In this article we return to talk about Alicization. If you are not familiar with the series, we recommend you to retrieve the reviews of the other episodes to this link.
Despite the numerous successes by the heroes of Underworld, victory is still far away: the enemy still has many cards to put into play, and the third episode serves to shake the scales, so far excessively in favor of the protagonists of the story, towards the antagonists.
Alicization: Intermezzo
The last two episodes have been quite eventful, sometimes excessively, and this makes the third episode, which has the function of establishing the obstacles and objectives to which the next part of the narrative will be dedicated, an episode that breaks a lot. the pace of adaptation destabilizing it without actually adding much to what we already understood.
Beyond the hesitation on Bercouli's heroic sacrifice, in fact, Alice is still on her way to the altar, this time of her own free will, while Sinon awaits the return of Miller, a return that had already been announced in the epilogue of the previous episode.
Even Klein's revelation of Vassago's virtual identity is not surprising: it was already more than evident that the man was the last remnant of Laughing Coffin, the assassin guild of Aincrad, so as a scene he adds nothing else than a name, PoH, and serves more as a link to the other resources put into play by Miller and his men: the red armies, which seemed to be running out, are strengthened considerably thanks to the access of players from China and Korea.
The choice of groups chosen by Kawahara is quite significant here, bringing to the surface the tensions and disagreements present between the three Asian peoples in the game, with the two newcomers rather inclined to see the Japanese players as enemies.
Of possible importance, however, is the skepticism with which some veteran players of the two nations enter the scene, perceiving that something with the scenario proposed to them (a forced raid of some Japanese players in the servers of a new local product) does not quite show. .
With the amount of things going well for the "good guys" of the narrative in recent episodes, to the point of wondering how the remaining episodes of the current cour could be filled, it was only natural that Higa's plans would go wrong in Ocean Turtle as well.
If on the one hand the plan to distract the enemies organized in the previous episode was successful, at the very last second a twist is put in place perhaps a little too predictable: the presence, among the staff of the Rath, of a mole had already been implicated several times both in the very first part of Alicization and in War of Underworld, when we discovered that Code: 871 (title, by the way, of the fourth episode) was not the intentions of Kikuoka, so it is not a great twist to discover that the man, never studied or known previously, who suddenly offered to accompany Higa in his arduous task, was precisely that mole who wants to prevent the protagonists from saving Kazuto.
The episode therefore does not offer much to put on the plate, although it is visually well presented and despite having given some minor secondary characters a moment of luster. In terms of adaptation, after all, we are talking about an episode that covers only a handful of pages (and here the perceptible slowness in its rhythms becomes clear) of which, among other things, some scenes have been skipped, probably to be moved to the next episode for a narration better configured to the television medium.
Beyond these small omissions, however, this episode faithfully reproduces what is present in the original material, with some scenes transported in an even more impressive way than what is written on paper (first of all the arrival of Subtilizer, the avatar from Gabriel's Gun Gale Online, in Underworld).
Whether these events will be the only obstacles that the heroes will have to overcome is still to be seen, but one has to ask: how much can things even worse before Kirito awakens with the power to solve something?
