Well in the novels they mention that the amount he gave the leaders was about 100,000 Yuld mythril coin. Doesn't really sound like a lot doesn't it. So yeah it leads to the conclusion that SAO currency is greatly inflated since the cost of Asunas house in SAO was about 10,000,000 Coll.

As for the ep I'm a bit underwhelmed from the fight since the novels gave it more pizzaz but still it's one of the best fight animations this adaptation has had up until now so it's ok. My only peeve was that he didn't use a non assisted version of "Vertical Square" (the skill he used to finish the Lizard Warrior in the dungeon where "The Gleam Eyes" was) to finish Eugene. Facepalm about the fanservice though. I mean cmon it wasn't even described in the books. Why do they always have to use Leefa for these kinds of scenes? Well granted she is pretty well endowed but still...

I love the track used during the opening of this episode and throughout some of the previous episodes. Then I figured out why I liked it so much. It's as if Yuki Kajiura remixed one of my favorite xenosaga battle themes. I mean the comparison between the two is pretty obvious. But you know what? If you have to use one of your old tracks as the framework for something (relatively) new, its not a bad source to draw inspiration from.

Well, the fact that they have "mithril" coins implies that they might have other kinds of coins too. Supported by the fact that she was only surprised after looking inside the bag.

So this may be a case where pennies were converted into 100 dollar bills.

Hmmm. There is that huh? Haha maybe the ordinary currency they had in SAO was converted to the special currency in ALO w/ a conversion rate of about 1 Mythril Coin = 1000 Coll:D

If there is Mythril, that means there's Gold, Silver, Bronze/Copper that comes before it... Standard RPG rare metal stuff.

FYI on the currency.

Unlikely, as the numeric value wouldn't change, as if conversion was required it would have just been corrupted like the items instead; and they had 100,000 Yuld mithril pieces.

Checking back, the lizardman Kirito killed on floor 74 dropped 1000 coll. So the war chest Kirito handed over was equal to killing 100 lizardmen.

Between the floor 75 boss, and the monsters in the floor 1 special dungeon, I can easily see two players racking up that much money.

The point would be that conversion wasn't required. The game just had a "money" number that in SAO was labeled coll and in ALO is labeled yuld. However, the makers of ALO decided that for flavor reasons that should add more separate money stats that represented lower amounts of currency.

I do think that Alicia's reaction strongly implies the existence of gold coins, silver coins, etc.

...enjoyed the episode...nothing really wrong with dual-wielding and the money...
...nice dual but still want some mmo group fights...

...only thing that bothered me was that they really made it seem like Kirito was helping out of kindness...

...his goal is to find Asuna...then save her before the end of the week...
...but then he goes on these "side quests"...

...you would think it is reasonable as he will be getting allies...
...but then he goes and say that he only needs help to get to the base and that he would go at it alone...

...which then makes you think that he is trying to get more sympathy from these potential allies...
...but then he vaguely explains his intentions leaving out vital information...like for example...he is searching for an actual real person aka his wifey...

...the assumption then is because he does not want to involve others in his "wild goose chase"...
...but then you remember that this "wild goose chase" only has like 5 days left...

...nothing serious...but yeah...

Excellent fight between Kirito and Eugene. Poor Kirito, you charms on women still gets you into trouble. lol

10 out of 10.

anyone have the voice actress for the cait sith leader? She just had a few lines, but was wondering it was a noteworthy 'cameo' va or not.

Let's put some math. Even if it doesn't apply to normal players, in the previous EP it was said that defeating a race leader would give you 30% of his money. Here Eugene wasn't the Salamander leader, but his right hand. If it were true that Kirito got those 100,000 mythril coins, enough to completely outfit both Sylphs and Caitsiths to take on the World Tree, it would mean Eugene alone had enough money to outfit 6 races and get some change, and don't mention his brother the Salamander leader. If they had so much money why haven't they equipped their whole race with Ancient Weapons?

Let just leave it as most of that money coming from SAO data.

Seems like people are forgetting something, there's a difference between saying Yurudo and Mythril Yurudo coins. Because people might say "Kirito got 50k yurudo from a single fight in the previous episode, giving the leaders 100,000, isn't that a bit low?". But remember that in fantasy settings RPGs, you have currencies, metals and different denominations, just like in real life you have bills in different sizes . Which means that 1 Yurudo might be the equivalent to lowest denomination or 1 bronze coin. And silver, gold, mythril, platinum, unobtanium and whatever has different denominations usually multiples of 10, 100, 10000 etc. Here he's giving 100,000 Mythril coins, just like there's a difference between saying I give you 100,000 dollars and I give you 100,000 Benjamin Franklin bills.

Yup, when I heard the longer battle version in the Ep. 13 boss fight, right away I said it was a basically copy/paste of one of her Xenosaga's themes and made that comment on another blog. And someone copy/pasted my comment here as his lol. And now that I shifted through the soundtracks now I remember where the chorus in SAO's battle theme came from, it's Promised Pain from Xenosaga III, like 3-4 verses and the music are almost the same.

...i could understand Kirito's harem during the SAO arc...and thats cool...
...but if i remember correctly...you can choose your gender in ALO...which now...aint so cool...


...apparently listed as Saitou Chiwa...Akemi Homura and Senjougahara Hitagi? ...sounds like her...

Saito Chiwa is the VA of the cait sith leader (Rue, Alicia). She's also the seiyuu of Akemi Homura from Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica and Hitagi Senjougahara from Bakemonogatari. Basically, she is a noteworthy cameo as she has a long history of voice acting :)

http://myanimelist.net/people/61/Chiwa_Saito

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Anyway, well 5 more episodes to go, and things are great as always. Love the fight with Eugene. There is inconsistency in Kirito suddenly using dual wield, and it wasn't explained in the anime, but that's the problem with producing animes based on light novels (it's very difficult to fit everything from a novel into an anime. Budget is an issue too). Basically, I would read the novel to have a better understanding of why that is so.

And Asuna has made her escape, so all ideas of Kirito saving her from the cage are out. They'll probably meet somewhere in the World's Tree, though.

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I hope we get to see more of the catgirl in the later episodes. Give Yui a pet kitty at least. :p

That being said, will Kirito always choose male for whichever future games he jumps into?

No point in hoping for a gender-bender kirito?

A trap probably... muhahahaha....:heh:

...second season or perhaps sword art offline?

...going by the second picture...looks like kitty found more than she bargained for...

Very disturbing thoughts here, considering the ratio between female and male gamer and how often males play as female.

[mod edit: remove allusion to future content]

yes, in SAO his name is in katakana "キリト" while it is in romanji "Kirito" in ALO

When was Kirito ever with an Undine???

This is by far the best fight scene of the series.

And oh, more fan services. Yay?

He wasn't. The guy was lying to cover for him. The moral of the story being to make good friends with your enemies when you have nothing against them (which he's consistently been doing).

Hilarious bluff by Kirito though. When things are bad might as well go for broke and see what happens :heh:.

Kirito is literally a god in this game.

Handsome, powerful, smart, and rich enough to fund a military. No wonder Lyfa succumbed into Kirito's charm.

Also, I am totally speechless when I saw Sigurd had 2 semi-naked girls sitting on his lap, and other players were offering their tributes to him. Are they really a player? I can understand if this is a real-life, but to degrade yourself into a slave just because someone is stronger/influencial than you in MMORPG is simply just make no sense.

More likely they were NPCs.

I was surprised by how very bad this episode was. I think it's the worst episode in the series so far, and by a long way. I liked the fight scenes and the animation, but the problem was in the dialogue, with the way Kirito acted and the way people treated him.

- Kirito is awfully perky and relaxed for someone who's on such an important mission. He's on a strict time limit for saving Asuna, here!
- Leafa appears to think there's no chance of victory, but once she gets to the meeting place, Kirito's standing in front of the group and she's all "But the one thing I can say is that our fates depend on him". And then, later, when the leaders are thanking her, she says "I didn't do anything. You should thank Kirito-kun." That's right, she didn't do anything. But it all seems very contrived.
- While it was a good fight, the one-on-one thing seemed a flimsy pretext for allowing Kirito to win and stop the Salamanders.
- Kirito is the best fighter Eugene has ever seen. (Granted, I suppose he should be excellent, given his time in SOA.)
- Leafa says "You're insane, you know?" to Kirito, and he replies with a super cheery "I get that a lot".
- Kirito gets told "I can't believe you came up with that on the spur of the moment." He replies, ever-perky, with "Whenever I have a bad hand, I always raise the pot". Spare us from the witty self-praising one-liners, man. Spare us.
- Then Kirito gets praised for how strong he is, etc, and then he whips out a large fortune of money...
- The Sylph and Cait Sith leaders are both all over Kirito, complete with boob-squishing his arm. And Leafa spends much of the episode completely mesmerised with him.

In short, this ep just had far too much by way of moments where Kirito was amazing and everyone thought so. It was complete overkill. It made Kirito look insufferably perfect, with everything that happened carefully arranged so that he had every possible ounce of praise from nearly everyone, and nobody else got to do anything at all other than be wowed by him. That was just horribly, horribly written. In previous eps, although it is clear that in many ways SOA is a wish-fulfillment series, it was never this blatant.

Thank goodness for Asuna getting a scene near the end. I'm sure the next ep will be a lot better.

Amazing. These posts are in essence describing the same thing. Guess which one will provoke more 'reaction' from fans :heh:

One thing I can say is to just enjoy the show. And by show I mean Oppai. This is Sugus Arc Oppai afterall. ;)

:heh: True!

This was the first ep where, in my opinion, the flaws outweighed the positives to the point where it wasn't enjoyable to watch. (I was too busy cringing over the writing!) But I hope it'll be the only ep in the series to be that way.

... ALO stands for All Leafa Oppai, (all the time)?

Two more girls. G-Geez, Kirito-kun is such a playboy... >///< Soon he will have a harem out of all cute VRMMORPG girls...

I'm kinda disappointed that Eugene vs Kirito fight didn't show their HP bars at all during fighting, where it's just pure action. Makes me wondering, how much HP remaining from them when they got some damage from their opponents?

:heh:What is the artist thinking when he inserted the pig. I wonder if the pig is a sign of something.

I have to agree with you regarding the flaws outweigh the positives. I rated it a 7 since I only enjoyed the fight. It would have been nice to have some form of explanation within the narrative. It would have helped the anime only viewers immensely.

The series needed this episode. Y'know...something where something interesting happens.

But seriously, what's with the pointless fanservice? It feels so shoved in that it's jarring.

One question I have about this episode: why didn't Kirito obtain Eugene's Gram after killing him? In the previous episode they stated that he got the equipment of the Salamanders he defeated. Is this explained in the novels?

The loot will be random from typical mmorpg experience

It funny because I think this is probably the best episode of this arc considering I haven't been enjoying this arc all that much and could have used an episode where I can just switch off my brain and enjoy a spectacular fight. And now I know where the budget for Shin Sekai Yori went to...

Wow, this episode is the boss thanks to Kirito... again!

Not only he can transform into a freaking monster from last week's episode, but his dual-wielding skills are back! Amazing! Still, at least he wasn't laid by either Sakuya or that Cait Sith leader.

Although Asuna manage to escape, does this mean that Oberon might capture her again or successfully escapes on the next episode?

You made it sound, like the imouto in red pajama's fanservice was needed. They just had to do it, since Luu and Sakuya just made their appearance. Remember how it was with Sillica? First time and they already shown her in underwear.... baka producers. >///<

I think I've corrected this many times now, but in the anime, this is not the case. In both SAO and ALO, Kirito is written in Romaji as just "Kirito". There is no other use of Kana, etc.

On this one point, I actually thought they demonstrated the opposite rather well. At the very beginning of the episode, they fly out and look at the world tree, and Kirito seems conflicted and all the more in a hurry, and by the end of the episode he explains that he just wants to get to the tree and won't wait for the army. I think he's obviously composed because he knows he has a massive skill advantage, but his attitude at the beginning was more like "let's hurry and get this done (because I've got more important things to get to)" to me.

(And keep in mind that he doesn't know he actually has to "save Asuna". He has to go try to see her, if she's even there.)