Sword Art Online II

Episode 16

Last week, I made a hopeful prediction to the effect of “maybe this week is all still frames and exposition because they're saving the good stuff for next week.” Well, I'm very happy to be proven right! This episode took us straight into the giant's castle, following Kirito and the gang through the entire dungeon and right up to the battle with the giant lord himself.

We started off with Yui returning to the exposition-well, which had me scared for a moment there, but fortunately she wrapped it up pretty quickly. Though the show's efforts to impress the stakes of this conflict on the audience didn't really do anything for me (so if they don't stop these giants, even worse giants will destroy the world tree? Fair enough!), I actually did appreciate the elaboration of the Cardinal System. The fact that it deliberately draws from and mixes up classic folklore is a clever conceit, and the more power they give the underlying system to reshape these worlds, the more these conflicts will actually have a sense of weight. It's still definitely an uphill battle - the stakes here are just too low to really generate much tension, and so each episode is forced to live and die by its own internal entertainment value. Fortunately, this episode had entertainment value in spades.

The big centerpiece of this week's SAO was the team's fight with yet another giant minotaur monster. Though the direction of this fight was somewhat hit or miss, the animation here was an embarrassment of riches. The fight started off fairly mundane, but as soon as Kirito called for everyone to use magic-type sword attacks, the animation roared out of the gates.

The big setpiece started with every member of the main cast getting their own limit break-style big hit on the boss, leading into Kirito's final attack. I figured that was all we were getting - but then the monster's life bar stopped halfway, and we proceeded to get another solid wave of beautifully animated attack patterns. And instead of just showing each character's attacks in isolation, this second sequence actually featured solid group choreography too, and had the characters visually play off each other in a series of coordinated attacks. SAO's fights never really have any internal stakes you can follow (they're mainly just the good guys beating on monsters that might as well be standing still), but at their best, they succeed anyway through sheer force of visual gratuity. This week's setpiece might actually have been Sword Art Online's finest example of that yet.

So yeah, that was great. Beautiful sequence, nice choreography, close to two total minutes of lovely animation. And even after that display, the episode held together - the various Klein-centric jokes of the second half landed solidly for me, and by the end of the episode, I found myself totally on board with pretty much everything about this adventure. SAO even started making some real gestures towards respecting what MMO fights are actually like - thought the first season tended to depict most fights as essentially “Kirito versus the world,” this episode engaged in a fair amount of tactical banter and teamwork. With a subarc like this, the lack of overarching continuity in either character arc or theme means there's nothing to lift the material, but if the material itself is as fun as this episode was, that's no problem at all.

Rating: A-

Sword Art Online II is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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