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Accel World, Vol. 1: Kuroyukihime's Return (2014)

by Reki Kawahara(Favorite Author)

4.26 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0316376736 (ISBN13: 9780316376730)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Yen On

series

Accel World

review 1: Cyberpunk light novel that's a bit underwhelming.Overweight male protagonist is bullied at school, has self-esteem issues. An ojou-sama takes notice of him and introduces him to brain-boosting, a secret feature of the neurocoms that everyone uses to get on the net. You can enter a special mode that speeds up your thought process so much that it seems like time has frozen. You can only do this so often, and the only way to gain more "points" to do so is by beating other brain boosters in a fighting game.It's...well, it's okay. It feels like Sword Art Online if you replaced "stuck in an mmo" with "forced to protect someone via a fighting game." Same power fantasy, although with a less appealing hero. In this volume, the cyberpunk aspects feel minimal, and the whole concept i... moresn't that great. Most of the situations suffer from implausibility, since you aren't forced to fight and can evade them usually by just staying off the public net. Not to say that its bad, but it didn't really do much for me.
review 2: Accel World is a story, at it's heart at least, about social ranking, be it in the real world where our Yugi-sized, overweighted protagonist, Arita Haruyuki, is strung up by his neck by bullies on a near daily basis or the on-line world where a secret game is taking place between teenagers though the use of Burst Stream, a system that accelerates a person's mind though the use of CCTV cameras.As you can guess, Haruyuki is arse bottom of the real life social scale and when we first meet him, he's really veering close to going full sociopath from it in spite the best efforts of his two friends.Kawahara is merciless on both ends, he's more than willing to show how bullying ends up screwing up both the perpetrator and the victim here and throughout the book Haruyuki is desperately trying to make sense of the fact that he has this new power and where it puts him in social standing all the long being strung along (Or so he views) by the most popular girl in school, a young waif of a woman known only as Snow Black. It's refreshing for an author, and a LN/Japanese Author at that, to have Haruyuki as a protagonist, it is far too easy to have a standard sized teen who's bullied for ether no reason at all or a very stupid one be the main character but by taking the risk of the series being dismissed (and it has been) purely on the unfounded basis that it's glorifying being fat he's probably cut a little more close to the wick than most books are comfortable with doing.All in all, it's a good read, especially if you want to see where Kawahara went after Sword Art Online. less

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