His whole gimmick is being a duel wielder, and he was able to afford it (each sword costs 150k and he had 302k).
He def should’ve just bought 2 swords, but the writers just had to nerf him 😭
I cant tell which arc this was from so im going to guess gun gale, every fps i have played has an equipment system of swapping weapons, never having dual weapon slots to be used at the same time. Meaning to equip the sword the gun has to be holstered, and to equip the second sword, the first sword has to be holstered. Even throwing grenades are sometimes considered weapons even if they have a seprate equipment slot in the ui, so they end up holstering the gun as you prime and cook the nade. To dual wield sub machine guns, pistols, or melee weapons, they would actually be counted as a single weapon that equips to each hand visualy, so if Kirito wanted to dual wield he would have had to find a different weapon than that single photon blade to buy, and the dual version might have been even more expensive than buying two single version since the “cool factor tax” would be applied.
Though this is a futuristic VR game so it would be possible to just fumble around with everything all at once and dual wield two single swords, but the author wrote the LN years ago basing it off of the games of the time instead of completely imagining a new concept of VR interaction, so the world of VR games in SAO is constrained to what would be considered “outdated” game logic to their future. So i wouldnt say it was a case of purposefully nerfing Kirito, but accidently because of wanting to incorporate the things they loved into their story instead of being “completely original”.
