Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-29045088-20160714104605/@comment-25449165-20180807223806

Technically AWvsSAO DOES take place in the gameverse canon, but again it's not part of the main series.

I do like the fact that when the game was first announced with pictures and small bios of all the playable characters, Graphite Edge's voice actor was intentionally left "???", yet in the game, his voice sounded almost exactly like Kirito's albeit with a heavy modulator over it. If Kawahara says AW and SAO are not in the same universe, then we could be talking parallel universes here. Think of it this way, Graphite Edge could very well be a future Kirito but AW's version of him, and may not be what SAO's Kirito will turn out to become. They're the same person, but they're direct parallel counterparts to each other. Basically, I'm saying that SAO and AW both take place in their own separate parallel universes, with some small similarities here and there. Think of it as DC's multiverse.