-made it sound as though AH as a factor of any (strength / speed / defence) was completely invalid (if that wasn't your intention, my apologies).
I was just simplifying the circumstances for illustration purposes. If you can dodge all of your enemies attacks and land all of yours no matter how powerless you are, as long as there is no life regen happening, you will eventually get the job done. That is what Kirito, as well as plenty of other players did in SAO early on. Fought monsters way above their power levels to level up fast. A normal player would tackle the boars outside of the Town of Beginnings. Kirito went straight for the woods near Horunka Village to fight Nepenthes monsters way above his level with starter gear, confident in his ability to dodge them reliably.
If something like this has no attack potency value, because it's beholden to in-game mechanics, the entire verse goes ****-up. And before you bring up leveling discrepancies, I agree with that much (I mean it was one of the first things bought up in the Aincrad arc for gods sake). I guess a better question is "what part of the Cardinal System allows a city-level explosion to actually go off if it's mechanics never intended for an event like this to happen?"
I think you are overthinking simple VFX. 18+ Shooter games would be much less interesting, if there was no blood spraying around as violently as it does. There is no reason for the blood to spray the way it does. But it looks cool, so it does.
Cardinal System draws inspiration from all over the internet for content, so much so that some libraries in Aincrad even has real scanned PDFs as actual books. It can certainly distinguish what is cool and what isn't.
Q2) "Should we downgrade that attack too?" Idk, you tell me. By what you're saying, that explosive yield doesn't have a HP damage cap / defined value, and that may or may not be the only reason Kirito was able to survive the attack.
I'm not saying we should. You guys are the experts in regards to power levels. But it needs to be admitted there is more than a certain level of vagueness when it comes to exact values in games. You will not be reaching any kind of exactness and that's why I believe most standards here exist. To approximate something out of nothing exactly descriptive.
I can go raiding in Destiny. I can defeat Atheon in Vault of Glass, the Time's Conflux, who according to the game has around 8 million HP. What does any of that mean? In the end, those are just arbitrary numbers and names. In the end, all I know is I defeated a monster that has the power to delete me from time and space. The moment you overthink things, that's a rabbit hole you cannot get out of in my opinion, so it's best not to. That is where most of my criticism towards powerscaling comes from too. These things are kinda meant to remain vague, and let you fill with your imagination or suspension of disbelief.
Does it make any difference whether AH has 10 million HP or 50 million HP? It doesn't, it's just an arbitrary number for you to deplete with no real meaning.
Does it matter if Asuna's meteor does 5 million damage or 10 million? It doesn't, it's just an arbitrary damage number applied to whatever health AH has, dealt via a moving projectile.
The moment you go down into this rabbit hole, it becomes very clear that it all becomes meaningless as it is just a game, working on game mechanics.
A simple, down to earth example I can give is how exhaustion works in Underworld. You simply do not get exhausted at all, since you do not actually have muscles to run out of energy from. Any signs of exhaustion you see is instinctual/human nature. But that doesn't mean you have "infinite stamina" of some sorts. After exerting yourself for longer amounts of time, your HP starts to drain instead of you feeling exhausted.
There are just so many game mechanics attached with no real equivalent to make reasonable sense of.
And as for this 'run away' mechanic, I couldn't really care what it is (unless you're bringing it up as a distinction between feats we can take literally and stuff that was survived due to game mechanics). AbHor could be doing the default dance for all I care, doesn't change the fact that all 3 contributed to it's death, Asuna defeating the main form we see (you and others in this thread said it was a Meteor, which A) has it's own implications depending on what kind, and B) I seem to recall it being terrain manipulation (but this was based on the anime, which seems contentious enough around here)), and Alice getting honours for finishing off the parts that tried to leg it.
I call it a meteor because that's what I would call a large piece of earth floating around in space. For all intents and purposes, it is a large piece of rock, yes. But yeah, I am not even sure what you want from me here, or whether you expect an answer at all.
So I had the immediate questions that resulted in the author answers requested for translation. I'm curious if you would consider these "loaded"or not.
Well, can't say I'm surprised at all that those are the exact same translations I have provided in the earlier thread, with the exception of me fixing Sols into Solus, a typo made by the original question. This may be getting repetitive but as I said, the translation was never the issue here. It was confirmation bias and wanting to upgrade a characters power.
