Summary
Sword Art Online: Alicization’s final battle in the Underworld is much more epic and complex than what can be achieved in Aincrad. The underworld allows for the participation of many real-world factions, unlike Aincrad which is exclusionary. The underworld also has life-or-death dangers and real-world implications due to the clones living within it.
Although too many critics believe that Online Sword Art should have stayed in Aincrad, the franchise’s final war in Sword Art Online: Alicization War of the Underworld, set in SAO’s fourth MMO environment, Underworld, could never have been epic or deep as broad if author Reki Kawahara adheres to these criticisms. In fact, Kirito’s final battle with Akihiko Kayaba in Aincrad could easily be interpreted as what the end of Sword Art Online might have been like if the story hadn’t suddenly switched to ALfheim Online (ALO) midway through season one , this will not be comparable. to the true ending that Kawahara envisioned.
Aincrad’s story is inherently exclusionary, which severely limits its potential. The people of Aincrad are trapped there and no one dares to save them for obvious reasons. Akihiko Kayaba manipulated the programming of his own world so that players whose avatars died in the game would pass away in real life, and no one could log out once they joined.
The underworld of Sword Art Online is the exact opposite. Anyone can leave and dying in the game won’t kill them. This setup allows for many different real-world parties to participate.
Aincrad may never have supported as many different factions as Underworld did
Before things get extremely complicated, The final war in the Underworld is already shaping up to be much larger in scale than anything that happens in Aincrad. Essentially, the United States hired Japanese mercenaries to steal some coveted technology inside the Underworld for their own use. Furthermore, the characters in the game’s world are all cloned humans, essentially raised inside the Underworld as part of a large experiment. So, the three parties involved in the final world of Underworld are Kirito, the real-world Japanese mercenary hired by America and cloned humans from Underworld. This alone is much more nuanced and complex than Aincrad’s setup.
Things are even more complicated in Underworld, and Aincrad wouldn’t be able to simulate any of it. Japanese mercenaries hired by the US soon tricked gamers in China and Korea into logging in as members of Dark Territory to help them reclaim servers from what they thought were Japanese players. hacked the game the wrong way. None of these players agreed to rush into Aincrad, as it was well known that those who did could die there. On the surface, these payouts seem much lower than dying in Aincrad. However, it’s much more complicated than that, just as the franchise’s move to ALO has allowed Sword Art Online to become much more personal and much better even though no lives are at stake.
Instead of worrying about death, Underworld explores the dichotomy between gamers and non-gamers. After all, Sword Art Online is about gaming. Regular Kirito gamers are required to switch their avatars to delve into the Underworld, which can result in those avatars being completely deleted. Kirito’s acquaintances initially rejected the offer because they were being courted by Sword Art Online survivors and they believed that these SAO survivors looked down on them. However, they eventually relented when they learned that SAO survivors were discriminated against as gamers by society just like theirs.
The underworld still has life-or-death stakes and real-world implications
Death and real-world stakes are still on the table in Underworld. Although players from the real world are in no danger of death, clones raised in the Underworld face the destruction of their world and themselves. Even if Kirito and his friends don’t die, this still matters to viewers because they’ve just seen more episodes of Kirito interacting with these characters than he ever did with the characters in Aincrad. Furthermore, the reason why the show Underworld was created has given huge implications to the real world and even raises philosophical and ethical questions about whether human rights can be attributed to humanity. copy or not.
As revealed in the final season, Underworld is part of a much larger experiment to create human clones to replace human soldiers in battle. Therefore, if completed, Japan will be able to force these clones to fight on their behalf so that humanity does not have to sacrifice itself.
Underworld not only introduces stakes that could change the course of human history in the real world, but even greatly expands what the final battle of Aincrad can hope to achieve by allowing More real-world factions participate. While many critics wish it did Online Sword Art still in Aincrad, the final fight in the Underworld proves that moving beyond that first world is in the best interest of the entire franchise.
Online Sword Art is streaming on Crunchyroll.
Watch On Crunchyroll
