How to use a herb 101 xD Kyuukyoku Shinka shita Full Dive RPG ga Genjitsu yori mo Kusoge Dattara second stage impression

Let’s start the review for the second stage of Full Dive RPG. Continuing last week, after escaping Alisia wrath and meeting again with Reona, the two exchange conversation on how did the situation became this problematic. Hiro explained that he killed his best friend accidentally while Reona thought that he was so messed up killing NPC at his first adventure quest. In the normal Role Playing game, you can restart the game but since this is an online type of role playing game, the stat of each hero was saved automatically in the game server. Therefore, the state of Hiro killing the NPC, Martin was permanent and he could not change anything about it (unless he bought a new VR machine, which is also impossible for him).

It was safe as long as you pay more :P

Reona explained to him that it was impossible for the game store to refund Hiro’s money due to the company policy. Reona explained that Kiwame was a very old MMORPG; therefore the number of players was already dwindling over the years.  She also mentioned that although most of the maps were empty nowadays, there were still a small number of veteran players inside the game. One of them was a man named Ginji, and similar to Hiro, he also killed his “best friend” ten years ago. As an MMORPG player, I understand the feeling of playing inside a decade old online video game. As you play more and more, the excitement of playing the games diminished over time. Regular player usually played the game for a month or two and the one who love the game might play till one or two years and only a very few fanatic play until the server dead. Still, having a veteran player who played regularly over the period of a decade was a kind of rarity inside an MMORPG.

Tsundere sister ..check

What I think the game lost more people was because it doesn’t let the player enjoy the game. For example, Players need to rub the healing herb in order to cure an injury. It worked exactly like a real world herb and player can’t just tap the herb and recovers them automatically like any other RPG did. Even the NPC merchant will resort in extortion if they think they can oversell their product by raising the prices (It happen because the merchant know Hiro was Martin killer). Even other NPC worked like real world human. They can gossip, spreading rumor, and even trading information about Martin’s murder. The game was just “too real” that there was no boundary on what the players can do inside it (somehow it reminded me of ShenMue, yet even it still plays lots more fun).

Even Sadako trembles in terror

Just when thing started to calm down, the horror started. Alisia who still high on avenging his brother finally find them. Hiro tried to reason with her but she already lost her mind and yes she chased him again (with the knife ;P). I got to admit the scene when she tried to hurt and kill him for real was really impactful and scary to look at haha. Not to mention that Alisia was planning to kill herself after killing her childhood friend so that they can live forever together in afterlife (which was quite a complex emotional thinking for an NPC). Alisia did manage to hurt Hiro’s hand and only because of Sharon help did he managed to escape the game. A day passes by and Hiro was back to his old mundane life. After school, his sister Kaede told him that he should stop playing video game because during his last game, he shout a lot and it disturbed her. Remembering Sharon messages that she would help Hiro again I game, he entered the game world once again only to find out that the wound he got from Alisia’s knife still haven’t recovered yet.

Machine gun punch piupiupiu

Just when he was feeling downright confused with the usage of the Kiwame world’s healing herb, he met a middle-age old man who helped him to apply the healing herb. He was burly; his hair was messy and doesn’t look like he cares about his appearance at all. That man introduced himself as Ginji; the same veteran that Reone mentioned before. Afterward, they went to the local tavern in where Hiro explained about his situation. Unlike Hiro who has a name tag of ‘Best friend killer, the old man tag tittle was inhuman/heartless (that seem like a villain titles lol). One important thing from their discussion was about the person named Kamui. He was the only player who managed to become an elite player in Kiwame. Not only that he was technically capable to deal with Kiwame’s hazardous environments, unlike Ginji or Hiro, he was also fit enough to solve most of the NPCs difficult quests. Just before the end of the episode, suddenly Ginji exposed Hiro identity in front of all NPCs nearby. In short, Ginji was basically a troll who after years of playing alone finally found someone as a victim.

During this 45 years, I managed to become a Kamen Rider too xD

As I saw the episode, I can conclude that this anime want to tell us that overly realistic game doesn’t always means that it was good. It can make us feel amazed with how the realistic the game is. On the other hand, being overly realistic made the game not enjoyable or how I said it “ a pain in the 4ss”. For example, instead of having an instant teleportation to move us to nearby town, a realistic MMORPG means that we had to walk, to ride a horse, or to ride a cart every time we need to get from one point to another. Right now I am looking forward to the next episode..let’s see what we got next week ;)