I really wanted to like this. The first season holds a lot of nostalgia for me, as it was my very first anime. But with all the contrived plot devices, bland characters, tropey cop outs, and boring setpieces, the show fails to engage its audience in any meaningful way. Leaving a couple interesting ideas, new and old, by the wayside.

Art-wise, the characters, particularly Kirito, have been redesigned. It looks fine, I like the old version a bit more (maybe that's nostalgia talking), but after an episode or two, it’s hard to even notice a difference. The scenes are really clean. While the animation isn’t necessarily improved, the character and background art is crisp af. There are plenty of times when you can pause the video and just soak a scene in. The environments are beautiful and full of vibrant colors. The color designer did a fantastic job. I particularly like the use of orange and yellow in sunlight places, or anywhere is the forest. The color design is by far the best in the series.

Fights are better than SAO’s previous seasons. While Alicization tends to focus on big moments in fights rather than the actual fights themselves, at least they aren't flashes of light in dust clouds anymore. I’m always curious what a studio like Bones or Madhouse would do with this, but A-1 did a pretty good job. The transformers noises are pretty distracting. It's cool that they're trying to showcase huge moments, but it comes off a bit cheeky.

The first OP is awesome. They got LiSa again, and just like with the first season, she nails it. The OP has lots of cool cuts too. The handshake at the end is always hilarious (in a good way) to watch.

Thematically, the show is all over the place. It tries to discuss interesting concepts such as humans playing as gods, what separates humans from machines, and power hierarchy in a society. But instead of seriously discussing these topics, it shifts almost all of its focus to saving a girl who the audience has such a tiny sliver of emotional attachment to. Alicization introduces a new girl… once again, establishes a confusing childhood friend trope for 10 minutes, and expects the audience to care about saving her for 20 episodes. The fact that they continually introduce new girls and leave Asuna out of everything is strange. Why was there so much build up the first season? Asuna is just used as a reward at the end of the tunnel at this point. Alicization would work better if it were spun off into its own thing, like the GGO alternative anime, rather than constantly ditching it’s characters for new girls it can put on the cover.

Instead of discussing the characters or themes. Alicization wants to focus on the backstory of it’s boring world. Kawahara, author of the SAO light novels, has gotten away with this style of writing for a while. SAO is a wish-fulfillment fantasy in a gamey world. Who wouldn't want to play SAO it if it were real? I would play the shit out of it, and I bet you would too. That’s why the world building worked. What the audience doesn't care about is a generic fantasy, with a million pointless backstories, that is not a game we can't project ourselves onto playing. There’s so much less tension built into the world, as opposed to SAO wherein a simple sword mechanic could be the difference between life and death.

The way some of the thematic concepts are introduced showcases the incompetent directing of the anime. The rape scene is laughably over the top. It focuses far more on shock value than anything. It brings up interesting themes, but refuses to talk about them. Using rape as a contrived plot device for nothing more than shock value is downright insulting. When Valvrave the Liberator pulls off rape better than you, there is a serious problem.

Eugeo is the worst part about Alicization. He is a nice boy who doesn't like conflict and loves helping his friends. What an unrealistic, unoriginal, and boring character. We’ve seen this a million times. We two year time skip over any piece of character development we would need to care about him. The ending of his arc is ridiculous and doesn't earn the emotional payoff it thinks it deserves.

I didn’t even notice this at first until I read a different review on MAL, but he never even talks to Alice after episode 1. Alice is his single motivation in life, the driving force of everything he has spent the last two years preparing for, and he doesn’t even bother to say a word to this girl. This perfectly exemplifies how contrived and plot-devicey these characters are. It doesn’t really matter what the reason is, Kawahara just needs to get Kirito to the top of this tower to kill the bad guy.

The Aincrad arc is the only interesting arc in the series (kinda bar Mother’s Rosario). It explored the blurry line between reality and VR, and actually accomplished what it set out to achieve. The ideas established in SAO’s two previous seasons are thrown away in favor of new half baked themes, which could blend quite well with Alicization’s if only given a chance.

Reki Kawahara is his own worst enemy. There are some great moments in Alicization, but they are ruined by another story the author is trying to tell before it can engage its audience in any interesting way.