I agree - it's definitely good to play outside of your comfort zone, my problem is that I don't want to butcher the culture of a region I've not personally been to or know much about. Japan, I could do, but I don't really know how their whole testing into High School and University as well as their actual cultural mannerisms go. >_< I suppose my best bet would be London, as long as we're not making our dialogue phonetic, that would likely work the very best.

As far as year goes, I imagine future... I'm almost positive that we could have a strong VR technology going within 30-50 years, high balling, and that's based on the advancements such as the Oculus Rift, which has received fairly strong reviews for what it strove to be, as well as a language-recognition system being worked on so that a computer not only recognizes voice and words, but rather understands what they mean, not converting it into data and calculating a response. Rather amazing, if you ask me, but it's real and it's absolutely spectacular, they're trying to make it be able to learn as well... Anyway, my estimate comes to a full-dive type of technology on a massive multiplayer server around 2040-2060something, if you'd like to put it around there, and I would imagine we would have had an amazing technological push elsewhere with products like Google Glass and the laser- oriented keyboards which project onto tables and the like. All that would likely be taken a step farther... so we just kind of have to decide what we want our future-Earth in England to look like.

I also believe it might be good to start them young and then make the jumps in chapter-like/arc sequences before settling on older versions of themselves. Honestly, one of them could have quite the background which gets them both dragged into some kind of scenario that incorporates a fair amount of action. After all, the early-life roleplaying would mostly be centered around laying the foundation for their adult personalities and lives which would then lead to them realizing who they've been spending so much time with online, and then finally we begin to develop after one or both of them is dragged into something which would further develop. It almost seems, though, that once we reach a certain point, there will be a definitive end, which would mean we could/would retire the roleplay and hit the drawing board once more. :p After all, I've rather found myself growing tired of characters who have like 5-8 books in a series when the writer continues to milk ideas that are long-since dead. Harry Potter and SAO are exceptions because... well, I love them, but because things continue to happen which are 1) logical and 2) exciting without being over-the-top - a hard combination to nail. :p

Though I also quite liked the idea of them coming out of the game after an obscenely long session and finding that they were thrust into the distant future, or some post-apocalyptic scene. ^^ I think we could keep rolling that ball around if it interested you as well.