Review of Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online

I want to assault the person who wrote this for their awful, tiny-brained contrivances that continue to make this series insufferable. That is essentially all you need to know about this review if you don't feel like reading the rest because that was originally all I wanted to write, but I'm afraid MAL's character requirement forced me to elaborate. The main character's entire personal conflict centers around her being "too tall," apparently to such a disgustingly monstrous degree that she can't fit in anywhere. She's 183 cm by the way, 6 feet, and is otherwise a completely conventionally attractive person. What a fucking joke. I don'tcare about this person or her exaggerated problem. Fortunately for her the game decides to make her character model a loli, which is simple pandering to a common archetype that has no other apparent narrative purpose. It isn't explored at all beyond her finding comfort in a smaller form, which could have been accomplished if her character were just a shorter adult. The fact that she is a child is otherwise never a talking point in the story. At any rate, the issue she has with her size is apparently resolved just a few episodes in, and the little bearing it had on the story ceases to matter at all, and her character essentially has nothing of interest to say after that point.

On the topic of size, I want to talk about what an awful piece of game design it is for Gun Gale to not only have randomized, predetermined avatars for its players, but for them to have physical differences that provide tangible advantages to the player. Her being tiny has a demonstrable effect on her mobility and the chances of other players being able to hit her. This is retarded. Gun Gale seems to be a terrible game in general, like everything else in this universe, and it's a miracle anyone still plays it.

Now let's talk about plot armor, baby, because there's a lot to get through. In its prominence, this is arguably the second biggest issue with the show (the first place winner we'll get to later). The protagonist is shown to have ridiculous, unrivaled speed that is never justified in terms of either gameplay or personal ability. Everyone is shocked at how fast she can move, but why this can't be recreated by other players isn't explained and she can just do it because ??? There are numerous instances of her facing immensely uneven odds where any sort of satisfying, clever tactics are unnecessary because she can decide she's able to outpace a group of 6 people and can dodge every bullet and physically overpower them in any circumstance. This is in addition to random idiocy and incompetence on the part of her opponents, such as firing their entire magazine into her *weapon*, which works as a shield for some reason. Or when she's completely vulnerable and at point blank range, but firing every shot into the one part of her body that happens to hold a small, impenetrable object that protects her. Instead of, I don't know, shooting her in the face.

This very quickly dissolves any sense of danger or tension, in addition to making every single encounter completely meaningless because the show can't even bother to pretend that they're legitimate threats. They're just more opportunities to demonstrate how impressive the character is, despite showing very little to earn that. In any instance where she does fail, her opponents fail even more to balance it out.

This show has an immense amount of issues that would take pages upon pages to cover, the two most extensive areas probably being pacing and characterization, but I don't expect people to read all of that so I'm trying to narrow it down to the few biggest examples that stood out to me.

To that end, I'm punctuating my thoughts with what I consider to be by far the most troubling and genuinely insulting part of it.

The antagonist, Pitohui, is demonstrated to have a very severe psychosis that primarily manifests with sadism and sociopathy, taking pleasure in killing other players while blurring the line between the game and real life in doing so, not to mention manipulating people close to her with threats of death, whether theirs or her own. So she doesn't even place much value on her own life. It's very apparent that she's severely out of touch with reality and that this would not be a simple thing to fix. While the show portrays this problem in an utterly cartoony and exaggerated way that lacks any nuance to the subject, it nevertheless tries to play the consequences of it fairly straight.

But then you get to the end, and after sharing a brief, melodramatic anime moment with the protagonist, all of these crippling mental issues of hers seem to magically be solved. Not only is it an ignorantly reductive view of the problem she has, it's also an unearned redemptive moment because all of the horrible things she did or threatened to do, whether they had lasting consequences or not, are completely forgiven or forgotten about. Even if she really does have no intention of hurting anyone now, am I to believe that the person who was willing to kill herself a day ago will never consider that again, just because a character was nice to her? Boy, Sword Art, you certainly have a profound understanding of human issues. If only more people were willing to witness your convenient, trite anime solutions to life-ruining problems that can plague people for decades.

But wait! This gets worse. At the end, a male character explains the relationship she had with the antagonist. Namely that she was abusive, physically and verbally, and manipulated and blackmailed him into being her lover. This is a bleak thing to discover about a character near the very end of the story, and in an intentional tonal shift it is immediately played off as a joke, because he's a masochist.

That's it. No one comments on how fucked that arrangement is, or how the woman in question is clearly a dangerous, unhealthy person who requires help, or that the man should not be making light of the abusive relationship he's in. They don't even really bring it up to the woman when she's there.

I was utterly baffled and confused when this came up because I couldn't understand how the writer could have had any respect for his story when he thought capping it off with a joke about domestic abuse and how mentally unhealthy two of the main characters were was a good idea. I want to clarify that this is not me reading into it to make it seem darker than it was, the *joke itself* is how dark it sounds when he starts describing it. I will remind you that the abuser in question just had her redemptive moment and is considered "fine" now. Despite no talk of this behavior.

And this is what elevates Alternative above simple poorly-made garbage. There's a disconnect with reality, and in particular the way humans behave, in the writing that leads it down asinine and immature lines of thought, which ends up insulting everyone who watches it. Whoever was responsible for writing those parts clearly didn't know what the fuck they were writing about and didn't realize how badly it assassinated their story and their characters by making the whole thing feel so unsympathetic. There are disturbing, unresolved threads that they don't even realize exist because they're too insensitive and witless, and ultimately the story has no point because the *very resolution* of it is half-finished due to that ignorance.

I'd love to confirm if this is the installment of Sword Art I hate the most, but I don't have the willpower to trudge through all these dumpster fires again to find out for sure. Suffice it to say, Alternative still has the typical SAO seal of quality.