Review of Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online

I kinda wish this show wasn't called SAO. People probably wouldn't have paid nearly as much attention to it that way, but it wouldn't have been hamstrung by the poor worldbuilding of GGO and we could've had a more polished story. Speaking of which, the story is quite personal and has rather low stakes, and I liked that. The premise took some getting used to, but in general I noticed more thematic coherence than in the actual SAO. The characters were enjoyable, quite well written and had nice designs. The pacing kinda blundered by having the first episode be chronologically third and spending a bittoo much time on the first major event. The second event then proceeded to drag on a little longer, but the conclusion was alright in my opinion.

The action wasn't really like a video game, with some characters having unfair advantages and others passing obvious exploits off as new competitive strategies. I feel that the previously established rules of GGO led to this problem and the show would've been better off by making up a whole new game.

The animation was fine, but not really exciting. The sound however, I found rather pleasing.

Overall the show was fun, but I felt that I could've spent my time watching something better.