The World Seed

Happy new year from Lura’s Anime Blog

Key Events:

Kirito makes it to the hospital, but is ambushed by Sugou with a knife and cut in the right arm. But he fights back with the injury and takes Sugou’s knife forcing him into submission. He stops himself from killing him and moves on to see Asuna.

Later, Asuna and Kirito go to the same highschool, a school especially for SAO players.

Sugou was arrested and everything has settled down. VRMMORPGs suffered a huge setback because of everything and Alfheim along with other VRMMORPGs were shut down.

Kirito and Asuna and a lot of other SAO players meet up in Agil’s café for a reunion and congratulates Kirito on completing the game.

Kirito also checks up on ‘The Seed’. In essence it’s a program that can create virtual reality worlds as long as someone has a server. Agil loaded it up on servers across the world which revived the VRMMO market. Alfheim’s data was transferred to another company that now runs it. But from the seed, small companies and individuals started creating their own games in their own servers which all interlink to a point where one character created can be transferred to all VRMMOs.

One day, they all meet inside Alfheim as the old SAO world is placed into this one. Kirito, along with everyone from SAO and Alfheim, aim to clear the 100 floors.

Thoughts:

Where’s your hax skills now eh? Can’t use your cheating ways in the real world Kirito, although it looks to me like he did… I mean sure he’s probably skilled in kendo and light on his feet. But when a fully grown man is pushing down on you with a knife using two hands and his entire body weight, how can you hold him off with an arm? Not to mention you just came out of rehab not too long ago and it’s an arm that he just injured with a knife.

At least Kirito didn’t fall down the murderer route, no need to kill him. Should’ve just smashed his face into the car a few more times, that’d do it. If police asks just say you panicked and didn’t want to die, would count as self defence, right…?

Also, I find it hard to believe Asuna isn’t skin and bones like Kirito was, picking at the smaller details I know but it’s the small details that I tend to notice more these days. Though it doesn’t matter too much so I’ll leave this here.

The school for SAO people was interesting, I mean sure everyone knows everyone so they can get along and know what each other may be going through. But that doesn’t really help them integrate back into human society. They’re cut off again, at least they’re interacting with real humans now… Though they are behind in education, so I suppose they can catch up here and then get back into society fully prepared. And the older working folk are all already back, and they all seem to conveniently get back into their jobs with no problems, too convenient to be realistic. It was nice to see everyone in real life and then see them in the new game in virtual reality once more. Asuna’s new look isn’t bad, nothing to complain about. Ending was quite open, so I’m sure all of us are expecting a sequel. Was a very tame ending episode apart from that fight, which was pretty bad to say the least. The climax last episode wasn’t great either just seemed like we were cheated out of a good fight, so quite disappointed, however I don’t mind the relaxing happy ending.

With its popularity I’m expecting a second season announcement soon, although the popularity is probably based on the overall series. As I’ve said, the ending isn’t amazing, but the overall quality of the series has been fairly good and I wouldn’t mind seeing a second season knowing that it does continue. I can ignore things that don’t make sense as it was generally enjoyable, so at least it did something right.

The overly dramatic shounen fights were good fun to watch, the story telling because of the way they did it was a bit odd. The first few episodes didn’t link well because they decided to do the side-stories first and then when it got into the actual story I thought it went too quickly. Alfheim was slow at first and I don’t think it developed enough and the latter half went straight to the end too quickly. There was a lot of balancing issues with the story pace in my opinion however I think the setting and mostly well choreographed action made it seem better than it was, not to say that I didn’t enjoy it.

In summary I think it was the story that let it down with huge plot holes and many things that just doesn’t make sense. But in another sense it was the simplistic story with the goal of clearing 100 floors and saving Asuna that made it easy to understand and made Kirito easier to empathise with. The only thing I can say I really didn’t like was Kirito’s hax skills, especially how he stayed alive when he died in SAO and how he blasted through loads of monsters just because he had a second sword in ALO. Would’ve been better, and much more shounen if he had a flash back and then pulled the sword out of him with 1hp left during that Kayaba fight, and everyone attacking together to break through the barrier of monsters in the tree fight. The hax parts had none of the sweat, tears, hardwork, friendship etc you associate with shounen and I really hated that. Apart from that though, I liked everything else, ignoring the plot holes of course.

Note: Looks like I’m taking the first blog of the year. So a big happy new year to everyone and I thank you all for reading my blog in 2012.