When I watched episode nine of Sword Art Online II, I couldn’t help but think of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Gamesseries. A young boy and girl thrown into a circular arena featuring a variety of terrains and despite knowing that they will have to fight to the death eventually, they team up to try and stop a bigger, more threatening foe. Except unlike Peeta and Katniss, Kirito and Sinon don’t have to try and fake a romance – the show’s fans do that for them.
The map of the Bullet Of Bullets tournament is awe-inspiring. We’ve seen the competitors fight in the depths of forests and in barren mountain ranges and now, post apocalyptic cities. However, the darker colours probably add more to the atmosphere than anything else in the episode.
I don’t know about you, but if I witnessed someone being murdered in front of my eyes, I’d probably be at least a little freaked out. Yet Kirito and Sinon didn’t bat an eyelid when Pale Rider becomes Death Gun’s latest victim. At the end of last week’s episode, Kirito was screaming at Sinon to fire and avoid a tragedy, but it no longer bothers him now that it’s happened? Wwouldn’t it have been more beneficial to the investigation for Kirito or Sinon to defeat Pale Rider’s avatar before Death Gun could deliver the real-world-fatal shot? And then, any concern they have about their own safety is thrown out of the window once they decide to team up and go after a killer whose true method is still unknown! I mean, if I was playing a game and was told that a player had the ability to kill someone in real life by killing them in-game, I think I’d just log out, wouldn’t you?
One little thing that irked me was Klein saying that Kirito “probably” fought on the front lines against Laughing Coffin in Sword Art Online, when flashbacks have clearly shown that the two of them were on the front lines along with Asuna.
One a more positive note, I loved the choreography of the action scenes. In particular, when Kirito and Sinon team up to take out a player who I’m convinced can only say “No way!”, the camera angles used during the brief brawl gives the illusion that simple movements like Kirito swinging his beam sword to deflect bullets and Sinon falling to the ground to prepare her sniper rifle are far more impressive than they actually were.
To be honest, I felt that after the previous episode, this instalment of Sword Art Online II had a lot of potential to be truly heart-stopping and the events in the episode did play out as such for the most part, but I was let down by what I see as a lack of emotion. I would have easily preferred seeing Kirito and Sinon having to come to terms with what they had witnessed, as opposed to Klein and the ALfheim gang regurgitating facts about Laughing Coffin.
Review Taken From Here
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