I won’t lie, a lot of the reason I love Alicization is because of the little things you get in reading SAO that you don’t get from the anime. Particularly, the way the narration gives a lot more about Kirito than the anime ever did (I watched the first two seasons before I read the novels). And a lot of that is how Kirito reacts socially to people; after reading both the main series and Progressive, it’s curious to find him admitting that he feels a connection with Eugeo that he doesn’t even have with Asuna. I personally see it as character growth, if you start chronologically from Progressive- he’s not good with people. He doesn’t have anything against people, he’s just socially awkward and doesn’t have friends offline really. After he starts making friends via Sword Art Online and the survivors’ school, he’s making friends (as he notes in Alicization) as “Kirito” and not as “Kazuto.” Now, when he ends up in the Underworld, he’s face to face with someone who doesn’t know a lick about “Kirito, the SAO Survivor.” He’s grown enough to befriend Eugeo in a natural way, but even though he’s given his name as Kirito, he’s still, in a lot of ways, just being himself and not some idealized hero of a death game. The light novels have a lot to describe about that and I feel like moving into the anime, it just won’t get translated well because we lose the internal perspective in the anime.
I’m really curious myself to see how the anime handles Kirito in the Underworld. All of him figuring things out happens in his own head. Because he knows the world is a simulation and the inhabitants do not he can’t just explain or talk things out. They’re going to have to do some kind of narration to get it right.
Otherwise losing exposition is going to be really bad. We’ll find out really quickly how the anime handles it.
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