Miraculous Blue Rose & Starry Night Sky — Iskahn, Klein, Agil, Gabriel in SAO Alicization…
Regarding my Alicization Rewatch series, someone asked me before whether I would do the same for War of Underworld anime…
I’m sorry that I won’t do it, at least not in details as before. Tbh I would feel better to make this decision if War of Underworld did well in covering the settings that Kawahara-sensei has set up in his actual writing in the novel, but the anime just didn’t do it at all and made it look like everything happened out of the blue and nonsensically (I would never understand concepts like Incarnation, Main Visualizer, non-chanting Sacred Arts manipulation, memory fragments acting like Fluctlights, etc. if I only watch the anime), to the point it isn’t that fun to me while rewatching it with the novel. If viewers like to know what contents were left out or not done well in WoU episodes, I suggest you guys come to the Source Material Corner in each episode thread on r/anime (reddit), Pedram (LuckyPed) did a good job on covering what was skipped and what should be done better in anime. But personally I really savored some beautiful moments of Kirito’s character arc from WoU ep 18 onwards and I intended to write something for it since the start of my Alicization Rewatch, so please look forward to that post.
Though to give a fairer judgement, I think Alicization episodes 1-4, 14-18 + most moments in War of Underworld episodes 1-11 are the best adapted episodes in all of Alicization arc for me. It’s not that there isn’t any cut content but the cuts are most reasonable for these parts, and the anime is most coherent on these episodes as a whole for me when I watched these episodes. 2nd part of WoU has a lot of beautiful and tearjerking moments, and some concepts are interestingly animated.