Genre – Sci Fi Anime
Movie Total Runtime – 2 Hour 46 Minutes
Spoilers – Yes

A Rightstuf Blind Box acquisition, this is another fragment of a sequel anime to a series I know nothing about. Hopefully this won’t be as brain hurty as the Gunbuster 2 review. The box came with a bunch of physical schlock that is in another box somewhere, and didn’t make much of an impact, since I have no connection to the series.

So The challenge here will be to figure out what’s going on, who the characters are, and what the plot is. Lets see if I can put the pieces together.

We start with some elves and an animal person in a cabin on winter break from school. I assume they’re elves. They all have pointy ears but look otherwise human within the margin of error for anime characters. Can’t tell what type of animal the thing with ears on top of it’s head is supposed to be, but on the anime animal person spectrum this one is “mostly human but with odd ears” in appearance. After an inane conversation about the one identifiably male character being asleep, we get the opening credits. Now, I’m trying to stick with my “no research” approach as I hope this will produce more entertaining content. The opening credits spark something in my brain that went “didn’t ‘Sword Art Online’ have a plot about people stuck in a video game?” I don’t know how accurate that is, and I’m going to refrain from looking it up.

Throughout the opening credits I’m looking for signs of round ears, and the two closest are in the margin of error of “the camera angle is just making them look that way”. As the credits go on, the visuals more or less confirm a video game setting. Health bars and floating status indicators are a dead giveaway.

We return from the opening credits to an establishing shot with the futuristic date of… December 20th, 2025… Err… Well… I should have reviewed this before 2026 rolled around, shouldn’t I? Lets call it historical fiction then. Well, in 2025, we have humans with round ears at a… Well the architecture says ‘bar’, but the drinks are served in mugs and looks like coffee. But there are bottles that look like booze on the shelves. The bartender and the map of the US on the wall suggest an American setting, but the uniforms make me question. But the dialog with the bartender confirms that no, this bar that serves coffee to minors is not in the US, as his wife “used to live” there, and the following establishing shots are more East Asia.

Bartender dumps a lot of exposition about his backstory that confirms a lot of my previous surmises. He and his wife were only able to preorder one of the neurological links to interface with Swort Art Online, and he was trapped in there. All he wanted was to get back to “this place” meaning the bar, and since they are there, I have to surmise that the breakout was successful in the first series. I’m going to hazard a guess that the pointy eared scenes take place in-game, and the round-ear scenes take place in reality. Anyway, it seems that after the entrapment, whoever was left with the rights to Sword Art Online began standing up a less “permanent death trap” version that you were allowed to log out of. They’re rolling out new floors in this replacement version. I wonder if they’re reusing assets from the original and how deeply they’ve checked them for deathtraps.

Boy and Girl gamer’s motive is to acquire the same plot of in-game property they’d had during the first go round for sentimental reasons. This starts a montage of people assaulting a raid boss in-game, or at least with pointy-ears. Since we know this is a video game, and we don’t have the “in game death is real world death” trope, what’s the weight in the fight with this no-name rock golem? Anyway, they win and fly to the location of the cabin and make the in-game purchase for 500,000 in game monies, which probably cost real monies. But it makes girl gamer cry tears of happiness before getting woken up in the pre-credits scene. So I suppose it was all a flashback?

There’s some banter about in-game mechanics around some other player dueling all-comers. I got bogged down trying to parse game mechanics from the fictional MMO they’re playing. But hyping up the duelist filled the rest of the first episode of the set I have. The closing credits tell me this was made in 2014.

We start the second episode with girl gamer logging out and see she has a very sterile, highly automated room. Of note is the lack of decorations and the monotony of the color palette. Her life, as she views it, is very clearly in-game, and it’s looking like she’s starting to have health issues from the amount of time spent there. From the rest of the house, her family is rich, but from the domestic servant’s response, they don’t sound particularly close. The quiet, empty sound of the house makes this starkly clear even before the cold reception from her mother and their antagonistic meal. I’m going to be honest, I did not expect the argument between Gamer Girl and Tiger Mom, let alone to have any nuance in their positions.

Tiger Mom is very pushy, but it’s also clear she’s doing what she thinks is best to help Gamer Girl regain progress lost in the two years spent stuck in the game the first time around. Gamer Girl doesn’t want to change schools to the high-intensity program required to get back on college track. When it leaves the topic of education and lands on that of marriage, the sinister music kicks in and the argument gets more heated. Tiger Mom disapproves of Gamer Boy. After the argument, Gamer Girl goes and has a cry in her room.

I often use the phrase “credit where credit is due” when something unexpectedly well done comes along. It seems insufficient. From my text summary, you’ve all seen the scene I laid out. It’s been done before, many, many times. But they managed with characters I’ve barely met, to successfully tug at the heartstrings. I am going to admit, I did not have very high expectations of the work going in. Sometimes it’s nice to be proven wrong. I hope they keep it up – exceeding my expectations I mean, not tormenting Gamer Girl. I also have to give credit to the sound design. During Gamer Girl’s walk to dinner, the only sound you heard were her footsteps. No music, no dialog, but a very effective conveyance of the emptiness and loneliness of the real world for her.

Back in-game, Gamer Girl fights the duelist, and I have to ask what the stakes are supposed to be in the fight. We’ve confirmed that the lethality was removed from this version. Maybe I’m thinking about it wrong. Treat it like a sports movie and things work better. It may take the visual form of a sword fight, but it’s not “life or death” but “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”. It is just a game, and Gamer Girl just got a new quest from the duelist, but the request was dropped on us just before the credits.

So, I violated my “no research” rule to try to verify some details. I found out that my collection of episodes is the entire side story “Mother’s Rosario” (which I’d seen in the opening credits) and no random unconnected episodes. I’m sitting here at twelve hundred words looking at the five remaining episodes and asking whether I should shift to summation mode for the remainder or break it up into multiple articles remaining closer to the beat by beat approach I’ve been taking. Some of you Tulpae have been complaining about the statistical predominance of negative reviews in this series. And I’ve been positively surprised so far with this work.

So the quest the duelist has was to assist their undersized guild to defeat the level boss. Because real life was going to force them to disband come spring, they picked this overly ambitious goal to cement the memories. Gamer Girl points out that raid bosses usually take seven times as many players as they have. But the players who first defeat a level boss go on a monument in the starter town, and they really really want to earn that with their tiny team of friends. Well it’s not as neat as that, but close enough.

But… after Gamer Girl agrees to join this mission, Tiger Mom unplugs her connection. She was five minutes late for dinner, and is now losing her gaming privileges. So, she goes walkabout in the real world. While she’s having her sad moment in the snow unable to escape that part of her life she hates, I have to mention a flaw. The show suffers from modern volume mixing. Combat noises are significantly louder than dialog, so I end up going “Oww! My Ears!” before adjusting it. Then things go really quiet again after and I have to turn it back up. I’m glad I’m not wearing headphones.

After Gamer Girl gets her cable back, Hopeless Guild makes a run against the raid boss, and we learn that Rival Guild has been using other groups’ failed attempts as scouting opportunities to snipe the first victory. Hopeless Guild decides to go PvP against half of the Rival Guild when the other half shows up. At the cliffhanger, Gamer Boy shows up to help hold off Rival Guild. That would make it about 49 to 8 as the credits roll. Fair anime odds between named protagonists and unnamed characters.

This is also the end of Disc 1, so it sounds like a good place to split the review. I’m getting a bit wordy.

To be continued.