This is an article about the VRMMORPG by the same name as the entire series.

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Summary

Sword Art Online is the first-ever virtual-reality massive-multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Kayaba Akihiko and produced by Argus along with the FullDive compatible NerveGear. The game is set on a skyborne hundred-floor castle called Aincrad, and is designed to be beatable.

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Gameplay

Main Menu Window

The main menu, popping up as a player would put their right index finger and thumb together, was the top level of all in-game interactions. In the novel, the menu is styled as a bright purple rectangle, while anime has the interactive laconic white and yellow. Player data and inventory, social data and actions, the messaging system, and the maps and quests were available as primary actions, with a chart and explanation to the left and the submenus with icons to the right. The selected primary action would move to the top and open the submenus.

The menu structure was as follows (most primary action names are unofficial):

• Player is the default screen when the menu pops up.
  • Items opens a scrollable pop-up menu on the left listing all of the player's items, and tapping on an item materializes it in front of the player. Having too many items makes the window turn red.
  • Skills opens a scrollable pop-up menu with the player's skills.
  • Equipment
    • Weapons (has a sword icon)
    • Equipped (has an armor icon)
    • Accessory (has a necklace icon)
• Social
  • Party opens the options Create (作成 sakusei), Invite (招待 shōtai), and Dissolve (解散 kaisan).
  • Friend opens the list of player's friends, and selecting one pops up Message Box, Position Check, and Profile. The dead friends are shown in grey.
  • Guild
• Communications flashes when new messages are available. A player cannot receive the message if they are in a dungeon.
  • Befriend allows sending friend requests to other players.
  • Trade allows to trade items with other players, or just to show one's items.
  • Duel allows to send Duel requests, and the duel mode is picked by the challenged player.
  • Marriage handles sending marriage and divorce requests.
• Navigation
  • Dungeon Map is the local or indoors map.
  • Quest opens the quest log window.
  • Field Map is the global floor-wide map.
• Settings
  • Option
  • Help - selecting this lets the player contact the GM in the left-side window.
  • Logout - disabled for the official SAO launch.

Equipment

There were various available types of equipment in SAO, including weaponry, armor, clothes, and more. There were ten possible points on the player avatar's body to wear the equipment on: their hands, head, arm, torso, wrists, and so on.

The equipment was procured either from loot drops, by crafting it, or by purchasing it off the NPCs. Player-made equipment was generally the toughest, apart from certain rare monster drops.

Level System

A player's power was determined by their level in SAO. Gaining a level enveloped the player in golden light, and three stat points were given for spending on either strength or agility. There was no level cap in SAO.

The skills needed to be used to level up, and a skill was considered complete if it reached a skill level of 1,000. Skill leveling would sometimes unlock more skills; for example, the One-Handed Sword training unlocked the Two-handed Sword and One-handed Rapier skills.

Combat

Parameters

In SAO, damage calculation was derived from several factors. Those included the hit efficacy (a direct hit or a scratch), the player's skill level, the Sword Skill used, the weapon's stats. It was more complicated than it is in ALfheim Online.

A weapon had the following stats describing its capabilities: Sharpness, Quickness, Accuracy, Heaviness, and Durability. The NPC or playing character smiths could upgrade it by allocating the +1 or +2 bonuses to the weapon stats. The players used a short way to describe a weapon's bonuses. For example, "2S1Q1A" would mean the weapon had +2 to its Sharpness and +1 to its Quickness and Accuracy each.

The weapons' specific stats were usually unseen until it was Appraised, and the sum of the bonuses alone was shown. Kirito's "Anneal Blade +6" was in fact "3S3D".

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References

Sword Art Online - Fan Wiki