1. Sasami used to be the host of the supreme Goddess until somehow, her brother ended up with it. This episode is caused by a wish she made 3 years ago.

2. MMOs have a very small chance of survival. If people started to stop playing there is generally no way to get them back. A bad game dies. But no matter how bad, there will always be some fans for ANY game.

3. Sasami loved this horrible MMO that no one else likes. The server was going to be shut down. She doesn't want that.

4. The game's god (in some ways, the game itself) responded, and use divine mind control on the normal population and maintained a player base of 10,000 despite how bad the game was. The game was saved from being canned.

5. The game, in order to keep doing what it is doing, draws spirit power from the normal human players. But doing nothing more than that.

6. Sasami told the game that it is okay. That it doesn't have to keep itself on life support to keep her happy. That the game should pass on.

Episode 2 is possibly the worst episode of any SHAFT show in my recent memory in direction and animation. :(

Direction-wise, it's even worse than unfinished episode of Nadeko Snake in the unfinished state. Everything in the episode is just a degraded Bakemonogatari. All the manga faces serve as a pure distraction and not even a bit entertaining. Most of the joke are not funny at all and with it continuing for nearly half an episode, it just become painful to watch.

For the animation ...could you even call it animation? For other bad episodes, at least they maintain a bit of quality in (still) drawings, but this time they're not even trying, instead they resort to use manga face as an escape... I can't say how much I'm disappointed.

It has been a long while since I'm extremely disappointed like this.

Oh, so in other words, Haruh-... *cough*

Putting that aside...
And putting aside the wonderfully entertaining, brimming with sense, that lovely part where the characters look like they came out of a different anime ( :rolleyes: )

...It just wasn't interesting. The story moves way too fast, they crammed an entire story in one episode, and as a viewer, I'm just left... "Great..." Strange occurence of the week, oh great, Orochi is attacking?
...And the everything is settled the next moment.

When Sasami talked to the god of the game, she didn't tell the game what it was doing was wrong. In fact the human victims were barely relevant. Instead, Sasami focused on the game holding on to life like a zombie, when it is better off dying a natural death and be reincarnated as a better game. Sasami cared about the god of the game far more than the 10,000 mortals who were mind controlled into playing it for the last 3 years. I am not saying this as a complaint; but that this is just the nature of things when we talk about deities. The "common people" just doesn't matter. The humans are not the centre of the Polytheistic universe. It is cruel and lawless.