Today marks the day when Sword Art Online incident was resolved and to commemorate the occasion, the franchise revealed a breaking news broadcast segment announcing the information. The franchise had a stream of the first 14 episodes of Season 1 leading up the exact time the game was cleared.
The segment was streamed at exactly 2:55 PM, after the scene where Kirito ends the final battle. Hisanori Yoshida of Nippon Broadcasting served as the newscaster in the commercial.
The video has him saying that the very first VRMMO game in the world has been finished and more than 6,000 trapped players have been logged out of the virtual reality, resolving the incident. To be precise, a total of 6,147 players were freed. Yoshida previously hosted many different Sword Art Online events both in Japan and overseas. A special visual for clearing the game was also released:
A-1 Pictures animated the whole Sword Art Online series so far. Season 1 first aired in 2012. The second season followed in 2014. The franchise returned in 2017 via big screen through Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale. Tomohiko Ito directed all of it.
Manabu Ono directed the third season titled Sword Art Online: Alicization premiered in 2018, and it was followed by a sequel, Sword Art Online: Alicization -War of Underworld- in 2019. Two spin-off movies, Sword Art Online: Aria of a Starless Night, and Sword Art Online: Scherzo of the Deep Night had a theatrical screening in 2021 and 2022 respectively. Ayako Kono directed both of the movies.
ASCII Media Works has been serializing Reki Kawahara’s Sword Art Online light novel series with abec’s illustrations since 2009. The light novel currently has 28 volumes with more than 30 million copies in circulation. Reki Kawahara. Yen Press licensed the Sword Art Online light novel series in English and describes the plot as:
In the year 2022, gamers rejoice as Sword Art Online – a VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) like no other – debuts, allowing players to take full advantage of the ultimate in gaming technology: NerveGear, a system that allows users to completely immerse themselves in a wholly realistic gaming experience. But when the game goes live, the elation of the players quickly turns to horror as they discover that, for all its amazing features, SAO is missing one of the most basic functions of any MMORPG – a log-out button. Now trapped in the virtual world of Aincrad, their bodies held captive by NerveGear in the real world, users are issued a chilling ultimatum: conquer all one hundred floors of Aincrad to regain your freedom. But in the warped world of SAO, “game over” means certain death – both virtual and real…
You can watch the entire series on Crunchyroll.
Source: Official X (formerly Twitter)
©Reki Kawahara / KADOKAWA / SAO-P Project
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