#Sword art online lost song rating tv

In a nice touch, these events are mostly encountered semi-randomly and often without explicit prompting. This puts the bulk of the game’s narrative appeal in the interactions between cast members new and old, told via entertaining Tales of-style vignettes, in-game events, and lengthy personal quests, some of which adapt storylines from the canon like the well-received “Mother’s Rosario” arc. If the whole premise of Lost Song‘s plot sounds like the kind of inter-guild “drama” that plays out on forums and social media feeds for actual games today, one wouldn’t be too far off. The quest for “world-first” (a motivation familiar to anyone who’s played an MMO) eventually brings them into conflict with Shamrock, a massive guild run by Seven, an idol/scientist (!) who’s taking the opportunity run a big social experiment within ALO. Being the top-class gamers they are, the crew resolves to be the first to burn through it. Still placed in Hollow Fragment‘s alternative timeline (which saw the cast stuck in SAO for much longer than in the “canon”, and adding characters like Sinon under different circumstances), Lost Song sees Kirito and his posse moving to ALfheim Online right on time for the game to debut “Svart ALfheim”, its first expansion, consisting of five massive floating islands. Lost Song falls afoul of ALO’s curse as well, with even its central story afflicted with the same sense of meandering and lack of stakes. It came to pass that when ALO was onscreen, Sword Art Online became less about exciting adventures and speculative future game design than essentially watching a bunch of nonexistent Let’s Players play a nonexistent game. This was exacerbated in the second season, which followed up an excellent murder mystery set in Gun Gale Online with Kirito and his pals literally just doing a raid and some quests in ALO for a nice sword.

In contrast to original’s grand hook of “dying in the game means death for real”, the goal of Kirito playing ALO to search for Asuna carried not nearly as much weight. In fact, Lost Song‘s main plot virtually ensures that only those invested Kirito and the gang’s adventures and interactions will find fulfillment from the game’s narrative.īut first, an aside: When it came to the anime and novels, the reason the ALO-set story arcs felt so weak was the overriding sense that the show was treading water. Let’s not mince words: Like its predecessor Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment, Lost Song is meant for existing fans of Sword Art Online (or at least of Hollow Fragment), and few else outside that sphere. Released: Novem(NA), Novem(EU), Ap(SEA), Ma(JP) Sword Art Online: Lost Song (PS4, PS3, PS Vita )

#Sword art online lost song rating tv

Can Sword Art Online‘s second game outing survive the bad omens and prove itself where its cousins in print and on TV stumbled? This puts Sword Art Online: Lost Song in a bit of a pickle since the whole damn thing is set exclusively within ALO. That sentiment’s generally held true throughout both of the anime’s seasons so far, marking ALO as a curse of sorts for the franchise’s narrative integrity.

Ask most folks who watched the Sword Art Online anime series, and they’ll likely tell you that the show’s weaker moments usually coincided with events set in ALfheim Online (ALO), a fairy-themed virtual reality MMO that protagonist Kirito and his friends move to after the titular Sword Art Online game is shut down.