Review of Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online
While I found the other SAO anime series and movie to be relatively fun albeit flawed romps through a fairly basic setting with some cool ideas, Alternative distancing itself from its family so strongly by dropping ALL connecting characters and most connecting events was an interesting move. Does it pay off? Well... let's see. The story, such as it is, is tripe - without going heavy into spoilers, they tried to recycle the OMG IT'S A DEATH GAME OOOOO vibe from every other SAO so far, and like most of them, it falls flat - and unlike even Ordinal Scale or GGO the paper thin explanationfor it here is so utterly trite and idiotic that it breaks all suspension of disbelief. The tournament structure is equally meaningless; you CAN tell a decent story within the structure of a tournament sure, the original GGO did that alright, but Alternative fails to pull it off due to its characterization.
Ah yes... the characters. Do not look into this dark abyss if you have even a passing interest in character depth. Even Jesus-Kun himself, the almighty Kirito, at least has hobbies and interests and strengths and flaws, while the main girl Karen has... a height complex. And I guess she likes music. That's it. She doesn't really grow or get much more interesting from there. At least her bunny loli version has a few good moments.
The deuteragonist/antagonist Pito is gratingly obnoxious from start to finish, loud and frustrating and uninteresting, though a few scenes paint her as slightly more intriguing and show the intriguing depth she COULD have had, if not written by monkeys on typewriters - sorry, the monkeys don't deserve that insult. And these are supposed to be the lead friggin' characters? There sure as hell isn't any charisma or intrigue to be found there, they don't even feel like they have a damn bond!
Side characters, ironically, fare slightly better but still fall hard. M starts off interesting and becomes a one-dimensional joke from there for the most part; similar to Pito he has a few good scenes but otherwise is a boring caricature. The high school loli squad's entire depth is "lol we look scarier ingame" but at least they're amusing to watch bicker. Every unnamed character and most of the foes are obviously NPCs; looking identical, all standing next to each other to die instantly, so on and so forth.
The ONE character who actually has some depth is the self-aware grenade loli, who happily abuses her small stature and femininity ingame to mess with people, who has obvious flaws but also a spark of actual charisma, and as a result actually feels like a real person. Unfortunately she never does that awesome grenade rain from the opening theme and mostly just gets stuck acting as support for Jesus Bunny-Chan.
Oh and a bunch of NPCs are randomly super perverted and really horny for lolis in completely unnecessary and creepy scenes that never go anywhere, add any real depth or heft to the anime, and just feel like random pandering - though I can't tell if they were trying to pander to lolicons or people who hate them or just thought it'd be funny to have a grown ass man try to rape a little girl in a fucking televised tournament fight.
Ah yes, the fights. We all know Kirito was overpowered, but at least the series made a token effort to justify it; the special skill from Heathcliff to end SAO in a hero vs villain battle, ported maxed stats, years of death game experience, great reflexes, crippling autism. Were they valid excuses? That's kinda in the eye of the beholder. But at least they made an effort to explain why he could do what he did, and to me that made it more tolerable. Not the first time a MC in anime has been overpowered after all.
The Loli Rabbit of Caerbannog? Not so much. She has blatantly superhuman speed and reflexes for no apparent reason, pulling off vastly superhuman feats such that even other Agility builds have no way to react to them, and worst of all her feats vary by scene - sometimes she can casually dodge bullets, other times she's just running at normal speeds, neither is ever explained and we are never given a clear view of what her limits are. Every fight she's in is either a casual clusterfuck of her casually ripping apart trained soldiers and pro gamers, or... her randomly struggling with nobodies who aren't even set up to be scary. More often than not she wins by deus ex machina that makes Kirito's dumbass 'breaking the rules of the MMO' at the end of the first series look fair and balanced.
In the end, none of the fights have much meaning or heft to them, which is a pity because there actually are some cool shots and strategies scattered throughout the anime - just drowned in a tide of mediocre Mary Sue bullshit that puts Kirito and even that imp girl's garbage to shame.
Now, I've been pretty harsh so far, and I don't regret it - the anime overall is heavily mediocre. But it does have some redeeming qualities and I would be remiss in not at least mentioning them.
The art style is solid, as long as you don't ever look at any of the minor characters. Major characters generally look alright, if not memorable, and the viscerality of the fighting occasionally pleasantly surprised me; most kills are pretty generic but higher powered weaponry occasionally rips avatars in half or blows off heads and makes the fight more visually exciting.
The music was... honestly I just finished watching it an hour ago and I can't remember ANY of it, it was all that underwhelming. I didn't hear any that was outright bad, but it was all utterly forgettable.
Overall I don't regret sticking through the anime, but don't see myself ever watching it again - it's SIGNIFICANTLY worse than 'normal' SAO in almost every regard. The first GGO is a far superior anime overall if you want shooty gun stuff; Sinon is a much more interesting deuteragonist, the story is still forced at times but at least is kinda believable, and there's more meaning to the fights.