Impression
Sugu has called bullshit, and so have we. Welcome to the Caliber side story! I promise there will be no rape.
This is generally what the remainder of Sword Art Online II will be concerned with – two side stories primarily set in ALO, Caliber and Mother’s Rosario. Neither are essential viewing, but it’ll serve as a nice, relatively peaceful cour of world-building that brings us back to the fantasy world of Alfheim Online – a setting I very much prefer over Gun Gale Online. Those who will be expecting something of epic proportions will probably be disappointed, but it’s nice to try something new once in a while, the primary difference being that this arc no longer concerns an issue of life and death – it’s a game, and ultimately they’re here to have fun and enjoy themselves. It’s a fresh perspective, and I don’t think it’s something we’ve ever experienced in full – the closest we’ve ever gotten is that short, unsatisfying stint in SAO’s Extra Edition. In a way, the new OP and ED sequences reflects this, especially as you’d almost expect LiSA to do the OP and Tomatsu Haruka the ED instead of the other way round. Both ended up feeling very nostalgic, and it feels like there’s now a greater emphasis on adventure instead of action, if that makes sense. Hopefully this is a good change!
The events in Jotunheimr originally occurred during the Fairy Dance arc, which they decided to skip in the original season in order to save time, as they didn’t know it’d have relevance in the future – ironically, it was key to how Kirito and Sugu got to the World Tree to begin with. Anyway, I found it quite funny that they decided to address this inconsistency through summarising the entire thing using one minute and a bunch of still frames. I don’t know… I suppose it didn’t really hurt given that I already knew about it, but it might have felt a bit odd to anime-only fans, especially as they then went ahead with a lot of cheerful infodumping. Jotunheimr was where Excaliber was first found by Kirito, although the pressing need to save Asuna meant that he decided to leave it behind – that’s why there was a precedent for Sugou to summon it in his fight with Kirito, as it was supposed to be the strongest one-handed sword. Pity they didn’t revamp its design actually, it hardly looked anywhere near as cheap in the novels. So now that everything is right with the world, he wants to try and get this sword.
This episode highlighted what I’ve always found to be a strange thing about the VRMMOs in SAO, regardless of whether the characters are stuck in one or not – even if it’s a game, it somehow manages to seem like it’s more than that. Putting Yui aside, evil-god class monsters aren’t supposed to be tameable at all, and yet we have Sugu who’s managed to befriend Tonkii. Strange quests appear, in which the NPCs involved can outright lie about the quest rewards – and the results of which can change the entire landscape of the game unannounced and alter its very foundations and structures. One species of evil-gods starts attacking another in conjunction with humans. It’s like the level of AI and autonomy is much higher than it really should be, which is a strange but subtle notion – even Sinon’s noticed that it all seems like a bit of a big deal for a quest, even for something of Excaliber’s status. The mythology that came along with it was quite entertaining though – I wonder how much of it was programmed, and how much of it was “real”?