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the beauty of sword art online as a franchise is it's an mmo series written by someone who clearly either does not understand or does not care how mmos work. this sounds like an insult but i mean it as praise
https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01JDVWSPTR4CXRQY4MS5V2ABYH
this was on my mind this week because i've been showing my girlfriend “sword art online alternative: gun gale online” (not the arc of SAO about heterosexual sword boy, but the spinoff series about lesbian pink P90 girl) and i keep thinking about the “bullet line” mechanic
in GGO (at least as depicted in the spinoff series), whenever a character puts their finger on the trigger of a gun, it immediately causes the appearance of a visible ray of light, like a laser beam going through smoke, between the gun and its target. before pulling the trigger!
it's a mechanic with all sorts of consequences, including players getting lulled into a false sense of security of always knowing where they're being hit from; a player who's genuinely good at shooting irl can press the trigger immediately and skip auto-aim and the “bullet line”
and it's also something you just wouldn't do in a series that cares about how video games actually work, because while this is entirely coherent in its setting, in the real world this is impossible to do in a non-VR game, and too easy to cheat in real VR. we don't have nervegear!
“log horizon” on the other hand is an mmo franchise by someone who clearly deeply understands mmos. however it does a bit of a bait-and-switch with this, so it also ends up fantastical, just in different ways (which i do not wish to spoil).
one idea both series like playing with is the notion that real-world skill (knowing how to aim a pistol, cook food, play an instrument) could, in a VR MMO environment, exist in parallel to and perhaps triumph over in-game skill systems (levelling etc). i really like this idea
and what's funny is both franchises are able to entertain this idea even though they have fundamentally different notions of what kind of world the characters are inhabiting. notionally one series is sci-fi and the other kinda isn't, but this is framing, they're both fantasy imo
one thing i'm glossing over here is that “sword art online alternative: gun gale online” does not have the same author as the mainline “sword art online” series. i actually never got around to watching sao s2, though i know the synopsis. maybe it's time for a “rewatch”…
if you think about it, “sword art online alternative: gun gale online” is kind of a magical girl series
@embr it's not just not by the same author, it's by a legendary gun otaku
@embr his pen name, sigsawa, is derived from “sig sauer” and he also wrote “kino's journey”
@hikari instead it has sigsawa, the guy who wrote kino's journey, and who named himself after a gun brand