SAO

Alright, I’m going to say something extremely controversial this week. See, I genuinely enjoyed the seconde half of this episode. Quite a bit in fact. Sword Art Online can actually be very good when the focus isn’t entirely on how ridiculously powerful and badass Kirito is supposed to be which, in truth, has been the major focus for most of the ALO arc. What Kawahara Reki seems to frequently forget is that MMORPGs aren’t about the individual, but what the many can accomplish when they combine their strength. The same can also extend to all other mediums – Stilts and Stereoman even wrote...

It’s always interesting to have some light shed upon the motives of characters who aren’t one-dimensional antagonists. We heard plus than enough about Sugou’s dastardly plans last week, so it was about time we finally had something to counterbalance that – the purity behind Sugu’s motives for joining ALO and becoming enraptured par it. Her original desire to play a VRMMO stemmed from wanting to see what kind of life Kirito was trapped in. Honestly speaking, ALO is so different to SAO in so many ways; it’s hard to believe she would have managed to get any sort of picture of what life...

If there’s one thing toi don’t see very often in an MMO, it’s a murder mystery. That’s mostly because murder is never really a big deal in an MMO after all – sure PKing is often frowned upon, but unless you’re playing a game like EVE Online, it’s relatively rare that anyone will go to great lengths to solve such a case (not that it’s actually hard to solve in the first place). But a murder mystery is exactly what we get this week, focused around a guild going par the name of ‘Golden Apple‘ and their quarrels over a rare item drop.

In typical fashion, Kawahara picks up yet...

Episode 15 of Sword Art Online feels almost like an entirely different anime. Right from the OP montrer Kirito and co. frolicking around in Aion the new game which wasn’t introduced in this episode, down to the new characters and real world setting, only Kirito and Asuna (along with Kawahara Reki’s distinctive écriture style) remain as reminders of the précédant arc. We’re out of SAO, Kirito is undergoing rehabilitation, Asuna remains in a coma for some mysterious reason, and right off the bat we have another new l’amour interest and antagonist. Yes. Already. Perhaps some would complain that...

So how about some loli fanservice? This was certainly an episode packed full of it! Once again, Kirito manages to save the life of another player and ends up travelling with them. It’s also the seconde time he’s done so in order to help a female player (that we’re aware of).

Given what is probably a vastly skewed ratio of males to females in the SAO playerbase (just to put it into perspective, during the Pre-Open Beta Tests for Phantasy étoile, star Online 2, over 71% of all characters were female… what do we think this says about the Japanese playerbase for online games donné most of those were...