So here we have the
latest edition to the sword art online franchise. Because it’s name
is so long I’ll just refer to it as Alt:GGO for now. So what is
Alt:GGO? It’s a story set in the sword art online universe sometime
between the start of gun gale online and Kirito joining gun gale
online. Our protagonist is Karen Kohiruimaki also known as LLEN. She
has no prior experience to playing games and only joined because she
wanted to be smaller than in real life.
So the first episode
shows us her in action although most of the episode is spent
observing and running away from the enemies giving the impression
that’s she’s weak. At the end of the episode she takes out a
squad of combat trained personnel so that doesn’t exactly last too
long. I will say that the fight scenes do actually look as visually
impressive as regular sword art online and the down time in the
episode is mostly coming up with stratergies which makes me want to
take GGO more seriously.
The second episode
starts to show the beginning of LLEN’s story allowing us to learn
who she is and how and why she’s so good to begin with. For the
most part it can be summarised as a bunch of happy coincidences that
soon turned her into a homicidal maniac! At least in game. For the
most part she started playing as escapism from her life. Due to being
so tall and moving into Tokyo for university she doesn’t have any
friends in the area. Due to this she starts trying to find a game
that makes her small which leads us through a funny montage until we
finally get to GGO. This episode was filled with many little bits of
humor like that my favourite being the sarcastic sadistic tutorial
NPC. We finally get to see one of the three other girls that we see
on the poster who seems like a good laugh.
Overall so far I’m
liking this series. Despite being set in GGO my least favourite part
of the series it does work to improve it through some light hearted
world building! In fact it might be a series that is best to watch
just before GGO since then we can at least learn about the world
before Kirito comes in with his light saber and makes every other
character seem dumb for completely disregarding the weapon. Anyway I
look forward to the next episodes to come and I hope it stays
somewhat like it is already.
Series Link
Episode 1 Link
Episode 2 Link
Series Link
Episode 1 Link
Episode 2 Link
