Toaru Majutsu no Index:Virtual On Afterword
Afterword
Okay, this is Kamachi Kazuma!
You probably already know, but this story started as a dream project where we decided to do some kind of crossover between A Certain Magical Index and Cyber Troopers Virtual-On!! If you think there had to be something really twisted to how this got started, let me tell you I was shocked by the odd power of connections I felt when the offer first arrived. It made me wonder how big or small this industry is. It’s Virtual-On but there aren’t two levers? Where’s the jump cancel button? Why are they fighting over points instead of wearing down each other’s gauges? I’m sure a lot of you were asking those questions, but that’s because we prepared a whole new rulebook for this dream project instead of using the rules of the existing series. It might be surprising, but the overwhelming majority of these suggestions for “a different sort of Virtual-On” came from the Sega. …At first, I thought I should build up a world that strictly followed the Virtual-On side of things (and the more I looked into that, the more material I found to use), but when Watari-san saw the plot I had come up with, he sliced it in two and said I should do more of my own thing with it. I’m not sure how to explain what I felt then, but it really rattled me and reminded me that this was nothing like my usual jobs.
So I ended up basing the story on the Index side of things while having fun with the Virtual-On material I had.
If you asked me what my favorite Virtuaroids are, I would have to say Temjin or Fei-Yen. That might be cliché, but I think I may tend toward the ones with less idiosyncratic controls. That said, I’m a lot more interested in the Tangram than the Virtuaroids themselves. It chooses who to be with, it has incredible power but doesn’t show it off and usually hides in an extradimensional place, it gets all tsun-tsun and drives away any strangers who approach, and it only has a connection with L’Ln Plajiner who created it. That round thing sounds like a shy tsundere to me. Maybe what grabbed my attention was how it has such a clear character even though it’s inorganic(?).
I give my thanks to Watari-san and everyone else from Sega, to Katoki Hajime-san who not only designed the Second Plajiner and the other units but directly handled the illustrations as well, and to my editors Miki-san, Onodera-san, and Anan-san. I love wasting resources and talent like this. You often hear that the attention a book gets before release is important these days, but I think this should take care of that nicely. Thank you very much.
I also give my thanks to the readers. What did you think of this crossover that began as a dream project? I tried to keep things in the usual Academy City setting while bringing the battles to a scale I normally can’t use. I hope you enjoyed it.
And I will end this here.
I hope the prefix of “dream” can be removed someday.
-Kamachi Kazuma
