So that's like the silver lining in them adapting the worst part of SaO to date - it might be over quickly?
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Sword Art Online: Alicization |OT| Everyone's favorite Gary Stu is back
- Thread starter Cornbread78
- Start date
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Honestly, it wasn't even Kirito that was my biggest problem... it was the complete ruining of Asuna as a character. She went from slowly working her way up to a top 5 players in the game to just being Waifu 13 of 40. They may as well have murdered her for what her character ended up becoming by the end of the first season and from every point after (maybe not in the movies? Didn't bother checking at that point).
Oh - I read that as "hours" - yea that's pretty crushing - hopefully S1 bombs and they reconsider it :P
She gets more of a real character in the last movie (which is just generally an improvement over everything that came since S1), and one of the mini-arcs prior. All that (and more) gets thrown out in Alicization of course.
Solid episode. They played the "which is truly the reality" theme very well with Kirito weak/blurry throughout the second half. It was also great how GGO-arc is still relevant somehow. The attack/villan near the end of the episode is typical Kawahara villan though, which reminds me of the worst parts of SAO.
Oh, and the animation is top notch. Also noticed Production I.G.'s name in the credits.
Oh, and the animation is top notch. Also noticed Production I.G.'s name in the credits.
So re-watching the OP, which served as an ED this time, it's kind of strange...
You should probably get used to that. lol
It has a really strange medley of stuff. It has all the old people from SAO and even shows Yuna, even though some of them don't appear at all and other than Asuna the old people barely have any presence. They just barely showed the people at the academy, and didn't show the apprentices at all. They didn't show any of the Integrity Knights, but they already showed Quinella. It was really cool but it felt more like a gift to fans, including those that have already read the novels, than a standard SAO OP. I feel there's going to be another OP with the same song but different visuals.
You should probably get used to that. lol
I guess my question would be other then the obvious (popular brand = sales) I wonder why the author didn't just make a new series instead of making this part of the SAO continuity. It feels so different from everything that came before it.
Not sure if this is a spoiler. If it is it's a really minor spoiler that very generally answers your question without giving any concrete details. But I'll tag it anyway in case you really don't want to be spoiled:
It wraps back around to connecting to everything from previous seasons of SAO eventually. If they keep the same pacing as the novels though, it'll take 25 more episodes before that happens. That's why I said you should get used to it. There's going to be a really long stretch where it'll feel like a completely different show.
Is this the final arc of the light novels? Or does the series go somewhere else after this? I'll be very impressed if
the author can somehow tie all the bullshit of the first two seasons and this new season into some kind of satisfying conclusion.
There's one more arc after this called Unital Ring, though its only been announced and not even the first volume has come out yet. And if its as long as Alicization it'll be years before its over, the Alicization novels took 5 years to come out. So we'll be waiting quite a while to see if that happens.
So potentially another 50 episodes in the future?
Who knows. It may be a shorter arc. It may be a long arc. If it is that long, I doubt they'd leave a 5 year gap with no new anime content. So they'd probably adapt SAO progressive, or do more filler movies. So I'm guessing more than 50 episodes.
Episode was okay, this episode was literally all I freaking know about this arc of the story so I was waiting for that final moment at the end there from the moment Kirito and Asuna were together XD Pretty good start but like the GGO's start a lot of this episode was just exposition on top of exposition. I mean I know you've got to set up your story and its not a fault of the anime itself but its just so flat and when its a 40+ minute episode to start off with there was a lot of it that just dragged on.
The episode strictly followed the book. There were parts near the begining where the animation was bad, but it quickly got better.
And Kirito is already getting started on his quest to irritating me, with him suddenly getting suspicious of a danger lurking for no fucking reason, aside from the author wanting him to be infaillible.
And Kirito is already getting started on his quest to irritating me, with him suddenly getting suspicious of a danger lurking for no fucking reason, aside from the author wanting him to be infaillible.
So, i kind of want to give this a second chance.
I fucking loved the start of s1, then got hellah creeped out by Kirito&Asuna playing father and mother to Yui, and thought s2 was passable. Reminded me of EVE online, if nothing else.
Peaced out of GGO when kirito started deflecting bullets out of a machine gun with a sword.
Is there some big-picture in this or it's still just kirito swagging around?
Start of GGO was heinous. "Nobody ever did this!" [5 minutes later] Kirito does it! x12.
I fucking loved the start of s1, then got hellah creeped out by Kirito&Asuna playing father and mother to Yui, and thought s2 was passable. Reminded me of EVE online, if nothing else.
Peaced out of GGO when kirito started deflecting bullets out of a machine gun with a sword.
Is there some big-picture in this or it's still just kirito swagging around?
Start of GGO was heinous. "Nobody ever did this!" [5 minutes later] Kirito does it! x12.
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Enjoyable first episode that tied in the current timeline with glimces into the future.
I get what your saying, but that logic can be applied to almost EVERY shounen MC ever.
I get what your saying, but that logic can be applied to almost EVERY shounen MC ever.
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God I have the books on my shelf and haven't gotten to them yet. I'll probably just start the anime and read them concurrently.
ha Firehawk just msg me telling me about the brain interfaces thats in it?
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The part from 2:35-2:50 seems kind of out of place to me. I really like the chorus though, and like pretty much everything else. Not sure how I'd rank it compared to the other OPs yet though.
Kirito gets some really great jobs despite being a regular kid
Beta-tester for SAO
SEED distributor
GGO government agency liason
Beta-tester Underworld
Beta-tester for SAO
SEED distributor
GGO government agency liason
Beta-tester Underworld
That last one messes with your memories and has the potential to be pretty dangerous. The owners might be villains, too.
The first one is kind of random, though pretty reasonable. The rest are because he won SAO.
It's pretty common for people that do well at MMOs to get hired as testers for other MMOs including in a professional capacity. So yes, I would expect that many have.
Episode 2 is out. They took out a lot of explanation compared to the novels and also changed the order of showing things, both I suppose for the sake of pacing as this episode was pretty slow even with that. It's probably worth it, though I'm kind of worried that people might be confused. lol
ED was decent, but not amazing imo.
ED was decent, but not amazing imo.
I honestly have no fucking idea where this season is heading. I suppose getting back to the real world is Kirito's ultimate goal, but there is no clear objective towards that goal, and no in game objective to accomplish. Hopefully we get one soon we've had almost an hour of story and no actual plot.
WTF with Kirito deducing that the villagers are AI developped from human newborns. If I remember the book correctly, this information is provided by someone who actually worked on the project. And here Kirito bring it out of thin air, like it's something obvious...
The books hint that he's guessed it to be the case at this point. This is the corresponding passage in the book, put in spoiler tags just in case though it doesn't go past the current episode:
The term artificial intelligence floated through my head.
The use of AI had been advancing rapidly in recent years, mostly in PCs, car navigation systems, and appliances. They would take the form of human or animal characters that could receive spoken commands or questions and perform actions or answer questions with remarkable accuracy. In a sense, the NPCs in the VR games I played were a kind of AI, too. Mostly they existed to provide information on quests and events, but if spoken to without a particular reason, they could give natural answers to a certain shallow extent. There were even people who exhibited what they called "NPC-moé," who followed around the pretty girl NPCs to talk with them all day long.
But that did not mean those AIs had true intelligence, of course. They were just a complex set of orders—"if they say this, answer that"—and could not provide real answers to questions outside of their parameters. If that happened, nearly all NPCs would offer a confused smile and say something along the lines of, "I don't understand your question."
Had Eugeo responded in that way even once throughout the entire day?
He reacted to my every question with natural displays of surprise, hesitation, laughter, and so on, and he gave me proper answers to everything. And not just Eugeo—Sister Azalia, Selka, and even the younger children never gave me a reaction that suggested what they heard wasn't "in their databank."
As far as I knew, the highest-level artificial intelligence of that sort was one named Yui, developed to be a mental counseling program for the old SAO and now considered a virtual "daughter" to Asuna and me. She had monitored countless player conversations for two years, collecting a vast amount of detailed data and compiling it into a complex database. She was perhaps the best current example of the boundary between automated program and true intelligence.
But even Yui wasn't perfect. Occasionally she would react to a statement by claiming that word wasn't in her database, and she sometimes mischaracterized more complex emotional expressions, like feigned anger or acting grumpy to hide embarrassed pleasure. All it took was a brief moment in a conversation for her "AI-ness" to show itself.
Yet I saw none of that in Eugeo or Selka. If human hands programmed all the people of Rulid into boy AIs, girl AIs, elderly AIs, adult AIs…it would be an even more preposterous case of super-advanced tech than the STL itself. It was impossible to take seriously…
They're not human, and they're not AIs. So what are they?
In a corner of my mind, an answer was already forming. But it was too terrifying to put into words. If what I was thinking was even possible, then this Rath company had plunged its hands deep into the realm of God. Compared to that, reading people's souls with the STL was as harmless as prodding the key to open Pandora's box with one's fingertips.
As I fell asleep, I heard my own voice rising from the depths of my mind.
This wasn't the time to be searching left and right for an escape route. I had to go to the city. I had to find out the reason this world existed…
The use of AI had been advancing rapidly in recent years, mostly in PCs, car navigation systems, and appliances. They would take the form of human or animal characters that could receive spoken commands or questions and perform actions or answer questions with remarkable accuracy. In a sense, the NPCs in the VR games I played were a kind of AI, too. Mostly they existed to provide information on quests and events, but if spoken to without a particular reason, they could give natural answers to a certain shallow extent. There were even people who exhibited what they called "NPC-moé," who followed around the pretty girl NPCs to talk with them all day long.
But that did not mean those AIs had true intelligence, of course. They were just a complex set of orders—"if they say this, answer that"—and could not provide real answers to questions outside of their parameters. If that happened, nearly all NPCs would offer a confused smile and say something along the lines of, "I don't understand your question."
Had Eugeo responded in that way even once throughout the entire day?
He reacted to my every question with natural displays of surprise, hesitation, laughter, and so on, and he gave me proper answers to everything. And not just Eugeo—Sister Azalia, Selka, and even the younger children never gave me a reaction that suggested what they heard wasn't "in their databank."
As far as I knew, the highest-level artificial intelligence of that sort was one named Yui, developed to be a mental counseling program for the old SAO and now considered a virtual "daughter" to Asuna and me. She had monitored countless player conversations for two years, collecting a vast amount of detailed data and compiling it into a complex database. She was perhaps the best current example of the boundary between automated program and true intelligence.
But even Yui wasn't perfect. Occasionally she would react to a statement by claiming that word wasn't in her database, and she sometimes mischaracterized more complex emotional expressions, like feigned anger or acting grumpy to hide embarrassed pleasure. All it took was a brief moment in a conversation for her "AI-ness" to show itself.
Yet I saw none of that in Eugeo or Selka. If human hands programmed all the people of Rulid into boy AIs, girl AIs, elderly AIs, adult AIs…it would be an even more preposterous case of super-advanced tech than the STL itself. It was impossible to take seriously…
They're not human, and they're not AIs. So what are they?
In a corner of my mind, an answer was already forming. But it was too terrifying to put into words. If what I was thinking was even possible, then this Rath company had plunged its hands deep into the realm of God. Compared to that, reading people's souls with the STL was as harmless as prodding the key to open Pandora's box with one's fingertips.
As I fell asleep, I heard my own voice rising from the depths of my mind.
This wasn't the time to be searching left and right for an escape route. I had to go to the city. I had to find out the reason this world existed…
And now for a spoiler that does go past the current episode:
IIRC no one explains it to Kirito. It gets explained in depth to Asuna and hence the reader, but Kirito just knows even in the novels.
This arc's main plot is focused around two ideas and one of the ideas is so vastly different than previous arcs that it feels extremely polarizing hence the feeling you're experiencing. One idea is that this is meant to primarily be an adventure. It's about Kirito's adventure in UW. The other idea is for Kirito's recovery so it's centered around him recovering in the real world. That's about it. There is no big bad to defeat that is destroying the world or anything. There isn't any immediate danger either. The previous arc had a clear end goal in mind every single time but here it's more of an adventure. It's also one of the reasons why a lot of people actually enjoyed this arc because it's so starkly different.
Eh... I don't think that's true. Maybe for the first quarter when its world building. After
they meet Cardinal
Eugeo still has the overarching goal of finding Alice and Kirito has the overarching goal of figuring out why the world exists and how to make contact with the outside world.
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Felt the same, that went by waaaay too quickly.
And the souls of dead babies? I read that correctly, right? What the actual fuck?
Not dead. Copies. The exact line from the episode is: "So they must be copies of the souls of newborns who were then raised in this virtual world. In other words, Artificial Fluctlights."
This is probably going to be pretty slow for a while. There'll be some action here and there including next episode, but the novels didn't hit the main story for a while. Next week they'll probably finish the first volume of Alicization, volume 9. The main story doesn't get going until half way through volume 11 though, with the action really picking up with volume 12.
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It's rolling pretty slow, but it looks like things should pick up next week with the goblins bearing down on them. After seeing the goblins take the girl, I have to thank God that this is SAO and not Gobln Slayer....
