How do you make a good Sword Art Online series? Drop Kirito, set the story in Gun Gale Online and make the new protagonist a girl who prefers to wear all pink armour while kicking ass.
This first episode managed to do what the original series never managed: make this look like a game people would actually play. The plot hasn’t kicked in yet, if there’s going to be any, so instead this whole episode was one long team match played in Gun Gale Online, which, as you may know from the second Swords Art Online series, is a sort of modern or post-apocalyptic shooter VRMMO. The way it’s presented here it seems to be a fairly serious sort of game, realistic enough that there’s a team of “pros” in the battle, a group of soldiers using it as a training exercise. Why they don’t use a dedicated server instead of mixing with actual gamers is a mystery. In any case, it all looks and feels like a proper game, even with all the virtual reality nonsense in it.
Our protagonist calls herself Llenn and her team mate here is M, so obviously their team is called LM. M, with his tactical camouflage gear and general build contrasts well with the adorable tiny, pink Llenn. They’re an odd couple but they work well together, with Llenn the nominal leader but M guiding her all the way through the fight. Which for most of it consists of actually avoiding fighting and letting the team of pros deal with the other teams in their neighbourhood as they keep themselves out of danger. It’s only at the very end, when everybody else nearby has been killed that they enter the battle themselves and it’s Llenn’s turn to shine. I liked their team work and how the anime didn’t feel the need to over explain their choices. There was still a bit of hand holding, with M explaining things to Llenn she should’ve already known, but it wasn’t intrusive.
Llenn’s whole GGO personality has the cuteness factor build in, but she’s serious about her gaming. Her first thought after surviving an ambush is that she nearly died without firing a single shot. She’s smart enough to realise when her team mate uses her as a decoy and pouts adorably about it. Her team mate is less fleshed out, the silent stoic type, but then he doesn’t need to be. How and when they teamed we don’t know and we only get to see Llenn in the real world at the very end of the episode, when it turns out she’s very different from how she presents online. It will be interesting to see what the series will make of this and how much it’ll be just GGO battles and how deep it’ll go into Llenn’s background and motives for playing the game.
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