Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online is licensed by Aniplex USA. The anime was written by Yosuke Kuroda and directed by Masayuki Sakoi.
I’m sure many of you have seen or at least heard of Sword Art Online. If you haven’t watched it, you totally should, but be warned that the second half of the first season gets very…tentacle-y. Don’t worry though, Gun Gale Online doesn’t have any of that. Taking place not long after the events of SAO, a young woman struggles with her height-complex. Karen is tall. And she hates it. Karen wants nothing more than to be small and cute like all of the other girls around her.
In order to try and help her achieve this goal, her friend, Miyu, insists she tries a number of virtual games until she finds one where she is able to make a tiny, adorable character, someone the complete opposite of how she views herself. After several attempts, she finally finds GGO. A multi-player shooter game. She’s never done anything like it before, but that doesn’t matter, because she is finally small, cute, and decked out in pink. Karen, known as LLENN in game, makes her first online friend in Pitohui (Pito for short), who demands LLENN joins her in the next Squad Jam (a free-for-all battle royale). However, Pito is unable to join and instead she sends in a friend of hers known only as “M”. Together, LLENN and M as a two person team must take on teams with far more numbers and experience, but that’s just the start of her problems.
Overall, I really liked the premise of the show and I felt a connection with the main protagonist. Like Karen, I’m a tall female and, while as an adult I now love being able to see and reach things easier than others, I really struggled with my height, especially in high school. So I totally understand that desire to feel shorter, because society tells women that if they are smaller it makes them cute and more appealing. To Karen, being small would let her feel normal and acceptable. More than that though, she uses LLENN’s height to her advantage by also making her incredibly fast – so she’s a tiny, quick moving target.
Although its a new show, GGO is not something SAO fans are seeing for the first time, it’s the same game we saw Kirito enter in SAO II and this series even touches upon those events which took place prior to LLENN entering the game. Unlike SAO, we know the characters in this game won’t die in real life, but that doesn’t make their death less brutal. I mean, there’s no blood, but a head shot is still a head shot and you do see corpses with missing eyes or heads and/or other limbs. Basically, I feel like the show does a pretty good job of keeping you invested in wanting to see LLENN survive even though you know she isn’t going to die in real life, still, it does make it lose some of that intensity felt from SAO.
While I liked the character design and seeing what Karen looked like in all the games leading up to her finding GGO, something always bothered me…why could she not customize her characters to be small anywhere else? In fact, it seemed like in every game, including GGO, Karen had little say in what her character looked like. The year is supposed to be 2022, do games suddenly stop allowing character customization? Why does it seem like everyone else got to pick character aspects? How does the game even decide that? Personally, one of the best parts of these style games is getting to pick what gender, race, and build you are. It makes no sense that she is just randomly generated in EVERY game with no say in anything.
The best part of the show is the beginning and the end, at least, up until the first half of the final episode…then the show does what SAO does best and makes everything weird and uncomfortable for no reason and it kinda ruins the satisfaction you had been feeling and just makes you wonder why. Just. Why. The middle handful of episodes aren’t bad, but they aren’t great. It’s more of a so-so middle area where sometimes cool stuff happens and other times you only remember half of what you just watched and still don’t feel like you missed anything.
OVERALL SCORE: 7 / 10
I liked this show. I enjoyed it and feel it was a good addition to the SAO world. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the last 2 and a half episodes are the best part of the show. I will leave it with this, LLENN is a savage.
Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online is now streaming on Crunchyroll.
There is currently an on-going manga adaptation as well as a light novel adaptation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fplmNjFf6T4
