by: Gen/Esis
While Unital Ring III felt like it was finally moving the plot forward, Unital Ring IV is where the story really starts to take shape. With most of the set-up for this mysterious new world, Unital Ring, being done by this point, our characters get to use what they’ve learned and inch closer to the goal set to them by that mysterious voice in volume 1. And now that the Underworld is back in the picture, we also get to chip away at a looming threat that has infiltrated the world.
Unital Ring IV is the twenty-fifth volume of the Sword Art Online series, released in Japan on December 10th, 2020 (September 20th, 2022, in the US), and marks the fourth entry to the Unital Ring Arc.
Although there’s a lot less Argo this time around, we get a whole lot more story-wise, so let’s get to the review:
Without a doubt, the Unital Ring arc has had the least amount of story out of all the arcs. Most arcs start with some sort of info dump about what the arc will be about and the characters are tossed directly into the situation. In contrast, Unital Ring has been all about slowly building to a greater story, something that is evident by the much slower pacing and a greater focus on world-building and characters. But Unital Ring IV feels much more in line with what’d usually constitute the beginning of your standard SAO arc, but with the benefits of a lot of stage setup.
The past three volumes have largely been spent exploring the world of Unital Ring and its mechanics. From crafting, to combat, to magic, and plenty of other details. And here, on the verge of a major conflict with Mutasina, the first real antagonist of this new arc, our characters utilize many of those aspects to create a defense against this threat that looks to destroy the town Kirito and the rest have created.
While this is only the beginning, this volume serves as a milestone in the group’s advancement in the game, and for the story overall. We get some smaller examples of payoffs to some things that we’ve been building towards, and we are finally getting to learn bits and pieces of what might hide behind not just Mutasina, but the world of Unital Ring in general.
With a main plot point being Ruis Na Rig expansion, the town Kirito and his friends are creating, there are plenty of new characters being introduced and reintroduced with every passing volume. There’s even a returning character who not once in a million years would I have expected to be brought back, and yet here they are.
The cast grows exponentially with every passing volume, and while I worry it might get too crowded, there haven’t been too many examples of characters not being utilized in any way. Some have more minor roles than others, but almost everyone is useful in some way. And if not, they are being teased to possibly being important at a later time—but I guess we’ll find out if that’s true soon enough.
Once again, we get bits and pieces of the internal conflict Kirito and Asuna will experience throughout this arc, and as things get more hectic around them, so do these problems. It’s all coming to a head at once and hopefully will culminate in something phenomenal.
The Underworld once again only gets allotted a small section of the book, but in that section, we learn plenty about the status quo of the world, the troubles the world is facing, and new details on the mysterious man name Eolyne.
Most of this section was characters talking to each other over some drinks, and personally, I was down for all of it. The dialogue continues to be great, and that’s especially so as we dive into Kirito’s mind while the memories of this world he gave two years of his life for come flooding back.
While we do get plenty of information, it’s admittedly cut short as the volume comes to an end. Surely, we’ll get more information about everything touched upon in this volume regarding the Underworld, but even what we’re left with now is enough to be enticing—but as usual, not so much when it comes to urgency.
Pieces of this large puzzle are starting to fall into place, and the more we learn about the troubles in both Unital Ring and the Underworld, the more we can theorize what the root cause of everything is. But now that we’re four volumes in, you’d expect we’d have more to work with by now, but we don’t.
Again, what Kawahara does for the setup is great, and it especially works with the payoffs, but with these Unital Ring volumes becoming shorter and shorter while the time between them gets longer and longer, it all becomes a bit much.
The pace of this volume was a bit all over the place as it sped up for some of the most intense fight scenes we’ve had this arc, but then slows down to a crawl as we get more lore about the world of Unital Ring.
Admittedly, the content in this book does make it my favorite yet, and it’s a great continuation to the arc, but it would work so much better if we received more when it comes to the plot. While it is moving, it’s still at a snail’s pace and there’s nothing that has you at the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens next.
Overall Score: 8/10
