>Kirito becomes the Representative Swordsman of the Human Empire Unity Council, now at peace with the Dark Territory (a kingdom of goblins, orcs, etc).
>written to be readable as a stand-alone fantasy that happens to have the same characters as SAO
I guess SAO has given up on the videogame part altogether and is now a straight up isekai fantasy.
crunchyroll.com
>Human territory has no emperor
>Still called Human Empire instead of Human Republic
I see Kawahara is living the IJA dream
>post-alicization arc
But Alicization arc is a perfect ending for SAO.
Can't give up that sweet sweet ¥¥¥.
250 YEARS OF GLOP
That sounds terrible.
So it's even more of a Kirito fap fic? Now he's even the legendary main character of a whole own world. This sounds stupid. How will this shit even include the real world? Will he spend the rest of his life in Underworld now?
SAO has been shit for like 20 volumes, why do you nigger still care?
What's even the problem and plot there? Everything is peaceful, no VR-stuff, no evil god. What is this even about?
It's literally just Kawahara trying to milk this series as much as he can now. Dudes has always been a hack who can't even into continuity
Wasn't there a hard cap on how long a human soul can live even in accelerated time?
Has Progressive V4 been scanned yet?
Yeah. I think the VR and AR stuff would even provide enough fuel for further stories, but it doesn't work with the same fucking cast anymore. Kawahara will never let Kirito go though, so I should just forget about that. At least there is that GGO spin-off.
It's more about how it manages to become even shittier each volume
SAO in space when?
I want to see Kirito in a mecha
So this means a third season is possible viewable on the horizon?
I know that the terms Mary Sue and Gary Stu get thrown around a lot, but I honestly can't think of anyone in anime who's a bigger Gary Stu than Kirito.
Mind you the ONLY reason SAO got published is because Accel World was popular in Japan and Kawahara decided to milk a shitty fanfic he made for some contest.
Mind you even he admitted the first volume of SAO was half assed because he rushed it.
I'm surprised he's still taken seriously. He's pretty much a joke now, the very definition of a hack writer.
Dont mind me!
Sasha from Seikon no Quasar beats him easily. But then again the author pretty much makes it clear Seikon is all about boobs and breastfeeding and nothing else, Sasha was literally an afterthought.
Maybe Onii-sama. But is a close match
Kirito beat onii-sama in a crossover thingy
Also middle school kids and the parasite known as the Japanese Otaku keep him alive.
Mahouka S2, when ?
Why can't he concentrate on Progressive? It's SAO too and it's about the most popular arc.
After the movie
For the same reason he's calling this new volume SAO 19 instead of making it a spinoff when it's a standalone story.
It would sell less.
How do you even forget about Yamato Kira? Kirito doesn't even come close to him.
Well it's settled then. Kirito is officially the biggest Gary Stu in anime.
Intelligent AI? tons of cyber worlds with sentient races sounds pretty good but how do they die? their data gets erased?
I've never watched Gundam admittedly so maybe I'm not the best judge.
Shouldn't Kirito age once in a while? His RL didn't really change since the end of the Aincrad arc. Or will Kawahara just bullshit his way around that part by accelerated time?
The latter. Age him too much and the Otaku from 2ch can't self insert.
But don't they age as well?
They should make him taller
I cant self insert as a manlet
Kira is literally the secomd coming of Jesus himself. Kirito looks like Guts near him.
Not mentally.
The AI have 'Fluctlights', which are identical to the human soul. When they die, the Fluctlight is extinguished.
Basically, they're all unique existences. You can't 'save' them or whatever - If they die, they're gone for good.
I can't help but reflect on how boring the story gets when there's no romantic or narrative tension. Kirito, as we all know, is invulnerable: He already has a canonical love interest, so it's not like he's going to fuck Alice or those cute apprentice knights who are just begging for a three-way.
All you have left is world-building. And world-building eventually becomes the magic system in Mahouka, a lot of words over nothing important.
fuck this hack, I want Eugeo back
They're not really AIs, they're actually human souls which Japan figured out how to clone and create a medium in which they can exist outside of the human body.
Kawahara the hack literally wrote a story in which the Japanese government decides the best way to counter Obama's drone fleet is to clone the souls of human babies to use as bootleg AI slave soldiers to install into UAVs that can operate better than any AI the Americans could code, and this is presented as a good thing.
It's not really an arc. It's more of a side-story that takes place during an Alicization time-skip.
Yeah, they work around that by sleeping most of the time.
>Now he's even the legendary main character of a whole own world
Here he's the "otherworldly mentor with legendary status". The story is from the Point of View of Ronye, instead of Kirito now.
>How will this shit even include the real world?
It won't. CotM was written to be pretty much a standalone story.
But this side-story has been around for since Volume 1 was published, as a web novel. Remember that Kawahara wrote most of SAO without a single cent going to him as a result. And it's not like he had planned to "eventually publish it"; SAO was the first Web Novel to even receive a Light Novel adaptation, so he was pretty much writing SAO because he fucking felt like it.
>Kawahara decided to milk a shitty fanfic he made for some contest.
His Afterwords claim it was all Miki's idea. So go torch his editor.
>and this is presented as a good thing.
Wasn't the entire point of Alicization "AI are people too!"? Which basically means "RATH are the bad guys too. They're just less dickish."
Are you talking the anime or the manga? They're quite different.
FUCK
Go work on Progressive instead, Kawahara.
Oh, it's based on Cradle of the Moon, apparently?
Guess that means this Kirito is the AI copy Star King rather than the real thing.
No, this is still Kirito. This is before the Kirito/SK split.
Of course, real Kirito won't remember most of this, in 250 years.
Actually, that is a translation error
I don't know but if it's not scanned, I'm drunk enough to offer to take pics of my book, page by page.
>the Japanese government decides the best way to counter Obama's drone fleet is to clone the souls of human babies to use as bootleg AI slave soldiers to install into UAVs that can operate better than any AI the Americans could cod
You have to admit, that every time Obama, McCain, and drones were mentioned, you got a mighty chuckle out of SAO.
Star King Kirito is after Kirito and Asuna go back to the real world. RATH only had enough technological know-how to save Kirito's Fluctlight, so he went off and did space shit.
Pic not related but maybe related.
Well that government dude who is in charge of the whole project has only ever been presented as a good guy, up to and including his previous allusions to the nascent police state he and his buddies are building in Japan by encouraging people to adopt backdoored electronic locks and installing CCTVs on every corner that actively scan the faces of all passers by to be entered into a police database searching for criminals. And he was very blasé about how parents were deceived into consenting to allowing their children to be soul cloned without being fully informed.
Wait, when does Star King happen if this isn't?
Nooo i want to see more of post alicization alice.
He's been presented as a "good guy" who does very shady things. And now a "good guy" who has ethics far removed from the main character's.
He's not exactly the mouth-piece of the story.
So at the end of Alicization, Kirito and Asuna are trapped in UnderWorld for 200+ years. In that time, Kirito becomes known as the Star King.
But once the two get out of UnderWorld, they have their memories of that time forgotten, but Higa makes a backup of old-Kirito first.
After the 250 years. All of Cradle should be occurring in the 30 real-life minutes immediately after the end of the big final battle in Alicization. Things are sped up so fast that time expands to like 250 years.
I guess technically, this should be a story in media res between the climax and denouement of the last volume of Alicization.
I thought that typically when people say "Star King Kirito", they're talking about the period of time after they've gotten out of UW and it's just Kirito's Fluctlight flying solo in AI-land.
>Decide to read Progressive since Sup Forums praised it
>It actually fleshes out on the story quite well and explains some stupid shit like beaters decently
I guess the trade off though is that the Kirito x Asuna romance is even more forced now.
>I guess the trade off though is that the Kirito x Asuna romance is even more forced now.
Haven't read passed volume 1, but it seems people can't seem to understand how these two took two years to glop, and not like two months.
I think it still relies too heavily on forced conflict. That is to say, whenever the writer needs some conflict, he just gets Kibaou to say something stupid.
Wait, didn't they say there was a limit of 120? or 200? years or something a human mind could exist? Like, you couldn't just flee into Underworld and expect to live forever because the human brain (or soul) isn't made to last that long. Did Kawahara bullshit his way out of there again or is my memory fucked and it was more like 500 mental years?
>yfw SAO actually has an interesting hard sci-fi premise let down by sophomoric writing
I would kill to have Progressive written by a top-shelf writer like Asimov or Vonnegut.
But the title was acquired during the period of extreme acceleration
That was an estimation on the linit and they didn't have their hope high on they would made it but they did.
The romance is actually less forced. What is more forced is Asuna's perfectness. Do you like her yet, user? Because Kawahara really wants you to like her.
The part where she lost her sword on the fifth floor was actually really nice, though. It was a mix of fucking up and desperation.
It's not even Kibaou. Kibaou is even portrayed as mostly reasonable in Progressive. What is completely unbelievable about Progressive is how Kirito and Asuna always do the right thing to be first and/or best at everything. Even the fifth floor boss fight, which really started off as a fuck-up, happened to turn out best because they didn't have a full raid.
I'm eagerly awaiting the day when Kirito doesn't get the LA bonus.
Quinella lived for much longer than that, but sleeping for most of those years.
That's what Kirito and Asuna did too. They just slept for several days at a time to minimize how many memories that accumulated.
I think he told RATH to wipe those 200 years from his memory.
>The romance is actually less forced
It is? I just finished chapter 5 and it's literally all
>This girl's sword skill is amazing. She's a beginner, but she perfected linear!
>I'm a solo player, but I feel drawn to this girl and want to see her grow stronger!
>Her dazzling eyes, her luscious lips, and her beautiful hair are otherworldly beautiful!
Kirito literally cannot shut the fuck up about her. Half of his internal narration focuses on how amazing Asuna is.
I would do the same. Or any VR related thing in that case. I fucking love this setting and subgenre so much but whenever it appears as a manga or LN series it's basically just high fantasy with a few game hijinks, you can barely even count these things as sci-fi since the VR or real world aspect is barely ever playing a role and I am not even mentioning the psychological stuff.
That's not romance. That's a teenager getting a stiffy over a hot girl.
Totally believable.
I fucking hate the LA bonus shit. It's not even a joke anymore, no matter how many thousands of hits the boss needs to die, Kirito is always the guy who hits him in that one very tenth of a second to get the last hit, even when there are 20 other people attacking the thing like berserkers at the same time. I cannot fathom how Kawahara isn't aware of the shit writing he does whenever Kirito is involved somewhere.
>how Kirito and Asuna always do the right thing to be first and/or best at everything
This is also what makes Progressive pretty bad, which is sad because it's overall a big improvement from the old series.
I thought fluctlights were plausible if the mechanism was fleshed out slightly. Also, playing up the diplomatic and political aspects of RATH, the Japanese government and its relationship to foreign powers would be nice. Instead, we got sloppy writing and paper-thin caricatures, plus a stupid fight between Japanese MMO players and American ones.
Well, that's what I meant. When someone's that super-special-amazing, it's only natural that it's easy to fall in love with her. The parts where Kirito's musing on how amazing Asuna is and will be in the future are cringeworthy, though the rest of their relationship is kinda nice.
>Kirito's "Christmas gift" to her
Oh, you smooth operator you.
If anything, it makes the romance feel less stilted than as presented in volume 1 and the other side materials.
>start reading volume 1
>"Who the fuck is this chick and why are they married now?"
>They just slept for several days at a time to minimize how many memories that accumulated.
I guess I can live for 1000 years then considering how shitty my memory is.
>but how do they die? their data gets erased?
Yes, the system the Japanese researchers built is literally designed to detect when the AI's "avatar" HP reaches 0 according to the videogame mechanics, then deletes the soul of the AI and dumps it from the light cube matrix.
That is to say, it's the Japanese government who are now murdering millions of people for dying in a videogame.
Will Cradle of the Moon finally contain another male character who is 1. relevant, 2. not a jerk and 3. not dead at some point?
Are you guys forgetting he was known as the LA-King during the beta? Faggot perfected the art of kill stealing.
What's the point for even making them die? Didn't they need them for their war AI stuff? What's the point of letting AIs die naturally? It would only make sense to kill bugged ones or at least provide some sort of explanation. Like that they shouldn't live long to avoid building an actual personality and too much knowledge which could make them harder to influence and rule.
Not enough space, I'd guess. It's running on accelerated time, that's a lot of cloned souls to keep around.
>What's the point for even making them die?
Resource limitations, devs want to replicate to some extent an actual human society. Not much point in raising AIs with no concept of death if you're planning to then order the AIs to kill people for you.
Quinella's brain is not biological
I would say it's too bring back the semblance of a consequence of death, like Aincrad, but it kinda falls short considering, as you say, it's Rath killing them. There are a few instances where fluctlight death isn't related to Rath at all, and more of a Matrix style "your mind thinks you're dead, so you die/have your soul corrupted"
The only real reason for this system would be limited light cubes (a numerical limit is actually given, too), so they delete them as they die, to basically reincarnate them. But I think it would be more efficient to keep them archived for a hundred years or so, to give enough room to study them.
Light cubes have a known limitation of 150 years of memory. It was assumed humans were similar.
>But I think it would be more efficient to keep them archived for a hundred years or so
What is that, like 5 minutes?
The usual "FLA" rate is 5000, or 1000 if people are logged in.
That would make it about 7 days at the usual rate, or a whole month (36 days) otherwise.
Not enough time to sift through 100 year's worth of deaths, but it's better than auto-pruning dead AI.
I think it's pretty clear that the RATH researchers are horrendously incompetent at best and criminally conspiring with the NSA at worst.
>let's clones the souls of human babies without informed parental consent and subject them to an unethical social experiment involving systematic mass murder, we and our sponsors could never be possibly tried for crimes against humanity once this inevitably gets out
>let's run our social experiment on a server farm that has external network connection capabilities so we can to dive into our experiment from Tokyo because we're too lazy to fly to our oil rig sometimes, no enemies of ours could possibly ever exploit this to jack in to the internet
>let's build the machine we use to dive into the experiment with no surge protection so any disturbance to the electrical wiring could easily fry the brains of whoever is using it, this couldn't possibly ever damage anybody who actually matters
>let's give all the test subjects dev console access instead of coding a proper magic system and give them more and more privileges as they level up, none of the subjects could possibly ever grind their way to sysadmin status
Also they totally failed to notice that Quinella existed, had commandeered the Cardinal process, and had been systematically abducting and brainwashing all the successful "able to break taboo" cases that they had been actively looking for.
The only reasonable explanation for that is that all of the people whose job it was to monitor the system and look for deviant individuals were just drunk 24/7.
>I guess SAO have given up on the videogame part altogether and is now a straight up isekai fantasy
"Fuck guys this Overlord shit is fucking rad and selling like hotcakes we gotta snuff this out"
except it's from last decade...
Nah. Cradle of the Moon was was written in 2009. 3 years before Overlord's first volume.
Also, it still takes place within a virtual world, but now that it's from the POV of an AI, it may as well just be a fantasy world.
So, not on Sword Art Online arc 5 yet?
It's still unknown how long this thing will be
>SAO is almost 15 years old
Didn't a guy from RATH work with Quinella and hide her existence?
>one guy
Any sign that they are colliding with Accel World?
Soon.
I'm betting the next arc will be called "Sword Art Online: Burst Link"
I honestly can't see that.
At the very least Kira was beaten, badly, once, even if the show tried to play it off as him not trying.
So was Kirito. Remember Aids-chan?
>At the very least Kira was beaten, badly, once,
And Kirito wasn't?
Or Heathcliff. Or that guy who paralyzed him and then was killed by Asuna.
Dude
Kira has like been in 100% death scenes MULTIPLE TIMES and has come back with zero explanation
i can only assume he is literally jesus.
NEVER STOPPED ME DREAMI- oh wait, wrong board.
>England in charge of not being an international embarrassment every year
The strangest thing is, the story keeps teasing rape. If you're reading this, there are multiple parts where you go "Oh man, this is where the rape happens" but it never does. Leafa does get briefly groped and drained by a dark elven sorceress, however.
Also, I really like the idea of an army of psychotic PCs being unleashed to loot and plunder and rape. That is an amazing idea, but unfortunately those people were just cannon fodder.
Just think about it, being unleashed into a fantasy world to wreak havoc. To do anything you want, and there are real people - REAL PEOPLE - being carved to pieces by you. That's an amazing idea.