Post by Kaito on Feb 15, 2016 9:57:29 GMT
Hello everyone! I've introduced myself in the ShoutBox a few hours ago but I wanted to make it official here. My name is Chris, but I'll go by Shiv too. I'm a bit of an Oldtaku, seeing how I've been watching the stuff on and off for 15 years or more now and turning the big Three-Oh this year. I'm going to be playing... well, I don't have a name exactly but my main character is going to be a collage senior whose dreams of game design are shattered by the meteoric rise of the Nerv Gear Neuro-Gaming-Headset-Thingie and presumably its sudden appearance on the market throwing gaming as we know it on its head. Or at least that's the canon I have in my head as I don't think its ever really been explained how we went from the slow, burgeoning increase of 3D Headset technology of the mid-2010s to an affordable alternative to the Star Trek Holodeck that takes place completely in the mind with life-like graphics in less then five years. Because SAO takes place in 2022, which is too damn close to reality for this to be possible unless Akihiko Kayaba, SAO and the Nerv Gear's creator, had been working on this thing in secret with a hand-picked staff of designers and engineers and neuro-scientists and... just...
Okay, I guess I have to bring this up now, to explain the title above. The "unlikely player" thing. I wanted to join a Sword Art Online RPG for a while now not because I love SAO. I wanted to because I HATE Sword Art Online. Okay, "hate" is a strong word, let me rephrase that. I'm annoyed and disappointed in SAO for taking an intriguing premise of Battle Royale: The MMO and instead making the most blatant wish fulfillment fantasy of every 13 year old gamer in the world where their awesome MLG skillz gets them laid by the most awesome tsudere girl in the game and literately break the game to come back to life to take out the creator of said death game. What could have been a great series that talks about the sudden life-and-death struggles of players who have to take into account various game mechanics they took for granted from slap-on-the-wrist death penalties to moral dilemmas of whether or not Kayaba's threat is even real or not (it gets brought up in like two lines of Episode 4 by a generic bad girl character and never addressed again) and instead goes back and forth from being a self-insert harem fantasy of the most awesome solo-player in the history of MMOs getting all the cutest girls to a romance story that ignores the fact they're wasting away in a coma in the real world while all the actual battling for their lives happens off screen.
Okay, I know this is a lot of bile being thrown about so I will admit that while there was a few hang ups, the first 6 episodes had me interested and hopeful. (I dropped SAO shortly after the two year time-skip because... seriously? TWO YEARS!? Most big name raiding guilds in MMOs plow through all the content of a game in less than a month! Not to mention we miss out on seeing so many levels of this gigantic tower and the possible stories that could have gone with them but NOPE! They're just stuck slamming against the brick wall of the final few floors so everyone just... does their own thing. GAH!) Though from what I've gathered from other review and analysis videos, SAO has created, maybe not the most realistic, but at least the most believable romance in anime, not to mention going past the usual "will they/won't they/wait for the final episode when they admit their feelings and kiss" template. Kirito and Asuna live together, they help one another, they have a healthy sexual relationship and even get married. (They might just be teenagers but when teens are in love, they want to experiment that way, not to mention its not actual sex because its in a video game but still!) I consider that freakin' progressive for the medium! But in the end, I feel like Reki Kawahara's true calling should be as a Japanese Nicholas Sparks writing romance novels than anything in the action/fantasy/sci-fi genre.
Anyways, my hope in joining this game and playing a rather normal player with some understanding of game design though not necessarily someone who could potentially cheat the system. I mean, one would have to download a Trainer running in the background or rewrite an INI file to fool the client side server to have the new stats match the old ones but then that would mean having the ability to leave the game itself and heading to the deskto- Oh wait! I left the game to do something on the desktop! Guess I can just shut the Nerve Gear down! (Seriously, so many damn plot holes... Sorry, sorry, still rambling.) But yeah, I want to play someone with a bit of a tragic situation happening early on but instead of trying to simply survive, but also find a way to make the experience for everyone as easy and safe as possible, as well as trying to tell some interesting stories with both the mechanics as well as the people in it too and how one's perception of people change when you see their true identity and... well, I just hope I'm up to the task for such things.
If you've read all the way to here, thank you for hearing me out and hope you'll still accept me. ^_^
Okay, I guess I have to bring this up now, to explain the title above. The "unlikely player" thing. I wanted to join a Sword Art Online RPG for a while now not because I love SAO. I wanted to because I HATE Sword Art Online. Okay, "hate" is a strong word, let me rephrase that. I'm annoyed and disappointed in SAO for taking an intriguing premise of Battle Royale: The MMO and instead making the most blatant wish fulfillment fantasy of every 13 year old gamer in the world where their awesome MLG skillz gets them laid by the most awesome tsudere girl in the game and literately break the game to come back to life to take out the creator of said death game. What could have been a great series that talks about the sudden life-and-death struggles of players who have to take into account various game mechanics they took for granted from slap-on-the-wrist death penalties to moral dilemmas of whether or not Kayaba's threat is even real or not (it gets brought up in like two lines of Episode 4 by a generic bad girl character and never addressed again) and instead goes back and forth from being a self-insert harem fantasy of the most awesome solo-player in the history of MMOs getting all the cutest girls to a romance story that ignores the fact they're wasting away in a coma in the real world while all the actual battling for their lives happens off screen.
Okay, I know this is a lot of bile being thrown about so I will admit that while there was a few hang ups, the first 6 episodes had me interested and hopeful. (I dropped SAO shortly after the two year time-skip because... seriously? TWO YEARS!? Most big name raiding guilds in MMOs plow through all the content of a game in less than a month! Not to mention we miss out on seeing so many levels of this gigantic tower and the possible stories that could have gone with them but NOPE! They're just stuck slamming against the brick wall of the final few floors so everyone just... does their own thing. GAH!) Though from what I've gathered from other review and analysis videos, SAO has created, maybe not the most realistic, but at least the most believable romance in anime, not to mention going past the usual "will they/won't they/wait for the final episode when they admit their feelings and kiss" template. Kirito and Asuna live together, they help one another, they have a healthy sexual relationship and even get married. (They might just be teenagers but when teens are in love, they want to experiment that way, not to mention its not actual sex because its in a video game but still!) I consider that freakin' progressive for the medium! But in the end, I feel like Reki Kawahara's true calling should be as a Japanese Nicholas Sparks writing romance novels than anything in the action/fantasy/sci-fi genre.
Anyways, my hope in joining this game and playing a rather normal player with some understanding of game design though not necessarily someone who could potentially cheat the system. I mean, one would have to download a Trainer running in the background or rewrite an INI file to fool the client side server to have the new stats match the old ones but then that would mean having the ability to leave the game itself and heading to the deskto- Oh wait! I left the game to do something on the desktop! Guess I can just shut the Nerve Gear down! (Seriously, so many damn plot holes... Sorry, sorry, still rambling.) But yeah, I want to play someone with a bit of a tragic situation happening early on but instead of trying to simply survive, but also find a way to make the experience for everyone as easy and safe as possible, as well as trying to tell some interesting stories with both the mechanics as well as the people in it too and how one's perception of people change when you see their true identity and... well, I just hope I'm up to the task for such things.
If you've read all the way to here, thank you for hearing me out and hope you'll still accept me. ^_^