Kirito and Leaf arrive in Arun, the vast metropolis at the foot of the world tree. It seems that the second life aspect of the game is at least as big a draw as the the games stated quest.  Arun is the largest city in the world of Alfheim by far, and is completely neutral territory. Our two heroes decide to scope out the bustling metropolis and the route to the Entrance of the World Tree when suddenly....

...they are informed that they have to log out as server is about to go down for maintenance between 04:00 and 07:00.
What follows is a day in real life episode. Kirito KAZUTO (he's outside the game now) gets up, greets his sister cousin warmly and the two of them go about their day. She asks if he wants to spar and he tells her that he has a lot of things to do, including an attempt to visit to Asuna in the hospital.
Leaf Suguha (she's outside the game now) asks if she can come along. They have a discussion on the bus about Kirito's plans. He's missed two years of school and his sister has leapfrogged him and is now in high school. Kirito is trying to decide whether he should spend the next year in cram school trying to catch up or try to cobble together some continuing education plan. There is another option however, The government is refurbishing an old abandoned school  specifically for school age victims of the Sword Art Online incident. Entrance exams will be waived for this school and students will be able to matriculate with people their own age. They'll graduate 2-3 years late but be able to take college entrance exams as normal. This seems to be a good option but Kazuto is unsure. He suspects that one of the schools functions will be to do brain and psychological studies of the effects of long term exposure to virtual reality on adolescent brains. He's pretty sure he doesn't want to be a guinea pig. He's less sure he'll have a choice.

The two arrive at the Hospital. Despite being warned off earlier by Sugo, they are admitted without incident (Sugo is out of town and Asuna's dad does like the boy visiting his daughter). On the way in, Suguha notes that Asuna is both the comatose girls'  real life and online name and observes that this is rare in MMPORGs. Kazuto is surprised that she knows so much about online games. The two of them thus miss yet another chance to clear up misconceptions and Kazuto ceremonially introduces his cousin to...

Suguha is polite, respectful, formal and all kinds of conflicted. She changes out Asuna's flowers as her cousin talks to Asuna. After some time the two leave. They both have "to meet someone this evening" and no doubt reflect upon how little they've seen of each other lately.


While all that was going on...
In the virtual world of Alfheim, Asuna is attempting to make good her escape. Weaponless, in a high level "dungeon" she stumbles upon a corridor that does not at all match the games aesthetic. Finding a map she discovers that it doesn't represent the game itself but rather..
...a collection of experimental labs.

This is how Sugo's team is conducting their experiments in absolute secrecy. All their lab work is done virtually in the Alfheim online world, which of course is using the SAO servers. Now the reason that Asuna is being held in Alfheim Online is clear. Sugo never removed the 300 minds from the game, he simply stopped them from leaving. Alfheim online is using the SAO servers because they are essentially running SAO 2.0. The vast VR bandwidth needed to do these fiendish mind control experiments on people...and do them in a virtual environment is simply hidden as an extra "location" in Alfleim Online. Asuna discovers a lab with virtual reconstructions of 299 brains. From the displays, it is apparent that many of them are being manipulated to experience agony, terror and despair.

^{Evil villain is evil.}

While digesting this disturbing scene Asuna notes two monsters enter the "room". 

It seems that the avatars of two of the techs carrying out these unholy experiments are slimes, for no particular reason, other than that they seem to be an exceedingly kinky couple of pervy guys. There's really no place to hide so Asuna tries to blend in with the virtual brain jars and be very still. She listens to them talk nonchalantly about how two more of the subjects are close to having their minds completely break, and that is important that they be on hand to watch the process this time. Asuna spies a virtual override panel (it's the same type of icon/sprite as the one YUI used in episode 12) she runs to it. It has a virtual swipe card in it that activates the menu and sure enough there is an emergency log out option, Asuna then activ....GHAAAAAAA!!! TENTACLES!!1!!...

^{"Oh you have got to be KIDDING me!"}

They recognize her as the sprite from the cage whose mind they're not allowed to experiment on. As having a player type sprite in the lab is completely abnormal, one of the two tentacle monsters logs out to get instructions from Sugo, but not before admonishing the other one not to molest THIS test subject.  As soon as Thing 1 is gone, Asuna breaks morale and calls Thing 2 on his unethical and wicked experiments. He shrugs it off suggesting that it's less unethical than physical experiments on animals and that's not important now, because he is "so tired of dolls" he points out that 'doing it' in VR is like drugs but legal and his tentacles roam...
...and wander...
...and coil...
...and many blue rays were pre-oprdered after this episode.

Fortunately Asuna does have one weapon..her +4 teeth of chastity and our repulsive, evil lab tech has his sensitivity cranked up to the max.

^{What do you know? Strong female leads CAN have a castrating effect on certain men.}

Asuna's freedom is short lived. Thing 1 spawns at the control point directly in front of her and informs Thing 2 that the boss is PISSED and they need to put Asuna back in the cage, change the access code and watch her till Sugo gets back from overseas. Asuna makes one final struggles against Thing ones tentacles in a heroic attempt to reach the control point but the display is on the other side of the icon and....she's back in the cage. Think 1 and Thing 2 lock the cage and ooze off. Asuna is despondent and near breakdown.

Until they are gone, at which point it is revealed that she snatched the virtual swipe card off the control point.

^{This woman now has her tormentor's swipey card. Someone is going to pay and it's not going to be her.}

Meanwhile...elsewhere in the same game Kirito and Leaf spawn in and begin exploring the city. Along the way Leaf tells Kirito that there is now a glass ceiling over the city due to the fact that the moderators "freaked" and patched the player work around that resulted in the screen cap that led Kirito here. As they cross the threshold of the cities central zone (immediately around the world tree) YUI becomes agitated and starts calling for "Mommy!" Kirito asks what is wrong and YUI says that Moms (Asuna's) player information is now detectable and...

Kirito takes off like a rocket as the episode ends...

On the debit side, the art, animation and monster designs in the "lab" segment seemed a bit below the shows normal standards. In particular, those were some truly dorky looking monsters.

^{Seriously?..What the HELL man!? What were they thinking?}

However, the other scenes were spot on. The real life sequences were, additionally, very effective in using, weather, color and lighting to convey a palpably desolate feel.

Although this episode leaves us plot-wise almost exactly where we were at the end of last episode, it did flesh out out a few things.  The real world elements are well handled and the offhand comments about his school prospects and his concerns give just a hint of unease. The episode also does a nice job ramming home the sheer abominable horror of Sugo's machinations. He and his team are exquisitely evil.  Meanwhile, Asuna continues to give lessons in playing a bum hand very well.


5 more episodes to go.

1 "Dorky-looking monsters?"

Hey, the techs probably had to design the avatars themselves without the help of the game company's professional artists.

2 OK. That works for me.

3 The characters of the Tech's avatars are of "Slimes"(a low level monster) from the original SAO game per the 3rd light novel.

1 Nice writeup!  But several of the pictures aren't showing up for me

2 It looks like none of the pictures are missing; there are just a few extra bad links to the ultimatum picture.

As for Asuna, I suspect only her internal badassishness is available. Our Villain likes his women helpless and breakable, and will surely have stripped her of her stats and skills, except perhaps for cooking. Kirito's cheating is only working because Sugou has completely dismissed him as a possible threat. I had initially thought that the "glitch" in his login was because Sugou had set a trap for him, but if he knew, he'd have found ways to use it to torment Asuna (which would have backfired the moment she spotted Yui in his pocket, but...). If Sugou understood Our Heroes at all, Asuna would be chained to the bed and Kirito would be surrounded on all sides by the legions of Hell.

-j

3 I really hope that while spending that massive bag of haxxor loot to equip their teams from the good stores, someone is kind enough to get a few items for Kirito.  There is really no reason he should still be running around in low level gear.

4 I've had a suspicion about that odd login glitch, and the stuff that did translate across games.  I mean, a re-skinned SAO is fine, but why should Krito have access to his old stats on a new character?  Why would "old" SAO character data be loaded into the new database at all?  And how strange is it that the glitch should drop him near the one player he could count on for support?

I detect the mostly unseen hand of the game's designer. They never found him, or his connection to the SAO servers.  So is he one of the 300 also, but still has his admin privileges?  Or has he just inserted himself into the game and is helping Kirito from behind the scenes?  Respect for the enemy that beat him?  Anger over having someone screwing with his game? Face Heel Turn?

1 That's the bridge in the pic, isn't it?

2 Yes.

Our party gets bogged down with in-game politics.

No Asuna.

No Asuna at all.
OK.
Our heroes are traveling through a neutral cave when Leaf gets a cryptic message from "Recon" an acquaintance of hers in both real life and her former guild. they discover that they are being pursued by Salamanders (Fairy clan that specialized in incendiary spells). There is a battle, and, with the help of Yui, our hero uses his races illusion magic turn into a monster (specifically the first boss monster from Sword Art Online) and vanquishes the pursuers.


 Leaf stops him from killing the last party member, and after he comes to his senses decides to engage in some negotiations.


And they learn that they have run afoul of some in-game intrigues though details are sketchy. We also learn that player sprites taste like negimaki, which is a bit disturbing in context.

While in town, leaf exits the game for a moment and finds that there are 437 messages from "Recon" on her phone. His character is not dead but is paralyzed and captured so he can't play. He explains that he discovered a plot to cause mayhem by assassinating the leader of Leafs in game race. Leaf abandons their quest to try to stop this but Kirito agrees to assist her. As the episode ends, we discover that Kirito has comic effect super speed.

This episode has more questions than answers. We do find out who is stalking our heroes, and it seems that they have simply run afoul of gamer intrigues. The VERY long battle that ensued was one of the less satisfying as he seemed to pretty much pull that monster out of his butt.

It is perhaps significant that the monster is from the SAO game. It may be that Yui is pulling some moderator tricks.

Not one of the better episodes, but it's interesting nonetheless. That is, for an episode  that mostly consists of a fight, they do manage a surprising amount of pretty cool character exposition.

Hopefully next episode will have less of an Asuna deficit.

UPDATE: J.Greely over at .clue. has some succinct thoughts on this.

1 They seem to be deliberately avoiding any explanation for the stunts he's pulling, with Lyfa not even questioning his combination of super-powers and total ignorance any more. The writers are walking a very tricky line, and it may end up a total mess, but at least we already got the first half of the series.

In this case, the by-the-book explanation is apparently that spriggan illusions tend to be useless in combat because the result is based on your stats, and you'd need to be some kind of godlike cheater to pull off something that impressive. 

-j

2 Ah. That DOES explain it. 

This leads to an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, our hero probably* won't die if killed in the game, ( he'll take an XP hit and probably loose his kit) but he does have two major time critical issues (one he doesn't know about yet).
  Asuna is to be "married" (technically placed in the guardianship of Sugo) in a matter of weeks or even days.

Unbeknownst to Kazuto, Sugo is nearing completion of his experiments on the test subjects he brainlocked from SAO. He is very close to being capable of rewriting Asuna's brain to his liking, essentially killing her and making her a functional automoton..  More importantly to the world at large, he is only a little further from refining the technology so he can not only directly enslave people hooked up to nerve gear helmets but plant more subtle suggestions in the minds of people playing online games or otherwise using Nerve-Gear tech. 

This means that the stakes are actually much higher than they were in the first half of the series.

1 "XP hit and probably loose his kit" = lose

The idea that the device can Manchurianize the players without them noticing is a FAR more interesting plot than killing/comafying/trapping them.

Man, I'm really on a neologification trip today.

2

"XP hit and probably loose his kit" = lose

Yes. Indeed. It seems on the surface the stakes are less serious but any nontrivial delay and everything goes to hell. And yeah, the specter of Manchurianizational mischief being performed in the game itself is certainly there. If not now, very soon.

3 The forced competition between all 7 races is the five-bladed razor of realm-vs-realm PvP; in real MMOs, it's mostly just an excuse to be a dick to the opposing faction, but apparently in VR, players actually (gasp) roleplay it. But if one race wins the ultimate prize, the gameworld will implode. (of course, that, along with what a race has to do to win, reflects the character of its creator...)

It looks like Asuna will get some much-needed screen time next episode. While I'd like to see her hit Our Villain over the head with a chair and shove him out a window, perhaps that will have to wait until she wakes up. :-)


On a side note, the in-game fanservice makes perfect sense, since ALO doesn't force you to look like your avatar the way SAO did, but Suguha is perhaps even more impressive in the real world. If that's what she looks like in junior high, she may have to give up kendo when she reaches high school. Or switch to a different anime genre!


-j

4 I've been following your SAO posts for a while, and Monday night I finally pulled the trigger, watching eps 1-6 in a single sitting.  Last night I stayed up till about 3am (not like I would have been able to sleep anyhow..) and caught up to episode 18.  I can't remember the last time I mainlined a series like that.  Good stuff!  Of course, I'm now regretting that I didn't wait until is was complete....
It is nice to see that Asuna, even in the forced role of caged princess, is struggling against despair and thinking her way through the problem.  Next ep should be a good one!