Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-25908228-20141222101442/@comment-25908228-20150712100559

@ 14.19.157.87

" Kirito reset all of his stats from SAO at the end of the Alfheim Online arc, that's why he couldn't beat Yuuki"

Gonna quote Gsimenas on another thread for that:

Unlike SAO, ALO is a personal skill-based game, meaning that one's equipment and stats only have a minor influence on one's battle performance. And as for the sources:

Gsimenas wrote:

Volume 3, chapter 2 (real books don't have CTRL + F nor copy-paste, so I can't give you the Yen Press version page number) She didn't know Nagata would start playing ALO with her. However, due to his exhaustive and exhausting lecture, Suguha had adapted to the game with amazing speed, and she found she was very good at the game. There were two reasons for this: The first reason is that Suguha had been doing Kendo for many years and the skills learned there were very effective for fights in ALO.

[...]

In addition, ALO is not a level-based game. So despite logging far less time than the most experienced players, she was able to match up with some of the best fighters in ALO. In fact, Leafa's numerical parameters were average and lower than most old players but because it ran off a purely skill-based system, she was considered one of the top Sylph players. And another quote from the same chapter but at an earlier time:

ALO's attack formula is not complicated. It depends on four things: Power of the weapon itself, where on the opponent's body the attack hits, attack speed, and the armor worn by the opponent. On this occasion, the attack power of his weapon was almost the lowest, while the Salamander's armor was really quite high level. The strength of his attacks came from the boy's accuracy and overwhelming speed.

I truly wish that were to be the case, and it was the stats that made a difference (I was the one that started this thread a few months ago believing Kirito lost because of some other reason than a pure skill difference after all) but one simply can't argue with solid facts bruh.

@203.176.181.37

"Reki himself said that Kirito would have lost."

Quoting Gsimenas again... XD

During the Q&A portion of it, the author replied to reader questions as the characters, unless the question was directed at him and not at a character. The question you're referencing was directed at Kirito.

Here's the translation made by Tap (http://www.taptaptaptaptap.net/sao-qna-kirito/):

Q. Did you go with Dual Blades in the tournament match with Absolute Sword? A. No, I went with one sword, but I probably wouldn’t win even with two. So, this doesn't really counter the argument. It was just about how Kirito believed that he would have lost either way.