- Location
- Ohio
No...?
I never watched SAO... I can't remember when I realized it sucked or if I just got bored with it before even getting through season 1.
I love it when I'm right!
Dragon Quest Online (SAO/Worm)
I never watched SAO... I can't remember when I realized it sucked or if I just got bored with it before even getting through season 1.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Welcome!
You need the [Meet] task for your vote to be included in the tally.
On the voting discussion, I intend to try to deal with problematic votes (particularly character build votes) using some things from NetTally's plan and preference voting features. I don't think it'll be perfect, but I'm hoping that things should go more smoothly than I usually see.
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CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
Do we know what the other ones were supposed to be awarded for? Or even what the other ones were, for that matter?That's not a theory; or rather, it technically is, but it's a confirmed one. (Pseudo-edit: Ninja'd!)
In other words, we can probably yoink it from him. AI n all that.
Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
The core reason why I despise Yui is because she marked the turning point where the story went from taking its core concept serious to "We can't kill this character! She's too cute!" and the development of Kirito from a character who minmaxed everything towards his sword and gaming stats and could feasibly exist if due to poor game design all the way to a Demi-God that could do literally anything including create unique code in the span of seconds to compress a likely multi terabyte program -again, in mere seconds- into a virtual object the size of a fingernail.
And then he didn't even bother reactivating the respawn mechanic or the logout button since those would be as simple as changing a variable, likely just one number while he was at the fucking GM terminal.
And then he didn't even bother reactivating the respawn mechanic or the logout button since those would be as simple as changing a variable, likely just one number while he was at the fucking GM terminal.
- Location
- Academy City
- Pronouns
- They
Obligatory "It's not a harem." Outside of alicization, which I'm not as familiar with, there are 4 girls that crush on Kirito (WoG is that Sinon actually didn't). Of these, only one is at all creepy, and has about half an arc about her getting over it; two of the others are crushes, and one is a fairly normal relationship. It's also worth noting that Kirito never encourages it, and in fact barely notices it if at all, and it doesn't effect the actual story that much.On the one hand, yes absolutely. On the other hand it still didn't save (presumably) dozens of players in canon that were victim to anti-crystal traps, sudden shifts in boss attack patterns, or the fucked combination of both. They're primarily a method of transportation rather than a get-out-of-combat move, which figures since Kayaba intended magic or magical combat aids to be practically non-existent outside of the special location events, and the super-rare seasonal events.
Nah, Silica got a fate worse than death: She survived to ALFheim and joined the harem.
Too soon.
Silica is 2 years younger and has a crush. It's not creepy at all, especially since nothing comes of it.In a bit more detail:
Yui's chosen avatar looks like she's 8-11 years old. She was Kirito and Asuna's adopted daughter, and for the brief time where she had admin access, was overpowered as hell. See previous page for a Lil' more detail.
Silica was 12 years old at the start of SAO. Her "dragon pet" was a member of the species called Feathered Dragons. Pina, the dragon, about the size of Silica's skull and could fly, attack, and heal.
Silica later joined Kirito's harem. It's exactly as creepy as it sounds.
Lisbeth started forging Kirito's weapons after he casually broke several of the weapons in her shop. Because, Y'know, the author of SAO enjoyed making Kirito a blatantly overpowered one man army.
Asuna, like most of the others, would've been more interesting if Kirito hadn't wandered in and sucked all the depth from her. She was a front-line (the top tier players, basically) DPS specializing in rapid hits and dodging pretty much everything. Also a great cook. Reduced to waifuness when Kirito came along.
EDIT: Forgot Argo. IIRC, she's one of the only memorable characters in all of SAO who wasn't sucked in by the black hole Gary Stu known as Kirito. Famous for being pretty much the best information broker in SAO, she also compiled a (free) guide for new players when the death game nature of SAO was revealed.
In the beta, Argo chose to keep the red whiskers (makeup) given for an in-progress quest. When SAO started, she chose to imitate the whiskers with makeup until she could get the permanent marks from the quest.
TL;DR: SAO would've been so much better if Kirito didn't exist or was written way differently.
Kirito is the highest leveled player in the game at that point (iirc he doesn't lose that title until floor 75-ish) and is nearly entirely strength specced with a boss drop item. It's not that surprising.
I'd argue that Asuna isn't totally waifud, especially in Mothers Rosario, but there is a lot of that.
[1] [meet] Yui
[2] [meet] Argo
[3] [meet] Asuna
- Location
- space
The thing about the unique skills is that they transfer on death. Like Kirito may not have had the fastest reaction time at first, since he doesn't even know when or why it just appeared on its own one day. Several thousand more qualified candidates die as the game goes on, suddenly Kirito is the fastest reaction time guy left alive to inherit the move.
- Location
- A single human dimension
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Someone already beat you to saying this. I admit(ted) I was wrong.
Yeah, another girl, Alice, gets added to the harem after that. This pissed off a good bit of the fandom (or at least, a very loud and vocal part) at the time since she was shaping up to be a possibly-interesting female character who wasn't in love with Kirito.
See also: author joking about feeling like he can't write a female character without having her fall for Kirito. One of the primary antagonists of the Alicization arc is perhaps one of the only females shown who didn't fall in love with him.
See also: author joking about feeling like he can't write a female character without having her fall for Kirito. One of the primary antagonists of the Alicization arc is perhaps one of the only females shown who didn't fall in love with him.
As this isn't the thread for arguing over canon SAO, I will cede the argument and move on.
Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
This was probably also when he gained his duel weilding since one of said PKers had double axes.
RexHeller
Title Incoming. Please Hold.
- Location
- Somewhere else.
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
STR and DEX/AGI(not sure which)
There's no magic there don't need to be mind stats. Only sword skills and the stats that affect them.
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
Kayaba was too busy building Lord of the Flies Simulator 2024 to follow good design ideas.
As shown by the fact that unique skills exist at all.
RexHeller
Title Incoming. Please Hold.
- Location
- Somewhere else.
Then what the fuck determines HP? STR? That's retarded! Is it just a flat gain per level? How the hell do you make tanks then? WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS!?!
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Because the author didn't know how to design a game. SAO is full of design decisions that would flat-out destroy a real-life MMO. Unique Skills, skills reset to zero if you unequip them, familiars (like Silica's Little Feather Dragon) cost skill development to use but die permanently thereby rendering the time spent developing their skills useless, extra skills are either trap options or OP depending on how they stack with the skills they develop out of, there's no rubber band mechanic so a one-month vacation is a developmental hit that you can never recover from, some combat builds use fewer skill slots than others and as such are blatantly and obviously better in every way (compare Kirito's Weapon+Parry to Asuna's Weapon+AltWeapon+Parry+Armor+AltArmor), and those are just the fuckups I can remember fixing without looking at my notes. The entire system is a pile of dead ends that'll randomly turn out to screw you over in the second half of the game.
Those things can be sort of excused in a game that can be completed in 20 hours, where the system is well-understood top-to-bottom and developing and optimizing builds is half the fun; Diablo II is an excellent example. But in an MMO? An MMO that takes years to complete, where nobody knows what the top end of the system looks like when they're selecting their end-game abilities and there are no take-backs? It's execrable.
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Syqadelic
That's not a mountain.
- Location
- Earth
Maybe that's why Kayaba had to trap them all in there. No one would play otherwise.
- Location
- West Michigan
This is the part where I ask you if you've played Grim Dawn or Titan Quest (Anniversary). They only had three primary stats (TQ: STR/DEX/INT, GD: Physique/Cunning/Spirit), but there was a whole host of secondary and derived stats that the attribute points from level-ups couldn't be spent on.
There's a reason why I think TQ was the best Diablo clone ever made until GD came out.
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
That ain't it; Alfheim had almost no reason to use physical attacks instead of magic(which would be fine, if not for the fact that so many people went pure or almost-pure physical attacker in that game), and I didn't watch the GGO saga, but supposedly balance isn't a thing that's vaguely in the same solar system as it.
Face it, SAO presents a grim future wherein by 2024 every competent game designer is dead, their legacy forgotten.
- Location
- Poland
@Vebyast You might not have known this, but the author of the SAO light novels isn't actually an MMO player. In fact he designed Kirito based on how he thought of a cool MMO player that he wanted to be, without actually knowing the ins and outs of MMO's.
I heard that on Digibro's youtube videos. That man has a lot of passion for saying how terrible and utterly shit SAO is. I liked SAO, but even I know that it's not a realistic MMO.
I heard that on Digibro's youtube videos. That man has a lot of passion for saying how terrible and utterly shit SAO is. I liked SAO, but even I know that it's not a realistic MMO.
- Location
- in between
Imagine we use Yui to hack the heck out of the game until it's fucking perfect? or we get Kayaba's ear. That way we could exploit the new system ourselves.
The fact that they're only meant to be an excuse for marking the shonen protagonist with some extra special-ness? yeah, that's bad.
Unique skills aren't so bad on their own: Worm powers are that, too. Sure, most videogames prioritize game balance, but if you make an Inescapable Death Game you don't have to make it fair, just entertaining. For you. (Uh, been imped (a while ago. I'm such a slow poster))
The fact that they're only meant to be an excuse for marking the shonen protagonist with some extra special-ness? yeah, that's bad.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
I did actually play Titan Quest! Even loosely stole some ideas from it, though in a "This is starting to look like X, which worked in Y" sense more than "Im'a gonna copy TQ" sense.
That doesn't surprise me too much. I've met more people that could've built something as bad as SAO despite their MMO experience, but SAO was still pretty far out there.
A tiny girl, maybe ten years old, with long black hair and a white dress. She curtsies adorably.
[2] [Meet] Yui
A young teenage girl, maybe twelve or fourteen, wearing yellow leather armor and sandy pigtails. She offers a friendly smile.
[1] [Meet] Silica
A pink-haired girl wearing a red coat and carrying a warhammer as tall as she is. She grins excitedly as you turn to face her.
[3] [Meet] Lisbeth
An older girl in a white hakama, leaning on a spear. She smiles warmly and encouragingly.
[5] [Meet] Asuna
A girl taking down her hood to reveal green hair and whisker marks. She seems to be laughing at some kind of private joke.
[4] [Meet] Argo
Never seen SAO beyond the first couple episodes, so I have no idea who any of these are, save Asuna, who I think is the deutagonist.
[2] [Meet] Yui
A young teenage girl, maybe twelve or fourteen, wearing yellow leather armor and sandy pigtails. She offers a friendly smile.
[1] [Meet] Silica
A pink-haired girl wearing a red coat and carrying a warhammer as tall as she is. She grins excitedly as you turn to face her.
[3] [Meet] Lisbeth
An older girl in a white hakama, leaning on a spear. She smiles warmly and encouragingly.
[5] [Meet] Asuna
A girl taking down her hood to reveal green hair and whisker marks. She seems to be laughing at some kind of private joke.
[4] [Meet] Argo
Never seen SAO beyond the first couple episodes, so I have no idea who any of these are, save Asuna, who I think is the deutagonist.
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