Excalibur

Synopsis

With everyone’s attacks landing, they are barely denting Thrym’s health. Frejya tells them that they need to find her family’s treasure to beat it, a golden hammer. Kirito finds it and hands it over which Frejya uses to turn her into Thor. And with Thor’s help they defeat Thrym. Their reward for this quest is Thor’s hammer for Klein, who unfortunately has no points in hammer skills. After that they head to the bottom layer of the fortification and take Excalibur.

The entire thing collapses and water and greenery is restored to the kingdom. The big lady that started the quest along with other random normal sized ladies appear to thank them for completing the quest and offers Excalibur as a prize.

In the real world, they reserve the Dicey Cafe for a day to celebrate and due to GGO’s job’s payment to Kirito and the others finding out, he has no choice but to foot the bill.

Thoughts

A calm, relaxing and rather fun arc to the end. I would class this as a filler, but it was a very enjoyable one nonetheless. The rotational onslaught of attacks on Thrym was quite entertaining to watch as yet again we see everyone get a slice of the cake that is SAO’s screentime and animation budget. And it was kinda like an actual MMO boss raid of sorts, well apart from that the rotational attacks never happens as we all know in MMOs when a boss spawns it’s a mess of attacks all at once which usually explodes the least prepared PC as their PFS drops to 0. Or perhaps that’s just me… Either way, taking turns to attack is much more of reminiscent of a tactical RPG type game than an MMO boss fight. But I’m not complaining, it was fun to let everyone have a go.

Also having Yui there reminds me of Shiba Tatsuya reading opponent’s moves which brings me back to the beginning of SAO when Kirito was a self acclaimed ‘beater’. From what I can see by using Yui, he still is. Not that anyone cares anymore though.

Following on from norse mythology, I thought that anyone who’s clued in would obviously jump to Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, but I didn’t expect a very lady like Freyja to actually turn into Thor. My mythology knowledge isn’t amazing, so I don’t know if that’s what actually happened. But either way, I’m sure Klein wouldn’t be the only person to be a little disappointed by that. And unfortunately for Klein there’s more disappointment when he’s presented with the legendary Mjolnir but can’t actually use it. Being a very sword based game I’m surprised there were any hammer skills anyway. However I’m sure he’ll find a use for such a rare item, whether that’d be to sell for a fortune or to keep as a trophy, or even to remind himself of his one true love… I really hope he realises it’s a NPC that he just asked for contact details…

I found Kirito’s ‘affection’ for Suguha hilarious. Ah ‘so glad we got out of there’ *hug*, ‘must take weapon’, damn I can’t! Obviously rare item over sister any day especially as this mission wasn’t really intense compared to his other ‘adventures’ doesn’t warrant such affection.

Something I’ve been wondering is how everyone got back into VRMMORPGs so quickly after the events of SAO. I would’ve thought it’d scar them for life, though I guess some just enjoyed it anyway in terms of having fun as a game. So I suppose why not continue, can’t let one bad experience ruin everything.

Also, bringing this back to the old ALO. I was also wondering what happened to those leaders of each clan. I remember them in the second half of last season, but not seen them again since and they made, what I thought to be, a big deal out of them. Wonder if they’ll make a reappearance. Then again Kirito isn’t likely to follow them anyway, but still good to have friends in virtual ‘high’ places.

Well, with the flirting that Sinon’s doing it’s very likely Kirito hasn’t said anything about Asuna, though that said, it could just be joke flirting because she knows. However the former seems more likely and here I’m wondering if they’re really going out…