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Old 2012-07-15, 10:49   Link #287
Kaioshin Sama
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Neither Here nor There
Age: 39
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The second episode of Hype Art Online was pretty interesting if not quite what I expected. It's obvious a lot has happened since the game started and everyone that's still alive is a little further ahead, especially so the beta testers, but the guy that interrupts Diabel's speech seems to think that people like Kirito stole all the good experience and loot at the expense of the non-beta testers and that they should pay for it since they basically abandoned them to die when they could have partied up and lead them to a better position.

Kirito seems pretty regretful about his actions (at least initally), but that guy expecting them to basically face a lynching mob and give up all they worked to earn (they still had to fight for it) seems way to extreme. People like that are dangerous in these types of survival scenarios because even though they might have a point their attempts to unrelentingly purge and redistribute also wastes valuable human resources. Yes I am making a slight Stalinist comparison here.

The conversation with Asuna was the slow part of the episode and her whole presence raises so many questions. How can someone be hungry in a virtual world? How does eating virtual food satiate that hunger? How is she so much quicker on the attack than others? Is it because of her stats? Builds? Class? Her own instincts? If so how? What made her choose to party up with Kirito? What made Kirito take such a shining to her and decide to party up with her? The episode doesn't do much to address any of these nagging questions, but I hope to have at least some of them explained to me later.

The boss fight definitely felt like the standard MMORPG boss fight tends to go albeit far less grindy. The twist that the Kobold boss has been buffed since the beta version complicates things by killing that Diabel guy. What a waste of a great voice actor in Nobuyuki Hiyama and what sad music for a guy we barely knew. Oh well as expected Kirito and Asuna team up to beat the boss who seems to be able to break the chain of attack at random (am I thinking about this too hard in the context of MMO fighting mechanics?), but what I wasn't expecting was the whole beater thing being a portmanteau of Beta and Cheater. The Japanese sure love their portmanteau's.

Also what I wasn't expecting was Kirito to basically go "check it out I'm actually a dick! Like my awesome new item, here I'll show it off right in front of you!". I'm not exactly sure what revealing all that was supposed to accomplish or if he just lost it, but it was a bit out of the blue to say the least. Also now that I think of it the abrupt switch to Asuna being all ditzy with Kirito as they walked away after such a tense situation didn't exactly paint either of them in a very positive light. I guess they really truly do not think all that much of the other players or their situation. Might have a group of anti-heroes on our hand at this rate.

Pretty good followup, but I still have a lot of questions lingering over the way the world is supposed to work and what the deal with some of our characters personalities and reasonings are, but there's still plenty of time to address that.
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