Hello. Reki Kawahara here. Thank you very much for reading "Sword Art Online: Unital King".
This story was proposed as a special mini-story to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the SAO games. The setting and rules are a bit different from the light novels, so I wanted to give a quick breakdown.
The first game, "Sword Art Online: Infinity Moment", was released in 2013 by Bandai Namco Entertainment. At the time, RPGs based off light novels were not all that common, but thanks to stellar efforts from producer Yosuke Futami and his team, as well as the support of every SAO fan, the game was a smash hit, which led to the successive release of smart phone and arcade games over the following 10 years. As a huge gamer myself, this was a great honor.
And as a result, the SAO games became an independent world of their own that could very well be called their own universe. The SAO game universe has many differences from the light novel universe, including many charming original characters. But it also gave new life to characters from the source material, like Eugeo and Yuuki. There are also other games using The Seed Connector that aren't mentioned in the light novels, among all sorts of other differences, big and small.
But with the release of "Sword Art Online: Last Recollection" in 2023, what would be the tenth year in the story of the game-universe, we brought the game universe to a resounding finale, detailing what happens to our characters in the epilogue. And one year after that, in 2024, a new title, "Sword Art Online: Fractured Daydream" is scheduled to be released (I'm writing this in September). This one, however, is based off the light novels, so it does not take place in the game universe.
Okay, that was a long preface, but basically, I started writing the material for this anniversary story a bit after Last Recollection was released and the game universe came to a close. It was a spectacular ending, but there was a lingering melancholy in my heart...a desire to give a proper farewell to the characters from the game universe, so I decided to have another big battle in the game universe that takes place after Last Recollection! Anyway, that was the impetus behind writing Unital King.
I think some of you already know this from the title, but it's a play on the name of the "Unital Ring" arc currently running in the light novels...or more like a parallel expansion. In the Unital Ring arc, players from all the The Seed Connector games are sent to a giant world, and in Unital King, all the players from The Seed worlds are assembled to fight a giant. But this isn't the end; it's merely a prelude. And just like in the light novels, this game-universe story will unfold into a larger epic akin to Fractured Daydream...or at least I hope it will. But that's just the self-indulgent fantasies of this series creator speaking. Sadly, I doubt I will be able to write that much, but it is my hope that you all can spread your wings and fly in a fantasy of what became of the scanned memories of Kirito and the rest of the cast while Unital King incident was underway.
I guess I should also touch upon why I decided to set this story in Gun Gale Online.
The GGO-motif game "Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet" was a rarity among SAO games because the hero of the story was not Kirito, but an original character. This character does not appear in the other series, but this boy (or girl) is a very beloved character among myself, many readers, and the gamers. So I wanted them to be the main character of this 10-year anniversary story, with ArFA-Sys as the costar. Incidentally, though this character uses masculine pronouns, their gender is not specified, so I hope that those of you who played Fatal Bullet will remember this hero's many adventures as you read this story.
Also, since the story is set in the game-universe of GGO, the depictions of the game mechanics follow SAOFB, not the novels. I did my best to remember the skills and equipment as well as the speech-styles of the original characters, double-checking glossaries to replicate everything as faithfully as I could, but I think you'll find some discrepancies and differences with FB here and there. In that regard, I humbly ask for your forgiveness.
Okay, this was supposed to be an afterword, but it turned into more of a string of explanations and excuses. Let me say just one more thing.
As for how the story ends... I actually like for some things to remain a mystery, but when I was reading over the story for my revisions, I realized it was just a bit too cruel to not reveal what the prize for defeating the boss was...so I'll tell you here.
Our hero, who spectacularly defeats the Unital King with the help of Kirito and the others, hears a voice, asking him/her what he/she wishes for. If the hero said, "I want to rule over GGO" or "I want 5,000 credits," the wish would probably have been granted. But of course that's not what our protagonist would wish for, so he/she asked for every player who fought in the event battle to receive a reward. And in the end, our hero accepts a large sum of cash and EXP in object-form as a memory chip. The players who participated in the three-level rocket get a bigger cut, with the remainder equally distributed among the rest of the players. But since Kirito was the only ally not around when these prizes were distributed (he had logged out to contact Yui and Kikuoka) he lost out on the prize, and the story ends with our hero apologizing... So that's the gist of it.
I'm sure that not long after this happens, the bigger crisis breaks out in full force, sending Team Kirito, Team Strea, and our hero off to new battles. And just maybe, yet another fight awaits them beyond the future depicted in Last Recollection.
As long as the characters live on, new adventures will find them. The SAO game series took 10 years to teach us all that lesson.
Once again, congratulations on 10 years. And thank you to the many people who helped make it happen.
Reki Kawahara, September, 2024
