It’s never a surprise that there are a lot of anime featuring virtual reality games. Examples are Ragnarok, .hack, No Game No Life, Sword Art Online and many others. Accel World (in short for Accelerated World) is also this type of anime where the protagonist, Haruyuki “Haru” Arita, a short, overweight boy who is always a subject for bullying at their school therefore spends his time on virtual reality game. The set up of their story is somewhat in the near future where they are so advanced, they have virtual keyboards and Neuro Linke where they plug the wires to their necks and able to mentally communicate and/or exchange files or ideas and at the same time play virtual reality games, which is very cool.
Our main guy is good on virtual reality games but there is one kick-ass player from their school as well, which is Kuroyukihime, a popular girl in their school and at the same time, the student Council Vice-President. Haruyuki attracted Kuroyukihime’s attention when he kept playing a virtual reality game of squash with unbelievable scores where his character is a cute pink pig. I just have to take a note on that.
Because of his ability, Kuroyukihime introduces Haruyuki to Brain Burst, which is a secret program that is able to accelerate the human cognitive process to the point at which time appears to stop. Not only that, it is also an Augmented Reality Massively Multiplayer Online (ARMMO) Fighting Game where people fight each other in fierce duels in order to obtain Burst Points which can be spent for acceleration abilities in the real world. Their ability/skills are the ones who chooses the character for them. Haruyuki takes the name of Silver Crow while Kuroyukihime’s name is Black Lotus. Their adventure started with the objective to defeat the “Six Kings of Pure Colour”. Along the way, the are able to gather trusted allies, confront difficult enemies and at the same time, their bond grows stronger while working to attain their ultimate objective… and that is to reach the highest in-game level and meet the game’s creator.
The anime series started on April 6, 2012 and ended on September 21, 2012 but last July 23rd, they had a limited theatrical run in Japan for the movie Accel World: Infinite Burst. Due to the anime series’ and manga’s success (manga is still on going), fans were really excited to watch what the movie is about. Unfortunately, it turned out that about half the feature was a compilation/recap of the 2012 TV anime, much to the surprise and disappointment of theater goers, in which they had openly expressed on social medias. In short, if you have not seen the anime series or read the manga version and you decided to watch it, you won’t have any idea what the hell is going on in the movie.
It’s such a shame but if you’d like to really appreciate Accel World, you can watch the anime series through online streaming for free, such as the website Hulu.
