attempt to free herself from her tragic past. What she doesn't know, however, is that a player appears to be killing people in real life through the game, and she is likely a target.

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1. Kirito joins the fray
   SAOII starts with the wrong foot already. You see, instead of investigating these murders by regular means, with real police force, detectives, and making some simple political trades, the adults of SAO's world go crying for Kirito to help. Apparently, any normal means is blocked because the game servers are overseas, and Kirito's superb expertise with ingame murdering comes to play. It's a rushed and poor excuse to put Kirito in another game, but damn... this can be doable considering how much nonsense stuff the previous season gave us.
   
   The first half
   The first half of the show goes around this "investigation". Although the pace can be terribly slow at some times, the fact that Kirito and Sinon are the only important cast members showing (and they are not a love-dovey couple with a hut in the woods and nothing to care about besides sex) allows SAOII to focus more on the events at hand. This turns out to be a great decision, which makes this entire first half already a LOT better than anything the previous season showed us. There is a large sense of danger, Sinon is far more human-like and charismatic than any of the previous girls, and even Kirito himself is not a jerk as he used to be (he still is the unmatched super-uber skilled hackz0r playa-ki11).
   
   The midseason terror
   The tale progression solves the mystery behind the player-killing and then Sinon just changes her personality and importance to be only "one more dere to Kirito's harem, with cat ears" and the show suddenly dives head-on into a absurdly stupid filler saga of three episodes that throws any momentum the show head right out of the window. This quest for a random ingame item with no importance whatsoever and lacking any kind of meaning or character development is simply unnaceptable for a show that finally got itself on track with GGO. Fortunately this ends quickly.. which takes us for...
   
   Sword Feels Online
   
   
   After a tense combat with a player killer and a absurdly boring quest for a random ingame item, SAOII flies to the skies of extreme drama and neverending tears. A pilot entry as boring as the previous three episodes only hides the "feels" awaiting the watchers as Asuna meets a new girl to play and learn about her fight for life, as well as her teammates in terminal situations.
   
   Seriously, this can get anyone by surprise. After stupid slice-of-life, siscon crisis, investigation, and random wandering, SAOII now tries to be the drama queen. What can surprise you even more is that it does a great job at that, perhaps the best thing it offered since its start.
   

   Show Spoiler
   
   A better cast
   SAOII achieves two decent milestones here: first, it proves that by removing all the girls and leaving romance as only a timid charm, the cast can be less annoying. Sinon achieves what Asuna failed miserably at first season, portraiting a damsel in distress that is much more likely to be loved instead of hated. Kirito also changes his jerk personality around Sinon to some extent and becomes a less annoying protagonist.
   
   But when the gils return
   Second milestone, it proves that SAOII is just a sort a harem. Right after Sinon's saga ends, she completely changes to a secondary role and tranforms from traumatized girl to Kirito's Harem Girl #5. The rest of girls are also all there, knowing Kirito and Asuna are a thing, but doing regular stuff girls do around protagonists.
   
   The emotional strength
   Perhaps what made the cast of SAOII shine this time was the traumas they had. Some of them absurd, yes, but traumas nonetheless. It is interesting how the show manages to make Sinon's trauma and Yuuki's situation seems absurdly more tragic and impressive then being trapped in the game during the first season. The former SAO players are just carefree happy guys, as if they just played WoW for a year in the comfort of their chairs and now are playing Destiny instead. The damage was already done, but I can only wonder how much better SAO could be if they tried to put this absurd level (or at least part) of drama to the original cast during the first season.
   
   No progression with the fights though...
   If you felt that SAO had a lack of exciting combats and the coreography in general was lacking, this will only slightly change here. The production value of this second season is on par with the first by all means, which translates to cute girls and guys, combats resumed by a single flash super power, and lots of talking and cutie face close-ups. SAOII, however, do try to make things better by giving Kirito a light saber and putting him on more fights by the start. They rarely get truly exciting, but we can at least leave a small sense of progression.
   

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Comments
SAOII surprised me, I can't deny that. The first season left me angry after every and each episode, it delivered so much nonsense that I barely could keep up with. Studio A-1 Pictures is a certainty of light presentation and that was one of the major issues back then. Now, however, the studio decide to transform SAOII into a exagerated drama, much like what happens in Ano Hana.

The result is positive. Very positive. The first half with only Sinon and Kirito achieves a degree of tension and urgency that was non-existent in the previous season, and the late arc was so heavy in drama it transformed the whole show. I can only truly point a finger at the filler 3-episode long middle arc, which not only totally destroyed the good momentum, but also gave me back all the feelings I had when I watched the first season.

So, with these decent start and ending, an annoying middle part, and a drastic reduction in the nonsensical decisions and real world interference, SAOII achieves a good quality standard and now deserves a bit of praise at least.