We're finally picking up form the epilogue of Volume 18, and Kirito hears of the things he and Asuna did as the Star King and Queen and he himself doesn't believe they could really have done those things. Also, intrigue: The Integrity Knights were sealed away 100 years ago, presumably because they were starting to suffer brain damage from an overload of memories and they no longer had access to Quinella's mind wipe technique. The names of the Star King and Queen have been removed from all official records to prevent any of their descendants from claiming the throne. Given the lack of any sort of Immortal Procreation Clause in the Underworld, there is merit to that position, as primogeniture would dictate that the immediate successor would also be a distant descendant, even as some of their children were still alive, which could certainly spark a succession war. Not only is the number of descendants an issue, but they would likely have intermarried with powerful noble houses, including House Arabel, House Schtrinen, and the descendants of Integrity Knights. The question is: Who ordered this? Did Kirito and Asuna do so out of foresight of the implications of their sudden absence, or was it a pretext from the Human Unification Council? Or was it because they were corrupt, as they would inherit their ancestors sinful dispositions and wouldn't necessarily be subject to the same restrictions on their behavior as the pureblood Underworlders? How did Incarnate weapons become illegal? Who is this mysterious commander of the Integrity Pilots, who resembles Eugeo? Eugeo died childless, but he had five siblings, and Rulid Village is fairly inbred, so it's entirely plausible that his great^n-nephew would strongly resemble him.
Insectsite finally gets a scene in the final chapter of Volume 24, and one of the players is Agil's wife! Of course, they are less concerned about that than the fact that a live version of The Skull Reaper has appeared in Unital Ring, and the Insectsite players need help. Despite it being much weaker than the Aincrad version, it can take off more than half of Kirito's HP in a single blow, despite him being among the highest-leveled players.
Also, Kikuoka alluded to the technology in Accel World. He figures it would take 30-40 years to develop to that level. Kirito seeks to develop it in 10. He doesn't quite make the goal of 10 years, but 12 years is a lot sooner than Kikuoka anticipated.
Floor 85 of Integral Factor was released today, and it's theme is Clones Are People, Too. We also get an explanation for how Lueur's gang knows about floors that haven't been opened yet: They're NP Cs with Admin credentials. A perceptive NPC notices that Yuuki has accepted that she'll die young, leading her to confide in her about her illness. Yuuki and the Player come to the conclusion that Aincrad's NP Cs have souls.
This. Cannot. Continue.
A question: does anyone how Argo's dialogue is rendered in the light novels or other official print works? The SAO (fandom) wiki says she has an odd inflection similar to capitalizing the last letter of a word, and I think I remember seein' her droppin' letters from her gerunds somewhere, but that might have been an unofficial translation on a dubious website.
Current earworm: "Awe of the Unknown"
Progressive 8 takes a turn for the bizarre as Kirito becomes a vampire, and this isn't cured before the end of the floor. We know it's cured eventually because he does go out in the sun on higher floors, but no word yet on how that happens. I'm also starting to think that Kirito surviving SAO constitutes Success Through Insanity.
The latest update to Unleashed Blading has Sylvie finding out that Bercouli, the object of her hatred is already dead, and that Vecta ordered all those Dark Knights and Pugilists to die pointlessly, causing her to become enraged at him. She has yet to learn that Vecta, or rather, Gabriel, is also dead, and I can't imagine she'll take that well, either. Then again, I don't know that anybody in the Underworld, including Kirito, knows that Gabriel is dead, so maybe she never finds out. Meanwhile, Fanatio shows some serious Blood Knight tendencies as she repeatedly tries to goad Sylvie into a duel knowing full well that Sylvie will fight to kill. It's not clear whether she's doing this to be a Stealth Mentor trying to get Sylvie to let go of her hatred, if she's suicidal, or if she just enjoys this. Regardless, she brushes off any concern for leaving Berche an orphan.
MY Unleash Blading app keeps crashing when I try to log in. Anybody know a solution?
Volume 25 is out, and the intrigue continues: The mysterious "Sensei" rescues the Virtual Research Society from imminent defeat, Eolyne has no qualms about disregarding the ban on Incarnation, the incident in the epilogue of Volume 18 was no accident, an insurrection seems to be brewing on Admina, and still no answers about the vanishing of the Integrity Knights, aside from Tiese and Ronye (who weren't synthesized to begin with) being frozen alongside Selka.
Gently wrap up this world like the night sky.
Also, Alicization Lycoris has received what is reported to be its final update, and Integral Factor floor 99 has been unlocked.
Today is November 6th, 2022. What if SAO and the NerveGear crisis happened in our world?
How will this affect the midterms? How would Japan deal with it after stuff like Shinzo Abe getting shot dead? Would Vladimir Putin gloat at Japan? Will Xi Jinping ban video games?
Make your guesses!
Edited by tgsr on Nov 6th 2022 at 1:18:33 AM
Xi would ban video games over such an incident. Concerning the midterms, I don't think there would be enough time to process it to have an effect, especially considering how many people have already voted. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg would suddenly find dealing with the crisis to be the most important thing on their agenda. Japan would be in a state of emergency because it's essentially a mass-casualty terrorist attack spread over the entire country- we're talking "stay off the streets unless your job is critical to responding to the crisis or you have an unrelated life-threatening emergency." Military forces would be recruiting professional gamers to help clear the game and deal with any potential future attack.
OK, now, how about the economy?
Good buying opportunity in the stock market because there would be panic selling at the opening without serious effects on the economy at large or even any company's earnings except those directly involved in VR tech. Japanese markets would probably be closed Monday due to state of emergency but up and running by Tuesday. Overall, the economic impact wouldn't be too bad because there's no major property damage nor long-term disruption of the means of commerce. Now if something like the SAO incident happened after VR was fully integrated into the economy like in Ready Player One, that would be catastrophic for the economy, far more than 9/11.
Right, SAO was basically the first decent VR game. They were still just a fad by then, they didn't really get off the ground until Kirito released the Seed.
If there was another major incident after that, though, then yeah it could tank the worldwide economy. Or well, maybe. The Seed games are worldwide, right? It's not just limited to Japan? Creator Provincialism makes it hard to be sure.
Not limited to Japan, but not worldwide, either. The Koreans and Chinese were ticked at Japan because they didn't export Seed games there.
Unleash Blading is shutting down next month, cutting short the game-original sequel to Moon Cradle. I was hoping to see more of this story, even as technical difficulties forced me to start the game over. Alas, it seems they couldn't afford to keep the servers running and the writers employed, as monthly revenue dropped to $76,000 before the suspension of in-app purchases. I heard things had gotten bad, but I had no idea they were this bad. Maybe some of the planned content will wind up in Variant Showdown, but I'm really surprised that this game got shut down before its time, just as it was getting good.
It is confirmed that the Dark Emperor Arc will be available on Beater's Cafe on You Tube. I have not heard anything about a release date.
Web novelization of the Dark Emperor Arc is now available. Not all the chapters have been translated into English, though.
Note: This is the official source, being released for free, as promised when the termination of Unleash Blading was announced.
Edited by mythbuster on Jan 16th 2023 at 10:30:30 AM
More like giant cherries
I recently started watching s4 of the anime (Undeworld War).
One annoying thing is that it's been so long since I watched s3 last year that I only have the vaguest recollection of what happened, and thus have been pretty confused going into s4. For example, I don't understand why Alice was wearing an eyepatch over her right eye in the two episodes. I vaguely recall something in s3 where the characters would see an error message in their eye while breaking the rules, and assumed that Alice lost her right eye at some point somehow in s3 as a consequence of defying the rules, but then halfway through episode 2, she dramatically rips the eyepatch off.. and her right eye looks completely normal! WTF was that all about then?
Military forces would be recruiting professional gamers to help clear the game and deal with any potential future attack.
No they wouldn't, they would just track down the owner of the game and raid him in person, seize the servers, etc. I know they paid lip service to attempting this in the anime, but they obviously had to fail for the sake of drama. In real life, they would have found him and shut it down instantly.
Edited by storyyeller on Jan 19th 2023 at 10:55:45 AM
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play
Healing arts. Alice is an expert in the Sacred Arts, and so is her sister Selka, whom she just spent six months with. Eugeo's eye also exploded, but the dorm monitor healed it before his arrest.
As far as shutting down SAO by force, how do you make sure that Kayaba doesn't kill all the hostages while you're doing that? The Nerve Gears were rigged to kill the players if they were removed or disconnected from the server for too long without the game being cleared, in addition to any dead man's switch Kayaba may have had related to him logging in or to his own life. They'd have to take Kayaba alive, torture him to get him to reveal his master key, and hope that he's not able to activate any kind of active or passive kill switch on the players before you manage to free them. The biggest problem? Kayaba was suicidal, which means threats don't work, and it would be really hard to take him alive.
Edited by mythbuster on Jan 19th 2023 at 9:54:47 AM
More like giant cherries
how do you make sure that Kayaba doesn't kill all the hostages while you're doing that?
The same way that you deal with any hostage situation. You negotiate with the hostage taker, try to persuade them to step down, and if that still doesn't work, you just shrug, go in guns blazing and hope for the best.
What you definitely don't do is leave thousands of hostages in a coma for years and hope that they beat the game before most of them die and that Kayaba is actually telling the truth about releasing them if they do.
This situation is also unusual because there's a very high chance they'd be able to hack the system and resolve it that way. So maybe they'd try that first before raiding his physical location.
P.S. I don't just mean "hack" in the virtual sense either. In this case, the hardware is in physical possession of the "attackers" (i.e. the good guys), and they'll obviously start experimenting on spare Nerve Gears to try to find a way to disconnect them safely.
And with physical possession, it's a near certainty that they'll find *some* way to do it. Hardware is always the weak link in a security scheme, and this case is a hacker's dream because the goal isn't even to make it do anything specifically, but to just make it *stop* working, which is the easiest thing of all.
For example, you could probably just disassemble the nerve gear and very quickly disconnect the microwave transmitter from whatever capacitors or batteries are powering it, fast enough that it doesn't have time to kill the victim.
The obvious question is whether the Nerve Gears are supposed to have anti-tamper devices. My assumption is that in order for these devices to be sold to the mass market, government regulators had to be convinced that they're safe first, which means that Kayaba must have created a device that *looks* safe, but secretly inserted a backdoor to kill people somehow. In that case, there probably can't be any anti-tamper devices because that would make it look suspicious.
But even if we assume the worst case scenario and there are anti-tamper devices, that is still only a temporary barrier. Ultimately, it is essentially impossible to create a hardware system that can indefinitely withstand physical attack from a skilled and dedicated attacker. In real life, people have achieved much more difficult goals with much less resources and motivation then the good guys would have in this scenario.
And of course, that's just the most likely avenue of attack. There are tons of other possibilities people will also be looking into, like whether they can spoof the sensors to make the Nerve Gear think it is still connected and thus safely remove the human.
Edited by storyyeller on Jan 20th 2023 at 10:42:21 AM
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play
More like giant cherries
Also, one baffling thing about this whole hypothetical scenario - how was the Nerve Gear supposed to have been created in the first place? Are we assuming that Kayaba designed and built every component from scratch himself, singlehandedly doing the work of tens of thosuands of people? I'm sorry, but that just isn't possible. And if he didn't build it singlehandedly, how does he expect to succeed when all his former coworkers and partners suddenly turn on him and work to safely bring down the system they created?
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play
Ace Pilot
There probably is a means to get it off but it requires people being willing to try and find that method since the whole microwave part was probably an unintended design flaw that became lethal when combined with the log-out feature being removed.
If I remember correctly one of the first episodes mentions a lot of people dying early on from nerve gear removal so chances are people tried to circumvent it and after enough failures, people probably decided to stop and parents would certainly prevent their kids or loved ones be used as tests to find out if an alternative way to get the gear off.
Also, it is rather hard to negotiate with someone if you are unable to find him.
"When I offered to make Norea my third back-up girlfriend she just glared at me and started throwing things at me.." Renee Costa
Volume 24 is out, and it reveals that Argo is moonlighting at a much more logical job for her: Private Investigator. Apparently, she's been working for Kikuoka since March, and she took the job primarily to track down a certain SAO survivor.