Review of Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online

First things first, if you disliked original SAO you can safely test this series for yourself, it's nothing like it. Just to be clear here I did enjoy the original SAO immensly (almost all of it) even though it had quite a number glaring faults. What makes or breaks animes and mangas for me these days are mostly characters and their interactions, then cpmes the story and then the rest, and SAO:GGO unfortunately seems to have it all the wrong way round. The GOOD things first: - Sound design is on point, there is not a single moment in this anime where sound would take me awayfrom the action or I would be disappointed with it, on the other hand, when it shines you do notice it (songs made for this anime are really good)
- The Art doesn't feel out of place, it's not soaring among the stars like masterpieces from Makoto Shinkai, but the animation is mostly smooth, texture quality is pleasantly high, nothing to really be picky about, very well done.

And now the BAD things:
- The Characters! My god... Someone truly misunderstood interesting for "having a mental problem". Most of the characters should see a psychologist for some guidance and two of the characters (second female main and her "lover") should actually seek out professional psychiatric help. The interactions between them feel extremely artificial, basically you can feel that things happen between them to drive the story forward and not the other way around. And since I already mentioned the story
- The Story is simply boring, at least for me, it seemed like a nice idea at first but by the end I didn't really care for it at all. For me it's not utilizing the setting at all. Why are they playing GGO and not some other game? Why even play games to go about your problems at all? It sure is explained in the anime, but it feels flimsy. Also it lacks a general direction. In the original SAO it was always clearly defined: First clear the game, then save Asuna (because Kawahara has some bondage fetish), then uncover the truth behind the Death Gun and finally the mini-stories. There is no such goal in here at first, then we get a sort of goal, but again, it feels flimsy and artificial (and looks like a job for a psychiatrist and the emergency services, not a 19-y.o. with a complex about her height).

Now finally the golden standard of the whole SAO series: Game Design is absolutely horrible! If it felt a bit more real, if it felt a little bit more tangible, maybe, just maybe I would have enjoyed the story more. But all it did was take me out of the experience. Unlike in the original SAO where I had some characters I cared for here there was nothing stopping me from pointing out the stupidity of the game simply because I wasn't engaged enough in the struggles and problems of the characters. I'll try to mostly list them because there's just too many issues to go into details (some of them are shared with the original SAO since not much has changed in GGO):
- The way the guns are obtained in the game is very unfriendly and unfair to new users
- PVP is does not have weapon balance at all, pretty shit for a pvp-focused game
- Prediction lines, the rules when they appear or not are extremely inconsistent
- If you could shoot without them, every player would simply train to shoot without them
- Teams in the team-battle-royale can wildly vary in size - makes the game extremely unbalanced for professional gaming
- Rules for getting damaged are extremely inconsistent
- You can heal yourself from a headshot!
- Weapon damage doesn't seem to matter when the story asks for it
- Weapon range is inconsistent
- Making bodies bulletproof after death
- Giving a player a bulletproof object to carry!
- If there is no killzone that's getting smaller and smaller, there's nothing stopping you from gettin an 8-player sniper party, bringing a mix of normal and anti-tank rifles and some powerful shields, gettin on a vantage point and waiting there for days...
- Explosives range and damage is horribly inconsistent
- Dual-wielding grenade launchers (both extremely stupid and inefficient)
- No way to replenish ammo other than to beg the enemy for it
- Massive fields with nothing in it! This game is basically shouting "Get a sniper rifle and annihilate everyone"
- There is no upside to having a big player model apart from being able to carry very heavy shit, no matter how big you are a team of lolis would be able to dance around for for days on end and make you look silly

Also this tournament is supposed to have the best of the best teams possible from thousands of players. Why then everyone in here is retarded? People walking around without cover in the middle of the street/field, having no spacing between them whatsoever (I guess it's only because the story needs them to be killed quickly with a single grenade). Found an opposing team? Shower them with bullets instead of regrouping and flanking them. Found a guy in a cave behind a waterfall? Shower him with bullets instead of throwing a grenade in. See a target behind a heavy shield you have no means of destroying? Charge him for no reason (remember to shower him with bullets) instead of retreating and going around his back, forcing him to switch positions.

As you can probably tell I kinda enjoy my FPS games, and GGO is one of the shittiest FPS games ever conceived. It made watching the show incredibly difficult for me. Was the original SAO any better? GGO part was a bit less bullshit, but SAO and ALO were also fucked in the head as RPGs so no, it wasn't. The difference was that I cared for the characters there and here I couldn't bring myself to do that.

TL;DR: You can give it a go, if you'll end up liking the characters the rest should be decent enough for you to have a fun time.