Sword Art Online II - First Impressions

Studio: A-1 Pictures

Genre(s): Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Game, Romance, Shounen

OP: "IGNITE" by Eir Aoi

ED: "Startear" by Luna Haruna

Summary: 1 year after the SAO incident, Kirito is approached by
Seijiro Kikuoka from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications Department “VR Division” with a rather peculiar
request.

That was an investigation on the “Death Gun” incident that occurred in the gun and steel filled VRMMO called Gun Gale Online (GGO). “Players who are shot by a mysterious avatar with a jet black gun lose their lives even in the real world…” Failing to turn down Kikuoka’s bizarre request, Kirito logs in to GGO even though he is not completely convinced that the virtual world could physically affect the real world.

Kirito wanders in an unfamiliar world in order to gain any clues about the “Death Gun.” Then, a female sniper named Sinon who owns a gigantic “Hecate II” rifle extends Kirito a helping hand. With Sinon’s help, Kirito decides to enter the “Bullet of Bullets,” a large tournament to choose the most powerful gunner within the realm of GGO, in hopes to become the target of the “Death Gun” and make direct contact with the mysterious avatar.

(Source: Crunchyroll)

Back with a new season of Sword Art Online, or rather Gun Gale Online this time around. And as one of the many people extremely critical of the previous season, specifically the ALfheim Online arc, I'm going into this pretty sceptical on whether this season will be any good. Like last season, SAO II presents the hook pretty early on and for this season, it is the death gun that seems to be causing people's deaths in the real world, after being shot by it. To me, it is interesting enough to want to see what happens next; however, how long will this anime stick with it as the main plot? With the first season as precedent, it doesn't look too good for this one, but we will see if SAO II doesn't make the same mistake as to rush the ending of this arc and start another one that is both not as interesting and entirely pointless.

Next up is how the main characters from the previous season have been doing. Starting with Asuna, it seems she is continuing to spiral into the unimportant character role. The biggest give away for me was when she and Kazuto were discussing what they want to do in the future. Asuna was the one who didn't really seem to have a goal while Kazuto wanted to become a creator with all the research he is doing on virtual reality headsets. The answer that Asuna was that she wanted to spend it with Kazuto and really that just felt like her character is now defined only by how much she likes Kazuto. As a small side note of Asuna's character, why does she still call Kazuto his in game name, "Kirito" after dating his for over a year? That is just an odd detail that probably shouldn't happen if you actually cared that much for someone.

As for Kazuto, we know that he want to work on virtual reality headset -- I'm guessing to make them safer after going through SAO and ALO. I guess you can stay thats the only thing new about him specifically, but it also seems Kazuto is becoming a detective for the virtual world. And that pattern of some problem in a game is affecting the real world and Kazuto has to gear up and enter this new world to, most likely, dominate everything for no real reason continues.

The overall theme of this arc seems to be the crossover, or even merging, of real and virtual world, which is interesting to me. This season might actually turn out to be good and the understandable scepticism I have can be lifted; but, it as could just end up being mediocre like last time. We will see how much has been learned from the previous season or if A-1 will continue to ride this hype train until it eventually crashes. Either way, I'm moderately interested in the current plot that have been establish in this first episode.

Orginally posted to the now shutdown sekijitsu.com: Archived Page