Well, I’m definitely starting to lag quite a bit. Hopefully I can catch up.
This episode is the unexpected onsen episode. OK…
We begin the episode with…
Meet Dudu. He’s the Grinder NPC. You add Grinders and pay a fee to attempt to upgrade your weapons. The first few levels are painless enough, but soon enough the Meseta cost ramps up, as does the failure chance. Luckily there’s no chance of losing your weapon, but you could drop 1 or 2 levels, resulting in a waste of Meseta. He is the single greatest Meseta sink in the game. Fuck Dudu. FUCK HIM.
And while we’re on Dudu, interesting trivia bumper we have for this episode…
Seriously, google the phrase “Dudu is the final boss,” or some variation of that. People have been saying this for years.
The gang arrives at an onsen run by the couple who play Izumi’s friends, Last Samurai and Yumiko. For the most part, Itsuki refers to them by their player names, not real names. He’s starting to lose his sanity, isn’t he?
We learn that Itsuki’s grades have slipped recently, as he’s been spending more time playing PSO2, and it reflects poorly on Rina, who promised the board that PSO2 wouldn’t affect Itsuki’s grades. Partially, she feels guilt for introducing Itsuki to PSO2 in the first place, but I can’t help but feel that her priority is in making sure they don’t take PSO2 away from her.
Itsuki doesn’t have much time for play during his trip since Rina gave him a shitload of homework to do. We see one of the girls in the student council talk to him and complain about how much Rina is favoring him. It initially comes across as the anime randomly trying to turn this into a harem by having her get closer to Itsuki, but then she abruptly leaves without any change in relationship. It’s… honestly kinda frustratingly pointless.
Eventually, Itsuki finishes his work and goes for a late-night soak. He bumps into Last Samurai, who tells him about an outdoor onsen. There, he finds a device (I hesitate to call it a Vita since this is in the future and it looks very little like a Vita) in a plastic bag, apparently left by Last Samurai for Itsuki to use. That is a man who has problems.
Itsuki logs on briefly before he’s interrupted by… surprsingly, Aika, who didn’t make the trip and wasn’t in the episode until now. She just randomly showed up. And for once… I don’t mind. Because she’s naked.
Rina shows up on the other side and has a heart-to-heart with Itsuki briefly. We cut to Last Samurai logging in on his portable device when a mysterious dark aura appears.
He lets out a scream, and Aika jumps to the rescue. Immediately. And I now love her for it.
Everyone finds Last Samurai next to a broken device. He babbles something about a Darker jumping out of his device and attacking him before the Darker gets beaten by a mysterious stranger. But since there are empty beer cans nearby, his wife assumes he got drunk and is seeing things.
Of course, we know that this WASN’T a drunken vision and it really happened. So it’s plainly obvious that Aika probably leaped out of the game to hunt other Darkers that leaped out of the game.
…okay.
We’re SIX episodes in now. Are we FINALLY going to address this, or do we plan on dragging this out for another four episodes before people start actively fighting the Darker threat and figure out what the fuck is really going on?