Hello again everyone. Just a few minutes ago I posted my own little review of the Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online light novels, and during the course of that review I mentioned the Unital Ring arc that's currently happening in the main Sword Art Online light novel series. Unital Ring is an arc that I have some very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very... very mixed feelings about. So I'm just going to spend a few minutes ranting about the arc here, just to get it out of my system. Now this rant will likely contain some heavy spoilers about the SAO light novels, so for those who don't want to be spoiled I strongly recommend hitting the Back button on the upper corner of your browser right now.
Now, for those who don't know what Unital Ring is about, here's a quick synopsis. Basically, an unknown intelligence (implied to be some sort of A.I.) takes all of the VRMMO worlds created by the Seed and throws them all into a blender, turning them into a massive survival game called Unital Ring (or UR for short). On top of that, the character levels of everyone in the game get reset to level one, preventing them from using their best equipment from their original game worlds. If that wasn't enough, anyone who gets killed in UR has their game account wiped from the system, preventing them from ever logging in again. So basically they recreate the stakes of the Aincrad arc at the start of SAO.
One thing that the Unital Ring arc has done right is that it's given us a compelling mystery, and that's something that SAO has always done a good job with. It's an extra compelling mystery for me because the force behind the Unital Ring incident is implied to be connected to a previous villain from the series. Shortly after Unital Ring gets going, a woman's voice tells all of the players that their ultimate goal in the game is to reach the land at the very center of the map. During this announcement, Kirito notes that this woman's voice sounds nearly identical to that of Administrator, the main villain of the Alicization arc's first half. I find this to be pretty awesome, because in my opinion Administrator is the best villain in all of SAO.
To reference JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Administrator is the Dio Brando of SAO. In fact I've noted quite a few similarities between Administrator and DIO.
- Both of them are incredibly arrogant and charismatic.
- Both of them have very pronounced exhibitionist tendencies (DIO spent most of Stardust Crusaders walking around without a shirt).
- DIO and Administrator are both able to easily control people
- Both characters threw away their humanity to gain immortality and power.
Now I will concede that Administrator is a more complex character than DIO. She did actually seem to care about the Human Empire in the Underworld, and her ghost did show up to help Kirito during his battle with Gabriel Miller. So she wasn't totally evil. Still, the similarities between Administrator and DIO are pretty pronounced. I could probably write a college term paper comparing Administrator and DIO, but that probably wouldn't be the best use of my time. There is one more major similarity between DIO and Administrator though, and that's that after their deaths they left behind enduring legacies that are more like a curse than anything else; the evil the committed caused more evil to rise and also left behind deep scars that won't heal.
Getting back to the Unital Ring arc though, Administrator being somehow connected to the creation of UR goes along with the idea that her legacy is a curse. I currently don't think she's actually come back from the dead. My theory that the Unital Ring incident is the inadvertent result of something Administrator did when she was alive, but I'm not going to say anything more than that right now. There is a lot more in the arc that's indicated Administrator's involvement in the incident besides just the voice that spoke to all of the players. In one chapter when everyone is trying to compare what they know about the game world's map, Kirito and Alice realize that the world has the same dimensions as the human empire in the underworld.
Despite this exciting and compelling mystery though, there's another storyline happening in the Unital Ring arc that kind of causes things to go off the rails. Shortly after the UR incident in the story kicks off, the government agent who got Kirito and his friends mixed up in the Death Gun and Ocean Turtle incidents, Kikuoka calls Kirito to tell him that an unauthorized person was detected logging into the Underworld, so he asks that Kirito, Asuna and Alice dive into the Underworld to find out what's going on. What we get is a storyline that's so massive that it should ideally be its own separate arc. The main problem with Unital Ring as a whole is that it just has way too many moving parts. We're got two massive storylines that really should not be sharing the same arc.
Now don't get me wrong, I do kind of like that they're revisiting the Underworld. We know from the end of Alicization that Kirito and Asuna got stuck in the Underworld for two hundred years and during that time became the world's monarchs. After finishing Alicization I did very much wonder what the hell Kirito and Asuna got up to during that time, but I feel like this was a very poor time for SAO's author, Reki Kawahara to try and answer those questions. In fact so far this whole Underworld storyline has only raised more questions than it's answered. Plus the Underworld has become a Gundam series!
I mean, they don't have giant robots, but they do have just about everything else that a typical Gundam series has. A war begins between the inhabitants of the Underworld's Earth-like planet (Cardina) and the space colony on their moon (Admina, named after Administrator, so there's that evil legacy again). They even have a Char Clone in the form of a Eugeo lookalike who has to wear a white mask over the top half of his face supposedly because of a sensitivity to the sun. I'm not saying that the Gundam similarities are a bad thing though. It's kind of funny more than anything, but at the same time I feel like it doesn't quite mesh with everything else somehow.
Anyway, the main issue with the whole Unital Ring arc is that it has these two major storylines that just should not be sharing the same arc. And quite frankly, I care more about the Unital Ring incident than I do about Universal Century Underworld. The thing is we know that both storylines are going to link together somehow, but we're now six volumes into the arc and Kawahara has only just now started to connect the dot. Earlier in the arc, Kirito and his friends in UR have to deal with an evil player called Mutasnia, who manages to bend several other players to her will by inflicting them with a curse that causes them to feel like they're being strangled if they don't follow her commands. Kirito and the others manage to kill Mutasnia in UR, but at the end of the most recent volume she shows up in the Underworld working with the colonists from Admina, and it would seem that she is in fact an Underworlder.
Now I should also note that when Kirito first encountered Mutasnia in UR, he noted how much her behavior reminded hum of Administrator, and Mutasnia showing up in the Underworld would seem to indicate that there is some sort of connection between the two villains. Mutasnia could be Administrator's reincarnation or maybe she's some sort of descendant. There's some sort of connection there, but the problem is it'll be ages before we find out what that connection is thanks to this whole moving at the speed of a sloth on tranquilizers. And part of the problem is that Kawahara keeps going off on these little tangents to bring back older characters from the Alicization arc Sword Art Online Progressive.
It's stuff like this that often makes me feel like Kawahara should've just ended the main SAO series with Alicization and focused more on the massive retcon that is SAO Progressive. Plus it sometimes feels like Kawahara started the Unital Ring arc just to make more money, and there's probably a little truth to that. Actually, I found out online recently that Kawahara's master plan is to connect SAO with his other series, Accel World, which apparently takes place in the same universe but further into the future. So Kawahara's ultimate goal seems to be to use SAO to finish fleshing out the history this other series. Just speaking for myself, I hardly know anything about Accel World beyond what I just typed, so at the moment I don't really give a crap about whether or not SAO links up with it.
Anyway, the problem with Unital Ring's slow pace is compounded by the fact that new volumes of SAO are being released very slowly these days. This is because Kawahara is now writing four light novel titles at once. There's the main SAO series, there's SAO Progressive, there's Accel World (yes, that series is still apparently), and then there's this new series that he started sometime last year if I remember correctly. I can't recall the title of it, but I did read a synopsis; it felt very uninspired. The thing is this new series of Kawahara's is about to get an anime adaptation fairly soon, so go figure.
Of course my latest gripe about Unital Ring is that it's forced any SAO spinoffs out there to come to an end in order to remain cannon with the main series. Of course as far as I know, the only title this has affected is Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online. Plus AGGO could still do collections of short story prequels while Unital Ring is happening. Still, it's kind if irritating that such a great series was forced to come to an end because of a slow-moving story arc in another series. Theoretically, AGGO could start up again once Unital Ring concludes, but with the way things are going that probably won't happen until I'm sixty!
I think that pretty much wraps it up for this long rant. To those of you who read all the way to the end, thank you for indulging me. Actually, the main reason I posted this was in the hopes that it might start some sort of conversation, and we could definitely use a little more conversation on this site.
