The Notepad

[Destination]

Neuro Linkers
What's the big deal behind it?

There's two conditions to install Brain Burst. 1) To have worn the Neuro Linker from birth, and 2) have adequate response time.

The second condition seems pretty easy to address, though. If a non-gamer like Chiyuri can qualify as having fast enough response time, then it's not a very important condition to clear. I suspect that the rule is to filter out those children who are comfortable with VR environments from the ones who hardly use it.

Relation to Alicization:

So what's with the first condition? I think it's contradictory. It's strange that parents would buy a brand-new gadget for their newborn child. It's brand-new, people still remember the SAO incident (supposedly), and there was the issue with the Brain Implant Chips that led to a rash of cheating cases. It's like giving your newborn a spanking new iPhone 6s from birth - do you really want to give your kid a gadget with the power and accessibility from Day 1?

Let's examine the canon characters for a second: why did they get their Neuro Linkers? Haru got his because he had a speech impediment. Chiyuri received hers so that she could listen to her father speak. Takumu was identified as a gifted child and was fast-tracked into a good school. Besides the three of them, no one else is shown as having a reason for buying a Neuro Linker after birth - it's assumed and handwaved. This poses a problem: either everyone is a special snowflake who needed the Neuro Linker for some RL reason, or the rule doesn't actually matter. Then we have two redundant rules.

Again, let's examine Sword Art Online's and the various times they discussed about fighting in the virtual world. When Kirito loses a fight against Heathcliff, when he wins one, when he wins his first duel against an Alicization mook, when he loses to Yuuki...

Each and every time, Kirito (and Reki by extension) always talk about the level of immersion in the VR world, to move their avatar as though they're actually executing the action, to imagine their movements, let the game translate it into virtual movement, and produce the desired outcome. He writes off Heathcliff as a cheater, the Alicization guard's son as an inexperienced fighter; but those are not really equal fights. The most equal duel was Kirito vs Yuuki, and he attributes his loss to the time she spent playing games in the Medicuboid.

So maybe this is the actual reason why Reki imposes such a weird rule on his players: he wants to ensure that all Burst Linkers have at least 6-7 years of playtime in VR environments. Which raises another question: why so young? The discussion becomes very fuzzy here, because children so young have not even begun to mature. Psychologically speaking, they'd still run from problems and seek their parents for help. How are you supposed to get anything else besides a Red or Yellow avatar from that alone?

Here's an alternative: give the program to older children. They wouldn't have been wearing the Neuro Linker from birth, but the school server is still a VR environment. Some would play games. Some would have the pocket money to buy and play more realistic VR games too, or maybe just the F2P ones. Isn't that also the age at which you see the newbie players on online games today? You wouldn't find seven and nine-year-olds.

Older children too have definitively settled into some form of coping mechanism to deal with their problems in life. They recognise that their parents are no longer the greatest people in the world, and they should have begun to react in a particular way to stress, discomfort, and unfamiliar situations. If there's a way to tell the different colour Avatars apart, it'd be at this stage.

Ultimately, the rules stick out like a sore thumb and create plenty of confusion. In trying to ensure all players are well-adjusted to VR, it raises more questions than it answers. Suggestion: make the players older.