This is much much better than SAO S2. Why did I have to go through that James! Why!!! It was soo painful. I’m not saying it was bad. It’s was just mid. If it wasn’t for James and Vik, I would not have been able to watch this. The three of us brought enough comedy into the show to make it really enjoyable.
All of this is considering that middle arc just doesn’t exist. Gun girl was very interesting. I liked that because, well, guns. And you don’t see that often. Then the second past was somewhat emotional. Not enough to make me cry but enough to make me care about it. Yea it felt, bleh sometimes but I liked what it tried to do. It was fun.
But all in all, it was hard to watch. A world’s different to SAO alien isolation.
SAO Alien Isolation is a good show. Honestly speaking, I enjoyed it. I liked the lore, I liked the new characters and I especially loved how for almost the whole final fight, the main villain is naked. That’s peak degeneracy right there.
One of the main things that sets this apart from Gungirl is how Kirito isn’t even the fucking main character for most of the show. The guy’s messiah, jesus christ himself. So we know that when he comes on stage, dual hands his swords, no enemy is going to survive that clash. The guy simply has too much plot armor. So to see him taking a back seat for once was simply so satisfying to see. That isn’t it, if the other characters were like say, Asuna or that god forsaken Yui, I couldn’t have lasted this. The characters we got were fun and I cared about what happened to them. Especially Alice. I think she was my favourite of the whole bunch. She and Kirito’s black extending baguette.
This looks amazing too. Though I got used to how Gungirl looked, it didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t have the fidelity I’ve grown to expect from anime of this caliber. The mid tier isekai route stuff. Maybe I’ve been watching one too many isekai from the boom its been going through the past half decade but seeing an isekai type of show with the looks it had felt out of place. So watching Alicization and A1’s beautiful fight scenes were simply a treat for the eyes.
I can’t believe I spent like in combination more than an hour just discussing anime mechanics with Vik. Like come on! This is SAO, the type of show that puts logical reasoning out the window for the vibes. How did I find myself questioning it as if I was discussing Elden Ring lore? I don’t know, but what I do know is that the lore stands up on its own feet most of the time. I gotta applaud this for getting that right.
Some of the discussions we went through were about Armament Full Control Art and how that relates to System Call: Enhance Armament and System Call: Release Recollection. Vik was a bit confused about how all of these fit into the picture. I like to think of Control Art being the name of an ability that allows you to perform different skills, System Calls like enhance and release, by invoking them with the speech command. That makes the most sense and the show stuck to that. For the most part at least, looking at you ending.
Another thing we talked about quite extensively was the Cardinal System and about Quinella and how she fit into the whole picture along with her supposed twin. So before Quinella became the self proclaimed messiah, how dare she steal that title from Kirito, the Cardinal System handled all primary maintenance and self bug fixing processes of the Underworld. However, she took the primary directive of the Cardinal System and infused herself with it, allowing her to become the world’s maintainer in a sort of fused state. At first we thought of this as roles and users in Linux. Cardinal user lost their admin role and Quinella gained it. This means that the cardinal system still exists but without the permissions and authorizations it had before, and this was the Librarian we meet. However the following explained more and our theory had to adapt. We found out that the Librarian isn’t the Cardinal system somehow getting an animorphic body out of nowhere because it lost its role, rather its a literal copy of Quinella with admin privileges. So Quinella simply fused herself with the Cardinal System where at the end, both were just one being. Then because she was running out of hard disk space, she created a copy of herself. Probably thinking that afterwards, she can use that being as an external disk and trim the unimportant data from her memory storage. But when that plan severely backfired, she lost her backup and her storage was in the red. Hence why she spent most of her days simply sleeping.
Then there’s the lore about all of the fluxlights and how they’re trying to create bottom up artificial general intelligences. The way the story approaches and justifies this is amazing. Although the practicality gets a little out of sync with the events happening inside of the world. Kirito having to heal in a medicube with time exponentially slowed down, AIs going through many generations building cities and whole communities. A freaking religion forming because of some selfish desires of an early generation girl with some talents. The world building is really up there, even though the execution isn’t on par with some of the bests out there.
SAO has a consistency issue. The good parts of it are very solid and enjoyable. Then there are it’s bad parts. They’re so bad that even categorizing them would be a sin. When I was watching this, I was wishing multiple times imagining what this would’ve been like if it had the same level of story consistency as Shangri La. It would’ve been amazing.
Was this worth sitting through Gungirl? Yep, it definitely was. I’d call this a mid-high tier show.