Sword Art Online Season 2 Blu-Ray Box Set Release Date Announced

Sword Art Online is something of a "wish fulfillment gone totally wrong" series. Following the story of Kirito and Asuna, the anime begins with players of an Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game discovering that should they die in the game, they die in real life. While there have been several manga and anime series that follow MMORPGs, SAO is arguably the most popular so fans will certainly take notice now that the second season of the anime's blu-ray set has been announced with a release date of this year.

The original conflict/premise of the series is actually overcome about halfway through the first season, later changing things up with a new online game for the characters to explore. In the second season, things change even more with Kirito and company finding themselves trying to find a murderer who can kill someone in real life by killing their avatar in the fictional game, "Gun Gale". While Kirito and Asuna remain exceptionally powerful from their past adventures, the new game offers new challenges and season two offers many new twists and turns by not just creating new worlds, but also returning to old virtual ones.

The Blu-Ray box set, featuring the story arcs "Phantom Bullet", "Calibur", and "Mother Rosario" was announced by SAO Distributor Aniplex at the Anime Central convention this week. The set itself will have both English and Japanese audio tracks, with subtitles of each language to match. It will also include the following bonus content: a Shingo Adachi illustration for the box's cover, the "Sword Art Offline 2" animated short, a mini poster, audio commentary, along with textless openings and endings options. Retailing for $159.98, the set itself will release on September 24th with seven Blu-Ray discs making up the collection. With 24 episodes to its name, mark this on your calendars for some online action coming to a retailer near you.

Sword Art Online was originally created by Reki Kawahara with illustrations provided by abec for ASCII Media Works' Dengeki Bunko line in 2009. The series follows a boy named Kirito after he and thousands of gamers get trapped in a virtual reality video game known as Sword Art Online. The gamers must band together to defeat the game's final level to escape, but Kirito and his guild learn there is more behind their prison than they were originally told.

If you have yet to catch the new season of Sword Art Online's anime adaptation, the original Japanese release of Sword Art Online: Alicization can currently be found streaming on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu. The English dub of the series is now airing Saturday nights on Adult Swim's Toonami block. The series will be returning for the second half of its Alicization season with War of Underworld in October.