It's time for fairies.
Kirito received Egil's e-mail and visited his cafe where he learned about a new MMO called "ALfheim Online", a game produced by RCT progress, the company who took care in maintaining SAO after Argus went bankrupt. Kirito decides to play the game and enter the World of Fairies.
Before talking about ALfheim Online, let' talk about Egil in this episode, I love that they showed us that the adult characters in this series actually has jobs in real life and in Egil's case, he owns a cafe that opens at night. I wonder if Klein and Lisbeth have jobs or they are just students. Now for the actual game, according to Egil's description of ALO, it seems that this is the online version of Final Fantasy II, one of the Final Fantasy games I quit before reaching the first boss due to its leveling system. To be honest, though the idea of skill leveling is really interesting but playing the game itself made me realize that will cause the creation of an imbalance party and I prefer my character to have balance stats.
To give you a better picture about this system to those who haven't played Final Fantasy II, let's just say you equip Firion with two swords and you don't teach him any spells, chances are he will grow into a heavy attacker and will suck in terms of magic. Another good example is you teach Guy spells but you don't give him any good equipment, chances are he will grow into one strong mage and will suck in terms of offense and defense.
Another thing that Egil pointed out about the game is that PKing is encourage, which is really disappointing since some PKers have no ethics and such and that PKers often times end up actually killing people in real life. After learning the tale on how a group of players got pictures of the bird's nest on top of the World Tree, the center of the ALO universe and the aim of every player in the game to reach, Kirito decides to play the game with his NerveGear. Before Kirito left, Egil told Kirito that NerveGear's successor, the Amusphere is just the NerveGear with better security, in short, the graphics and interface of this hardware is just the same with the NerveGear.
Kirito's FullDive scene in this episode felt like they used the same FullDive scene from the first episode and just made some minor alterations like the level of visibility of the visor and adds more details on the NerveGear's appearance. This is when the fun part in this episode comes in, unlike the FullDive scene in SAO, we saw Kirito making his own character, something that he didn't do since he has a beta tester account that he used for the game. The character creation process is simple, after you input the name and choose a race, the system will pick your random appearance in the game. One thing to note about the scene is that Kirito just picked some race without reading its strengths and weaknesses, he just pick a race that wears black clothing and that's it.
Kirito falls in the world of ALO and the first thing he noticed aside that he didn't land in the Springgan home territory is that his stats and his items from SAO remain intact in the game, in short, he has a lot of advantage for a newbie player aside that he is far more experienced since he played SAO for 2 years and lasted without getting killed till the final boss battle. One of the items that remained from his SAO item storage is Yui's data. The reunion between the two is really emotional. It's like a parent meeting his child after all these years, even though they are separated for at least 2 months.
Thanks to Yui, we learned that Kirito's SAO data combined with his data with ALO and ended up creating Kirito's ALO avatar. What's more, Yui also stated the things I deduced while watching this episode, namely, the game follows the same SAO game engine and graphics except that their version of the Cardinal system is a bit outdated. Guess that explains why there are no vast improvements with the game's graphics then. Since Kirito has some foreign items, he needs to delete them, which caused me to laugh. I mean, he like most gamers that I know, he has a hard time deleting all the loot he got in his game!
Now that he is done deleting his loot, it is time for Yui to transform into a Navigation Pixie, her equivalent in this game. Since she is a pixie, her size drastically decreased into something that you can put in your pocket. With Yui's help, Kirito learned how to fly in this game... which is basically him carrying a controller that kinda looks like something that came from the Nintendo Wii. For Kirito's first attempt in flying, he is bad at it and come to think of it, he is considered as one of the best players in SAO!
While Kirito is busy practicing his flying, a Sylph named Leafa and her partner, Recon are being chased by men wearing red armor and they are fighting in some neutral territory. A thing that I notice is that Recon said something about reaching Sigurd and the others. Who is Sigurd and why in the first place they are being chased by the guys wearing red armor? Leafa's fight in this episode is quite impressive while as for Recon, he just sucks and dies at the end. To put it simply, he just sucks in playing games, guess he will not last a day in SAO.
While Leafa is busy fighting more of these guys in red, Kirito crashed landed and ended up fighting the men wearing red armor and not to my surprise, he easily defended himself in one lance attack. Guess his stats from SAO gave him an advantage in this situation. What's more, he easily beat one of the players and come to think of it, he didn't do any leveling in the game, like fighting other players comes naturally to him. Some final technical thoughts about ALO, since PKing is allowed, I notice that the characters just burn in flames once they die in the game. The question is how long it will last for them to respawn?
