Accel World

[Porcupine]

I knew about this show for a long time but I tend not to watch stuff when new. A couple episodes were free on xbox video then I bought it on blu-ray. It reminds me of Virtual-On. It has a running on forever story from light novels which does not finish in the anime. The plot is basically like us playing Virtual-On...Zaarock and Porcupine play a videogame, fight people and hope to become the strongest one day.

The game is referred to as a "fighting game." The characters are pseudo-robots and shoot, have close combat, health bars, and run away for timeout. There is a super move bar and it says Here Comes a New Challenger!! like in Street Fighter. Usually it's 1v1 but they also have 2v2 and unregulated matches.

I don't like the people drawings of this show but I like the robot drawings. Every player has a unique robot and the names generally refer to a color, then a random english word.

Scarlet Rain


Lime Bell


Cyan Pile


Silver Crow


Black Lotus


Lagoon Dolphin


The two main characters look fairly unique in that world, like Ajim and Guerlain. All these gamertags are taken on xbox live. I was thinking maybe we could make Orange Rock and Lemon Pine, write "Welcome to the Accelerated World!!" in our bios, and scare the japanese players sometime, but those gamertags are taken too!

[MentholMoose]

Sounds cool, I'll check it out!

[shamanic_beat]

I like how you start the thread with the loli, Porcupine.

Anyways, to add to the opening post, they basically play this brain-jacked VR MMO where the game world is persistent and more or less a post apocalyptic scifi version of the real world. Times flows at a different rate (think Dragon Ball parabolic chamber), hence the name. They level up, get items and special abilities, do PVE, PVP, with the latter consisting of just beating the crap out of each other for fun or for territorial claims.

It's a slightly better and less popular Sword Art Online from the same author. It also go nuts with the harem stuff later on with everyone wanting a piece of main character.

[Porcupine]

Harem stuff in the anime, or the books? The anime hasn't gotten too bad yet. Sword Art Online is good but too mushy for me sometimes, I watched most of it when it was free on TV.

There's avatars in Accel World too, like our xbox avatars, but they don't get as much screen time. Most of the avatars look similar to the players, except the main guy is a pig, like Katenasasosu's donkey. Some scenes that could have been with avatars use the robots instead.

Though referred to as levels in the show, I realized it's more like rank in a fighting game. There aren't many levels and most players don't have enough skill to get past medium rank.

[shamanic_beat]

The books. The amount of people who want to have a go at the bacon is somewhere in the two-digit range by now.

[Porcupine]

I was rewatching some old DVDs recently and it occurred to me that Karas is also a bit like Virtual-On. The characters are like Kagekiyos and Myzrs fused together. The action sequences are great but the plot tends to drag, so fast forward the people parts.

Sadly, I discovered my Karas DVD is also developing disc rot, and one of my sensitive players cannot play parts of it. I bought another used one for $5 which plays perfect, but appears to be developing rot as well. I hope we can get a blu-ray release eventually.