As long as you include the time critical pet resurrection item quest from that garden episode sure.
Noone kills my crocodile and gets away without being eaten by it.
Nobody kills my crocodile and doesn't become a crocodile-shaped meat golem as compensation.
I was thinking of incorporating a pet system of sorts into that SAO-styled RTD. Nothing concrete as of yet, but what do you think? I was thinking of something along the lines of starting with a partner, and having him level up with you, so that you fight alongside him. Much like you, if your pet dies, it doesn't come back. What do you think?
Interesting, but it presents a slight maiming issue.
Normally, if you die you die. That's bad, but it's a final sort of bad- in another sense, your problems are over.
If your pet dies, on the other hand, you lose a bunch of power but are still in the game. That's roughly equivalent to, say chopping off a player's limbs or removing some of their equipment slots. It's "better" than death in a way, but in some cases arguably worse because now you have to keep running with it. Depending on whether you can get replacement pets, of course, this discrepancy might be more or less severe.
Speaking of limb-chopping, this also gives players a tad more breathing room in theory, because if things get really bad they can sacrifice their pet to keep themselves alive. Due to the aforementioned concerns and a few other things, though, I suspect many players would refuse to do so.
On a different note, doubling the number of characters could also have unintended side effects. It gets more complicated, for one thing. It also tends to be harder to keep everyone alive, because single enemies are now relatively stronger versus each individual character. A 16-on-1 boss battle, for instance, pretty much needs to be either very AOE-heavy, very easy, or very prone to murdering people outright, because there just isn't a good way for his single-target damage to be both personally and collectively reasonable.
There are ways around this at least in theory, of course, but it can get tricky and even then tends to rely on complex calculations or very specific target numbers. Massive HP and some sort of free counterattack every time you attack or are attacked might work, but you have to double the number of rolling per round and still calculate out exactly how each fight goes with a given number of people doing a given amount of damage. Plus you stretch out power discrepancies because lower-power critters have to make increasingly bad trades in order to affect anything.