At least, Suguha's issue wasn't magically solved, albeit it was still on the easy side (well, to have Suguha jumping back in ALO that quickly is quite too early but well).
That said, color me underwhelmed by the fight in there: it is quite obvious the guardians weren't exactly that strong but have a sheer domination through numbers, which indeed makes the advent quite difficult.
However, the execution and presentation were quite poor: the fight looks extremely turn based, with a knack of abusing close pan to the point you don't exactly see a single fight, but a sequence of several ones.
To make things a bit worse, the animation director seemed to be a tad conflicted, considering the perspective of the room is quite flawed: more often than not, the sylphes and dragon riders are attacking, with the background being "vertical", so they are still on an horizontal plan... but wasn't the goal tobreak through the mass of guardians in order to get into the inner door?
And surely, repeating the same animation stocks don't help in the aspect of "massive rampart of enemies before you" feeling: sure you see a lot of guardians in the backgrounds, and a literal swarm before the inner door, but the amount of attacking guardians on screen hardly looked impressive.
Really, the setup, the mood really was going very well for a epic raid clash, which compliments the aspect of "world wide event". However, the presentation of said fight was a bit on the lackluster side, and they still had the "good" idea of having a showcase of Leefa and Sakuya's... assets.
Kirito charging this way makes you wonder why indeed he didn't bother with another weapon before...
And I'm quite surprised that aggro wasn't even a known concept in ALO except for this dungeon. Might give even more "too easy" vibes for Kazuto
