Alright, so ep 8 is where I can resume watching this show. I hear tell that between the end of the 2-part mystery saga and ep 8 the only thing of note that happens is that one possibly-significant character is introduced, and otherwise it is all fluff. Would y’all agree?
I’m still hoping for a non-tsundere 'dere to be added to the main cast, but I hear tell that such will never happen 
Looks like Ep. 09 is delayed for an unknown amount of time.
Availability Information
Due to a production delay, episode 9 will be delayed. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
Looks like they just updated the Availability Information to give a time frame.
Availability Information
Due to a production delay, episode 9 will be delayed approximately 24 to 48 hours. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
It looks like the episode is already on the internet, doing a cursory google search. At least this way I know that when my friends and I group watch it, they’ll probably be showing a quasi-legal version to me. I guess it won’t kill me.
Crunchyroll has dropped the ball on SAO twice in one season??! This just gives the pirates an excuse, though frankly it’s an excuse that is maturing into a reason at this point. I rather like Crunchy, they have the best mobile app of all the anime companies and a fairly competent web site.
Ep. 09 will be up in about 4 1/2 hours!
Availability Information
Update: Due to an unforeseen production issue, episode 9 will be delayed till approximately 6pm PDT today. Please bear with us as this time is still subject to change. We apologize for additional delay and thank you for your continued patience.
Wow, they actually got it up fast enough that I could watch it legally with my anime group. Nice.
IMO they could turn down Kirito’s “god-likeness” a bit.
3 questions:
1.) What happened to Kirito’s regenerating health? When he encountered the Player Killers, he had hyper-regenerating health. In Episode 9, it didn’t seem like his health regenerated at all. He even joked that his “last few hp” could be dropped by an aggressive hug. That tells me that his regen was MIA.
2.) What happened to the “Phoenix Down” (revive spell) that Kirito gave the other guild leader; if Kirito had died in the fight, that guy should have been able to revive him with that potion, right?
3.) Why would the guild want to keep Asuna on as their 2nd in command against her will? Ignoring my question about how she made it to that rank in the first place, it seems to me that you don’t want someone commanding your troops and planning your battles who doesn’t want to do it.
Ep. 09
That was flippin’ AWESOME!
Kirito solos the boss with a unique dual-wielding skill!
1.) It’s a skill, and the benifit is Battle Regen, so one would assume it’s like any of his other skills that they’ve shown him use thus far. He needs to actually use the skill to gain any benifit from it. And as the benifit is named Battle Regen, one would also assume that it only benifits when you’re actually in combat, and not after the battle is over. I, myself, would assume, if he was actually using it during that battle in the first place, since he really didn’t have time to do much of anything before he had to jump in to save Asuna, that would be a testement as how hard that boss actually hit.
2.) Assuming Kline actually had it in his inventory, and not just put it some where in storage (you can only carry so much on your person, in any game) yes, he could have. However, logically speaking, you only have 10 seconds to use it, and if Kirito died, they’d still have the boss to contend with. When I use to play MUDs, I learned the hard way, it’s actually relatively hard to use a resurrection item a party member when you’re getting your head kicked in by a pretty powerful boss.
3.) -lol-
My roomie had the same problem with that part.
I’m still wishing that Kirito were less of a “god”, there’s no one in the game that can even come close to his level of awesome, and there’s not much reason (at least not that I read) as to why. He himself said that he wasn’t so great on the beta test, but now he’s suddenly the most badass guy in the virtual world.
I think Asuna should have given Kirito some crap about his sudden use of dual-wielding in the boss battle. Something like: “Hey, I thought you said we’d need 10 shield users to even have a chance at beating that boss, but you kicked his ass pretty much solo. WTF is that, you’re holding out on me!” I mean, they’d have to make it more “tsun”, but still… Take away his synthesized sandwiches for that shenanigan.
If Klein went into a dungeon with his guild and didn’t have the revive item with him, I’d think he gets the moron and/or jerk of the series award. It’d be even more of a jerk maneuver than back in episode 2 when Kirito gives the other “beater” his health potion and the guy dies and his death kills the health potion too.
With ~10 other people in the boss battle room, I think that they could have “aggro-ed” the boss sufficiently while Klein used the healing item on Kirito, if he had died. They showed that the boss was pretty easily distracted, it was a giant ram with ADD.
Why can’t Kirito dual-wield and regen?
Always nice to see book sales rise from an adaption, especially one this awesome.
posted on 2012-09-09 10:10 EDT
Ep. 10
This series just gets more awesome as it goes on!
So we left last episode with a dual being issued to Kirito from the guild leader of the KotBO.
With an unltimatum on the line, Kirito uses everything he can to win, but it’s still not enough and he loses, so he has to join the guild and Asuna has to stay.
Followed up, by Kuradeel coming back and trying to kill Kirito, but saved just in time by Asuna.
However, in the end, Kirito winds up having to kill him because he just won’t quit.
The end when Kirito asks Asuna to marry him was super “awww” though.
It was expected, but it was still awesome!
If Funimation gets this, Todd Haberkorn needs to be Kuradeel. Ep 10 made that. Come to think, who does Sentai have who could play a crazed, vindictive coward who keeps getting shot down by women and knocked off his high horse seemingly all the time? Watching Kuradeel is like watching Todd Haberkorn’s character in Shiki all over again.
That episode had a lot of plot shenanigans though (it got way too close to killing the credibility of its “this is a game, not a generic fantasy world” premise), but it did have one thing which sorta tipped the scales away from those lapses though:
Kirito actually engaged in a fight that lasted more than a few seconds, and he actually lost a fight.
How did Kirito use willpower/libido to overpower the paralysis? This is an RPG, not reality. He shouldn’t be able to overpower a status effect like that. If the sword could cleave off his hand, how come he didn’t lose his fingers when he was death-gripping the sword when it was in his abdomen?.
In the first episode of the murder-mystery “arc”, which was ep 5 IIRC, Kirito talks about how “fair” SAO is but I can’t see how a game where you can
control the menus of other players while they are sleeping, so you can steal their items or kill them and kill players in your own party could be considered fair. Not to mention that Kirito also said that MMORPGers aren’t fair to begin with…
Did they ever say what rank Kirito was given in the guild?
Ep. 11
Slower paced episode, but still good.
Yui is just so damn cute!!
Especially, the whole calling Asuna and Kirito “mommy” & “daddy” thing.
Ep. 12
This episode was so sad!
So Yui turned out to be an AI created to keep players psycologically stable.
Having regained her memories, she accessed a debug console and deleted the super powerful reaper, though doing so ment Cardinal would delete her.
Kirito accessed the console just in time to save Yui’s info and turned it into an item.
And Asuna and Kiroto agree, one they get back to the real world, they would try and re-create Yui.
With Yui now gone, and them having more of a reason to finish the game, not to mention how much fun Kirito had killing the frogs, I’d say we’re probably going to see them back on the frontlines possibley as soon as next episode.
Definitely. Still a great episode and it’s a hopeful ending, unlike the red-nosed reindeer episode.
I like how they cover some of the facets of MMO gaming that the .hack series failed to cover.
Ep. 13
I can’t wait for next week, that’s one hell of a cliffhanger!
That floor boss is awesome!
They do awesome battle sequences when they actually happen.
…and she did a bad job at it (as was shown). I can’t believe that there were so few people happy/stable in the game.
I don’t know how they explain kirito doing what he did, he wasn’t shown as having [details=spoiler]ridiculously good computer skills before, especially not with a proprietary system being accessed from a proprietary access console that he’s never used before. The only explanation I’ve heard for his sudden god-skill in being a hax0r was the shot of his Visual Basic. Net book in his room in ep 1. That’s no explanation. I also don’t see how they could reconstruct an ai designed to run in sao once they are out of sao. I doubt that the “code” for the hyper moe loli ai designed to run on the uber computers of sao’s servers could run on whatever hardware kirito has in his room. Also, why couldn’t all the people run away from the grim reaper enemy? It looked like they could, and some of them even did![/details]
btw how does smell work in sao?
As far as Kirito being able to access the console in the game, It was established that he had studied and admired the guy who created the game. He was also a beta tester to the game, so him being able to access the console isn’t out of the realm of believability but I can see where you might have had a problem with that.
Studying and admiring the creator doesn’t mean that he had intimate knowledge of the secret workings of Sword Art Online. That’s not a valid explanation, though from this show I guess I should stop expecting it, with its Twilight-level quality and all. But hey, at least it is watchable without an ulterior motive and decently entertaining (unlike Twilight) 
If he does know how to do all sorts of 1337 hax0r crap within SAO, why didn’t he just hack his way out of the game? I mean, since he has ridiculously unbelievable skills who is to say that he couldn’t hack them out?
BTW, does anyone else think the anime would have been better if it mentioned all the conditions of the game set forth in the novel (can be offline for 2 hours and not die, battery backup lasts 30 minutes)? Cause I was really hoping that the anime would differ from the novel and involve some sort of time skip (ie:2 years in the game != 2 years IRL), as that could make the premise much more believable, since they left out that part from the novel it was possible, but it really looks like the anime just omitted it but follows it. That gaffe got my hopes up. I guess I was just longing for a scifi anime that stimulates the brain and was willing to, for a time, ignore the evidence and bend SAO into being that show.
Sad face.
Ep. 14
Ugh.
As much as I’ve enjoyed this series, that was rather anticlimactic.
Pfft!
Where the hell do we go from here?!?
I was mostly interested in this series because of the game itself, now that it’s over and we’re back to real life, I’ve lost a lot of my excitement for the rest of the episodes.
If you want to go into the next arc clean, I suggest you don’t watch this and spoil yourself like I did.
However, the official site posted song samples of the new OP & ED with animation from upcoming episodes.