Sword Art Online: KiriAsu Authorized ShipCenter®

[MangaRocks!]

Episode 13 was excellent! The fishing stuff was downright hilarious :lol:; the relationship stuff was really quite touching ; and the suspense leading up to-- as well as the actual fight with-- that new boss was fantastic (and man, I totally got goosebumps there, both at the look of the thing itself and also at what it could do ). Plus a great cliffhanger!

Very much looking forward to next Saturday!

[blkmage]

[Falx]

Woah dang, Asuna. Those were some powerful words there.

[Rusty Claymore]

My Dad almost falls off his seat when each episode ends, and this one I thought he actually might.

Seriously though, that boss... Reminds me of the games back in the day of seemingly 3-5 hour boss fights. Also Legend of Zelda.

[GeneD]

Aww adorable couple making new friends, humorous fishing incident, heartwarming relationship affirming stuff... something horrible is going to happen isn't it? XP

The episode was great aside from the fact that my internet was dying for some unknown reason while I tried to watch it and it lagged constantly, so I'll probably try to rewatch it at some point before Saturday.

[Mr. Hat'n'Clogs]

Fairly disappointed with the actual resolution of the fight, but Kirito vs. Akihiko was fantastic. Great fight made all the more awesome by the great music. And now we've also reached the part where I have no idea what's actually going to happen, so exciting times I suppose.

[blkmage]

Yep, that went pretty much how I imagined/expected it to.

Next week should be exciting.

[MangaRocks!]

Holy crap-- that was a great twist!! It seems totally obvious now, and I suppose I should have seen that coming, but I didn't. That was perfect.

Also: That ending! [spoiler]I figured one of them would end up sacrificing themselves for the other, but man... to have both of them die, and yet win, and yet LIVE-- that was awesome!

I do kinda have to wonder where it can go from here, though (well, I mean, aside from Kirito and Asuna becoming a couple in real life )-- because while I know there's a bunch more books' worth of material, I haven't read them yet, so the way this ended seemed pretty final. Did that insane game creator make more than one game or something...? But whatever-- as long as there are more episodes, I'll take them! [/spoiler]

[blkmage]

Fairy Dance PV is up. I should stress that if you want to be surprised at the coming developments, do not watch that, no matter how confident you are in your speculation.

[GeneD]

Okay was not expecting that.

[spoiler]But but I wanna see 25 floors more of fighting and happy married life! Also I guess it's good we got a confirmation of their ages since I was wondering about that. But wait, was game time equal to real time i.e. if two years passed in the game did two pass in real life? So Kirito and Asuna were 14 and 15 respectively when the game started? They seem older.

The whole thing wrapped up really quickly though so it felt just the tiniest bit anticlimactic. And a whole bunch of cops better be well on their to storming Akihiko's house.[/spoiler]

[mechana2015]

A few eps in-

Reasons you might want to watch this:
- Decent animation - Yeah it is, but it does go into the gainax action blob animation in fights occasionally. Backgrounds are pretty great though, but are getting repetitive really quick (just like an MMO I guess).
- You like vidya games - Not actually my type of video game, but my type wouldn't make a good show like this... unless you're gonna count torchlight.
- You like swords - <.<;;
- The mechanics actually resemble video games (unlike, say, .hack) - This does impress me that it's always clearly been a game and the things never seem to be too far out of place from general game design, as well as the way they're using game interfaces to show other things to advance the story instead of speaking them... a good use of show dont tell.
- Kirito x Asuna - Not far enough for this yet.

So yeah I sound pretty positive for this so far right?

Reasons you might not want to watch this:
- The premise is kinda stupid -This... actually isn't too bad. Trapped in a game is explained better than .Hack ever did, and given a slightly better reason than lol rogue AI.

- Your suspension of disbelief will be brutally tested -

This on the other hand... hooo boy. There are serious issues with this in this show.

People die if they don't move enough. All the players have to be in hospitals now and severely atrophied, requiring physical therapists to keep them in a state where they can still be living and functional enough to be playing still. This was something that .Hack got somewhat correct.

Why hasn't the creator been arrested with ALL OF HIS PROGRAMMERS and forced to put the logout back in? This guy's on the hook for thousands of murders as is the entire programming team (at least as accessories... even if he pulled all the changes alone they'd be the people to reverse them and going by the story thus far, they haven't and are therefore partially culpable in at least a few countries) and they haven't been able to fix it in months? Even more, why hasen't every other developer for the system been tapped to try to figure out the programming if the originals can't be found? This is a world wide problem that affects CHILDREN in affluent countries and you're telling me that literally nothing has been done in... from my point of current watching something like a year? This would be the lead story in every news station, the main focus of every police department... heck I wouldn't be surprised if theres a few government task forces dedicated to fixing this...

What bothers me most is that .Hack actually got this part right! How? By showing the outside world!

All SAO has to do to fix this is give the mains a news feed or something, or give us a perspective charachter outside the main story, so we can see that 'the code is unique and it's taking us ages to crack it' or 'the head programmer has vanished and all the other coders didn't do enough to fix it yet' or 'all the other programmers were logged in and turned into the boss monsters and NPC's'. Some of this could be solved in SECONDS with one or two lines here and there, and could even add some much needed motive and depth to the main conflict of the show. I understand that the 'why' is an important piece of the end game of the story, but explaning at least some of it could go a LONG way to correcting a few of the issues that I'm sure are horribly bothering to other people than just me.
...

I have more but I'm gonna stop because otherwise my thin edge of enjoyment of this show is gonna get lost.

Ep 3 especially bothers me as they pull the 'I promise you won't die' trope... it's really grating how hard they hammer on it. The whole thing is just a ham fisted piece of storytelling that could have been done with MUCH better pacing so you actually cared about what happened. TPK was... uhhh...really obvious, it was bound to happen at least once in this show, but we didn't even know the names of half the people that died... which makes the impact level pretty low.

Ep 4 - Another ham fisted episode, this time with monster design and plot elements... showing, though the ending saved much of it.

[blkmage]

For some reason, they moved the hospital explanation from the first chapter to the thirteenth episode, so there's your answer to that.

As for why they can't just patch it, there are plausible ~programming~ reasons. Most of they why didn't they find the guy/servers stuff is plot related and also not given good justification.

[mechana2015]

>.< I'm gonna try to hang on through this, but it's like watching a show ignoring it's own premise and it's becoming infuriating, since I like the interpersonal interaction and the shorter storylines, like the mystery arc.

I do understand the patch issue, since editing the code on a patch level usually means rebooting said game, but what about other options, such as enabling developer modes or GM modes for players so they couldn't die, or editing player records to modify their levels so they could win faster? I dunno, for anyone that games a lot there are so many obvious solutions, that we're approaching the 'a cell phone call could solve this' plot from movies.

I also don't get why anyone would care about 'cheating' at that point... it's not a game, its a Saw like trap, and the only actual reward is survival for all if they clear the final area. They aren't going to be going back on SAO after this!

That and I think the idea of turning the whole programming team into the bosses or NPC's would have been a brilliant move, since it would make him that much smarter, and take the people who would have been able to help be both incapacitated and (if bosses) SLOWLY BEING KILLED OFF BY THE PLAYERS.

[blkmage]

not gonna lie, the only reason I read through the ten currently released and translated volumes of the light novel was solely for more Kirito and Asuna scenes

[Vii]

not gonna lie, the only reason I read through the ten currently released and translated volumes of the light novel was solely for more Kirito and Asuna scenes

Ahaha, well, I read through the last seven of the Full Metal Panic light novels just for Sosuke and Kaname scenes. ヽ(ー_ー )ノ

[mechana2015]

Do they ever eplain why there aren't any moderators or GM's on in the game?

[Falx]

At the risk of spoiling something. [spoiler]It's a closed system. There's no way to log on for anyone else even if they try after the fact due to the nature of the hardware, which Big Bad Guy designed. Everyone who was in the plaza in the beginning are the only people in the game. The number can never increase, only decrease.[/spoiler]

And it's not so much explained as you put the pieces together yourself from little bits of information about how the game works.

not gonna lie, the only reason I read through the ten currently released and translated volumes of the light novel was solely for more Kirito and Asuna scenes

The novels are so terrible. Fantastic premise, but the pacing is so incredibly bad it almost ruins it.

Which just makes the amazing nerd rage about how the anime is "butchering" the novels even more hilarious.

The anime does still have some pacing problems yes... but once you see what they had to work with... these people need a medal.

Tha pacing improves a lot in Alfheim Online.... but it develops it's own problems very quickly which are so freakin' dumb I stopped reading. I'm cautiously optimistic that the anime might iron it out, but I wouldn't be surprised if my score for this plummets over the next few episodes.

[mechana2015]

At the risk of spoiling something. [spoiler]It's a closed system. There's no way to log on for anyone else even if they try after the fact due to the nature of the hardware, which Big Bad Guy designed. Everyone who was in the plaza in the beginning are the only people in the game. The number can never increase, only decrease.[/spoiler]

And it's not so much explained as you put the pieces together yourself from little bits of information about how the game works.

But... that doesn't answer my question. GM's exist in almost all modern MMO's, they're the people that resolve disputes and stuff in game (though maybe that's changing, I'm not a huge MMO player). Opening day would be the day that ALL of them would be online more likely than not, and trapped in the game with them. The beta testers are sort of treated like GM's and the main charachter starts acting like one from about episode 3 on, but they either don't exist or just didn't cross the writers mind that they should be around...

[Falx]

But... that doesn't answer my question. GM's exist in almost all modern MMO's, they're the people that resolve disputes and stuff in game (though maybe that's changing, I'm not a huge MMO player). Opening day would be the day that ALL of them would be online more likely than not, and trapped in the game with them. The beta testers are sort of treated like GM's and the main charachter starts acting like one from about episode 3 on, but they either don't exist or just didn't cross the writers mind that they should be around...

guh...

Fine, actual spoilers:

[spoiler]There are no GM's because the vast majority of everything is regulated by the system itself. It's basically A,I. The evil dude (whose name, as I'm sure you can tell by now, I've forgotten completely) is the only person with GM access to the game. Later on they actually find a hidden (a normally inaccessible area) room with a GM console in it. Kirito is almost immediately detected by the software and booted out. And as for evil dude... who says he ever logged out?[/spoiler]

Also, with proper medical care, people can live for quite some time in a comatose state. Decades even. Two years is long yes, but not that long.

[blkmage]

Novel talk:
[spoiler]I've actually been pretty displeased so far. Fairy Dance was decent enough if you didn't examine it in too much detail, but Phantom Bullet was just silly. I think the only stories I really enjoyed without reservation after Aincrad were Mother's Rosario and Calibur. And Alicization is in a whole other ballpark in terms of silly goosery. I'm so fed up with that arc that I just do a search for "asuna" in to decide whether to read a chapter or not.[/spoiler]

[Rusty Claymore]

Lil' sis walked in about 4 episodes back and called out the bad guy right off the bat.

Curious on where things go from here. [spoiler]We're out a conflict, down an antagonist(maybe?), lost the setting, and have at least 3 months for things to settle down before the player's families even let them touch a computer. But we're past 13 episodes and the next one is "Return"...[/spoiler]
はやく、どうようび！はやく！！

[Falx]

Novel talk:
[spoiler]I've actually been pretty displeased so far. Fairy Dance was decent enough if you didn't examine it in too much detail, but Phantom Bullet was just silly. I think the only stories I really enjoyed without reservation after Aincrad were Mother's Rosario and Calibur. And Alicization is in a whole other ballpark in terms of silly goosery. I'm so fed up with that arc that I just do a search for "asuna" in to decide whether to read a chapter or not.[/spoiler]

I wonder though, I'm starting to be convinced that Baka-Tsuki are just terrible.

I mean, I'm sure they're great translators.

But I doubt a single one of them is an even mediocre writer. All the light novels there read like bad fanfic to me. Or maybe light novelists are just terrible and can't hack it with "real" stories?

I dunno.

[blkmage]

No, Baka-Tsuki are pretty terrible. A lot of the time, translators aren't really the problem and most people wouldn't be able to tell anyway. It's the editors that they need to improve on. There is definitely a certain style to light novel writing that is just plain bad, but that's exacerbated by the bad editing. All you need to do is compare a competently edited light novel (Yen Press' Haruhi or Bungaku Shoujo, or cokesakto's Kara no Kyoukai translation) with what you find on Baka-Tsuki (say, Kizumonogatari or Durarara for non-SAO examples that I've read).

[blkmage]

This week:[spoiler]Now that the game's been cleared, it's time for our heroes to be happy and have some well-earned rest.
[spoiler]ahahahahahahahahahahaha[/spoiler][/spoiler]

[MangaRocks!]

^ LOL, no kidding.

Okay, so my thoughts: First, that OP-- I think my expressions while watching it were pretty much exactly and , haha. (And those elf ears... after seeing the characters look a certain way for 14 episodes, that change just looks way too weird right now, LOL! Guess I'll have to get used to it pretty quickly here, though. )

As for the story being continued: Ah, okay-- I figured it had to be something like that. Man, though, that crazy gamemaker...

And it was nice to finally see Suguha's character for a whole episode, too (as opposed to like the 2 frames and one line of description that she had until now ).

Actually, the entire episode was excellent-- well, I mean, aside from [spoiler]that creeptastic freak who wants to (illegally!) 'marry' Asuna while she's in a coma...! The heck??! [/spoiler] Can't wait for next week!

[MangaRocks!]

Episode 16:

Interesting about all the copied data (and the partially-copied stats). [spoiler]And oh my gosh, Yui! So glad she's alright! [/spoiler] This new game seems very similar to the original one (as of course it should, since it's using the exact same code ), and yet still very different-- the two biggest differences, of course, being that since crazy-game-creator-dude is (apparently) not controlling this particular game (at least at the moment), PKing seems to do no physical harm to the players in real life (though I'm not entirely convinced that's true for Kirito and Asuna, since they're still using the old headgear, but we'll see if that makes a difference or not ), and the whole flying mechanic (which looks like a pretty awesomely fun feature to use).

Also, I'm loving the fact that Kirito is still as completely awesome as ever (well, aside from the flying, at the moment ).

...BTW, speaking of: I know that Kirito's stats are quite high and he's just plain awesome in general (...that last scene! ), but still, how exactly is he going to rescue Asuna within just one week? I mean, does time in the game (seem to) pass faster than it does in real life? Or is he seriously just going to blaze through all the levels that quickly? (Not that it even really matters, to be honest-- I love this show regardless-- I just thought that detail was a bit amusing, especially since it looks like we're going to have nearly as many episodes focused on just one week's worth of time as we had for an entire two years' worth. )

Anyway, as always, definitely looking forward to next week!

[blkmage]

so begins the legend of kirito hax online

[Falx]

*Future Spoilers* My personal favorite part is how two people [spoiler]can live in the same house and somehow never realize that they're playing the same game together. For days. Let's not even get into that he has the same online name, looks the same... [/spoiler]

The anime has managed to smooth over some of the not so logical parts of the Aincrad arc... let's stay hopeful.

[blkmage]

*Future Spoilers* My personal favorite part is how two people [spoiler]can live in the same house and somehow never realize that they're playing the same game together. For days. Let's not even get into that he has the same online name, looks the same... [/spoiler]

The anime has managed to smooth over some of the not so logical parts of the Aincrad arc... let's stay hopeful.

[spoiler]There's no reason that Suguha would know the details of what happened inside of SAO, since it seems to be a taboo subject. Recall that she was kind of baffled at his strange actions during their sparring match. If she did know who he was and what he was doing, she should've been able to put two and two together. And remember that character appearance is randomized, so there's no reason to suspect that the nub in black is onii-chan~.

But idk, I can definitely see not knowing what the hell my siblings are up to (because I don't).[/spoiler]

[GeneD]

I don't like Kirito's new design. He looks even younger than before, he looks 10. :/ I also don't like his sister and the weird thing she has for him, if I'm reading it right.

Maybe I missed something obvious but where are Kirito's parents?

Saving grace of this right now is Kirito continues being quite awesome and everything still looks pretty.