出典 : Amazon.co.jp

Minoru Kawakami, the author of SAO, has written his debut novel “Accel World”, which has sold 5.7 million copies and is a huge hit.
Eight years have passed since the first season of the popular anime, and four years have passed since the movie, but is there really any chance of a sequel?

Another masterpiece by the author of SAO! The anime was also a hit!

出典 : Amazon.co.jp

In 2009, Reki Kawahara, who would later go on to change the history of novels with his “Sword Art Online” series, made his commercial debut.
His debut work was “Accel World”.
It won the grand prize at the 15th Dengeki Novel Award and was published two months earlier than SAO.

Accel World is set 24 years after SAO, in the near future where most of life takes place on a virtual network. The story revolves around the overweight protagonist, Haruyuki, and his senior girl, Kuroyukihime, who is a player in the VR fighting game Brain Burst. The story unfolds in this game.

While SAO was a web novel serialized on her own personal website, Accel World is a grand prize winning work.
At the time, web novels were not yet as popular as they are now, and there was a tendency to say “why should I pay to buy a work that I can read for free”, so Accel World attracted more attention first.

After that, SAO was not the only one that sold at a furious pace, but both works continued to sell slowly and steadily, and the world view in which the “full-dive type game” common to both works was created gradually took root.
In 2011, as part of the 20th anniversary of ASCII Media Works, an anime adaptation was announced together with SAO, and it was broadcasted in the spring and summer of 2012 for two seasons.
The average sales of the discs were high, approaching 10,000 copies, and the sales of the original novels also accelerated with the anime broadcast, becoming a huge hit with a total of 5.7 million copies sold.

What is the reason for not making a second season?

出典 : Amazon.co.jp

As it is such a hit work, fans were expecting some kind of project to be announced in 2019, the 10th anniversary of Accel World. …… Unfortunately, no major project was prepared, not even a new anime.
But unfortunately, there was no new anime or any other big project.

Normally, Accel World’s sales would be at the level of a major work for both the original work and the anime, but SAO is a historical hit that hit one digit higher.
It is inevitable that this one will be given priority.
This was mentioned in the afterword of the 24th volume, which will be released in 2019, and he reminisced, “This year is the tenth anniversary of the publication of that one, and they are planning a lot of things, but (omitted) it is very sad that there is nothing here.

However, it’s still a huge hit, and at least one of the anime discs has sold enough copies to warrant a second season.
So why has there been no sequel so far?

There’s nothing wrong with stock.
The first season consumed up to four volumes, and the film version is a compilation of the TV series in the first half and the original story in the second half, so there are 20 volumes of stock left.

The barrier is the environment of the animation production.

The animation of Accel World is produced by Sunrise Studio 8.
In the 2000s, Sunrise Studio 8 produced anime such as “Mai-HiME”, “The Idolmaster Xenoglossia” and “The Girl Who Leapt Through Space”.

In 2011, they produced an anime for “Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere”, a novella from the same Dengeki paperback series as Accel World, and it was a big hit.
The following year, Accel World also became a hit, and it was expected that the company would continue to produce lanobe anime one after another along this line.

However, after that, 8 Star’s opportunities to produce new works decreased drastically and they concentrated on one series.
The series that every anime fan knows, Love Live! series.

Since Love Live became an explosive hit, 8 Star has become a studio dedicated almost entirely to Love Live, to the extent that even Borderline Hora, which was a huge hit in both its first and second seasons, is not getting a sequel.
This is probably due to the fact that Love Live is a project of KADOKAWA and Sunrise (plus Lantis), and it is possible to infer that they wanted to prioritize Love Live over Accel World and Sakai Hora, which are also under the KADOKAWA label.

So wasn’t there an option to produce them at the same time?

Sunrise is one of the largest anime production companies in Japan, with over 250 staff and more than 10 studios.
Even if it is difficult to produce 8 studios, it seems to be no problem if other studios produce it.

However, Sunrise studios are highly independent and are more like separate companies than separate departments within the same company, and basically all series other than the Gundam series are produced by the same studio.
It seems that Accel World was not an exception.

Due to this situation, it must have been difficult to realize the second season of Accel World because they had to allocate most of their staff to Love Live.
Incidentally, when it came to the production of the theatrical version, “Sunrise’s schedule was pinpointed to be free around the beginning of 2014”, so it seems that the timing was fortunate to coincide.