Thursday 22 November 2012

Sword Art Online 19 – The Lugru Corridor


Kirito and Leafa finally discovered who is following them; it's a group of Salamanders who likely want revenge against Kirito because what he did to a group of Salamanders in his first day of ALO. Can they beat these Salamanders? Also, what is this "S" that Recon is talking about that they should be careful of?


The episode expanded more on the game's magic system, which is basically; you need to memorize the spell if you want to use it. To make things a bit difficult, each spell is quite long and you must say it properly for it to work! I find this kind of magic system a bit inconvenient to players but after a few minutes, I realized that this is a RPG with elf-like characters and according to pop culture; they should have their own language for their spells and the like.

Speaking of spells, we saw a lot of spells used in this episode that is neither a healing spell nor a basic offensive magic spell. For starters, we saw a spell to create an illusion that there is a wall; second, we saw strong fire-based spells and some strong wall spell. You know, the traditional spells used in RPG! The highlight in this episode is the fight between Kirito and Leafa against the Salamanders. Much to my disappointment, the only thing Leafa did is to support Kirito from battle and that's about it. What she did is to cast healing spells on Kirito while Kirito is doing most of the offense.


As for Kirito, he is having a hard time fighting the horde of Salamanders but he never gives up because he doesn't want any party member to die. The scene reminded the viewers the crap that he experienced while playing SAO, that he lost a couple of friends along the way and he failed the opportunity to save them. Now comes the fun part in this episode, the high level Spriggan magic that he casted, which turned him into a creature that looked like The Gleam Eyes, a creature that Kirito, fought back in SAO. Seeing Kirito rampage and devour or slash players around is fun to watch because it is quite rare for a swordsman like Kirito to do that kind of attack.

After the fight, they were able to get some info about who attacked them and they went to the next town where Leafa received a message from Recon about something that he can only tell in real life. To sum up their conversation, Sigurd wants to overthrow the current leader of the Slyphs and prevent the alliance between the Cait Sith and the Slyphs. So yeah, it's a problem of the Slyphs and Kirito wants to help them prevent a bigger problem to happen and the episode ended with Kirito dashing towards the location where the alliance between the two races is about to begin.