Sword Art Online: Alicization Part 1 Review

I'm surprised there wasn't a bit more discussion on the animation given that this season had a significant overhaul in terms of the style. Some of the fights early on easily give Ufotable a run for their money too, particularly the episode with Kirito fighting the goblin. Some of the best TV anime I have seen in a long time.

I don't at all agree with the fact Kawahara always uses the same tropes in his writing, but I think the fact he did apologise for it after those particular episodes aired did change my opinion of it somewhat. While it doesn't excuse it, I was happy to know that he acknowledges it's not good to use those kind of plot devices and I guess that ultimately left me without a bitter aftertaste when it comes to the anime. Especially considering Kawahara wrote this plot so long ago, as SAO is still based on the Webnovel until we get past this arc which was many many years ago now.

Not that I'm saying everyone should forgive or forget either. If people don't want to watch it because of the rape scene then that is completely reasonable, I just don't think it takes away from the overall series quite as much for me. The quality of the whole thing is just too good otherwise I guess. SAO is a good series burdened by an inexperienced writer, evident by how much better SAO: Progressive is now Kawahara does have more experience under his belt.
 
I'm surprised there wasn't a bit more discussion on the animation given that this season had a significant overhaul in terms of the style. Some of the fights early on easily give Ufotable a run for their money too, particularly the episode with Kirito fighting the goblin. Some of the best TV anime I have seen in a long time.
Seen a lot of good stuff about the animation but Kentaro Waki's compositing work on Ordinal Scale and Alicization is one of the reasons I want to start SAO someday. His style is very similar to what you'd see at ufotable.
 
Seen a lot of good stuff about the animation but Kentaro Waki's compositing work on Ordinal Scale and Alicization is one of the reasons I want to start SAO someday. His style is very similar to what you'd see at ufotable.

I think some of the more impressive stuff was later in Alicizaion, but for sure. It's absolutely fantastic to watch in action and even those still shots above are so cool. I hope the team move over to Progressive and we don't have another reset in style, it'd be a real shame to lose this talented production now.
 
I also think the bizarre scene in War of the underworld episode 2 was more questionable to me than the rape as yes he apologized and the rest of the series was still really good (same applies to War of the underworld Part 2’s ep 1 scene really).
 
So why the 5/10 rating then? You didn't like a rape scene and you thought that explaining why the bad guys became rapists was lazy writing, are those two complaints worth 5 points?

Personally I have no interest in exploring the back story of a rapist. If someone chooses to do something so dispicable than that's all I need to know to understand what kind of human trash that person is, and I would have been upset if they'd wasted time on developing such trash characters. I have no problem with your point that the villains tend to be one dimensional, but I also don't think such criticism is worth 5 points when the series does other things pretty well.
 
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