One thing that I haven’t minded about working from home is that I’m able to throw on TV shows in the background, I have already written stuff up on The Order and Haven, but I’ve also managed to checkout some anime. Expect some reviews coming out of that, and the first one I want to talk about is Gun Gale Online. So I’m not talking about season 2 of Sword Art Online which introduces Gun Gale Online, the game, but instead looking at the spin off show. Now, I’m a big fan of Sword Art Online, both seasons, and I think that it touches on some interesting things, the question is, does Gun Gale Online live up to those standards or does it fall short?

So in Sword Art Online, we get introduced to Battle of Bullets, a player versus player and eventually a free for all last man standing tournament. Now, we have an eccentric millionaire/billionaire who has decided that they want to spend their money to create a team version of that, and that’s where we hop in. Karen, her real world name, hasn’t ever felt like she’s fit in, mainly because she’s so tall. A friend of hers tells her that in online gaming she can be anyone she wants to be and so she starts trying out various VR games, and all of them make her tall, except eventually when she hits GGO. There, she’s a really fast little character with a machine gun. She meets a mysterious character, Pitohui, in game name. She seems pretty easy going, all about shooting things and always up for the next thing, but there’s something off about her. Karen and Pitohui are going to enter this tournament but Pitohui has a conflict and gets another one of her friends, simply known as M to team up with Karen.

That’s the basics of the story without getting into spoiler level details. I feel like this show is lacking a bunch in plot. Now, I’m a tall person, and I standout in crowds depending on where I am, and I can understand for some people why it would be a big deal, but also as driving factor for Karen’s character motivations and actions, it’s a little bit weak. Compare this to season 2 of SAO, the main character in GGO there is someone who is trying to overcome a fear of guns after having to kill someone in self defense as a child and going to PTSD whenever she interacts with a gun or an image of a gun in real life. And she’s found that in GGO it feels different and hoping it’ll help her overcome some of that trauma. That, compared to being tall. Now, not to dismiss the bullying and everything that can go on with that in real life, but for the stakes of the show, it feels lacking.

The other things is the character of Pitohui. She’s this awesome fighter who has a bit of an eccentric personality. Who she is in real life is supposed to be a mystery, it isn’t. And her motivations are again a bit weird. This is going to have some spoilers coming up here, so you’ve been warned, I won’t give away home she is outside of the game though. Her biggest motivation is that she’s trying to find danger and excitement in a game. All because she was supposed to have gone into SAO when it launched but hadn’t been able to, and once she realized it was a death game, she wanted to even more so. There are obviously people who do things because of the adrenaline rush that are dangerous, but her idea is to find a game that’ll give her the same feeling, and because of Death Gun from SAO season 2, she’s decided on GGO. I think that this could have been done more interesting, make it a more subtle part of her character that slowly unfolds over time, but you get it quite quickly, that tied together with the other “twist” doesn’t work all that well.

Finally, I think that the story as a whole is lacking. The characters aren’t as interesting and the plot feels like it’s been vastly simplified. The motivations are weaker, the character development is slower, and the stakes feel so much lower throughout, even with Pitohui’s death wish. I think with SAO they were able to delve more into the psychology of people and what makes them tick as well as some simpler plot lines, and in GGO they want to do that, but everything is done on more of a simpler laid out level than it was in SAO. With that, they are also trying to be clever about stuff and just not managing to pull it off. M, this really mysterious character, turns out to be kind of a bust in real life and a cliche when he’s finally brought in that way. They try and have a number of twists or more shocking moments, but overall it’s too telegraphed and nothing really feels surprising about it. It also tries to pack the story with more action than SAO did, and that was part of the charm of SAO, you got to see a few boss fights or a few fights that really mattered, but not all of them, here we have multiple episodes that stretch over the tournaments and they try and do some plot in them, but it’s mainly action.

So, you can see that I’m down on this. I wouldn’t say that it’s horrible, it’s just lacking. They had a lot of things they could have done with the story, character developments that they could have had, but instead it’s more your typical anime where it doesn’t handle anything with finesse, it’s just simplified down. Would I recommend checking it out, not really, again, it’s just lacking. Will you be upset that you watched it, probably not, it does have a few moments, but it doesn’t feel like there’s all that much going on, so good background noise type of anime, in my opinion.

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