For past year I’ve been reading (well, rereading in the case of the earlier volumes) the Sword Art Online spin-off light novel series, Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online. I’ve been reading one volume of the series a month, from January of last year to this February. I finished the fourteenth and currently final volume just a couple of days ago, and now that I’ve come to the end of this journey I thought I’d share my thoughts of the series as a whole. Now there will probably be some very light spoilers over the course of this review, so I advise those of you reading to proceed with caution. For those who wish to remain completely unspoiled, I recommend skipping ahead to the final paragraph.
Synopsis: The series follows Karen Kohiruimaki, a young collage student with a complex about being abnormally tall. On the recommendation of her friend Miyu, Karen decides to try playing full-dive VRMMO games in the hopes that interacting with people using a virtual avatar will help her better interact with people in the real world. So using the handle Llenn, Karen tries several different VR games in the hopes of gaining an avatar with the tiny cute body that always yearned for, and she at last gains such an avatar in the world of Gun Gale Online. Of course it’s only after logging in for the first time that Llenn learns that GGO is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world where gun nuts shoot at each other for fun, but she makes the most of it and ends up turning herself into an infamous player killer that other players start calling the Pink Demon. Eventually Llenn meets and befriends another female player named Pitohui, who convinces her to take part in a new tournament in GGO called the Squad Jam, where teams of players compete against each other in intense gun battles.
I first picked up AGGO because I was interested in seeing more of the world of Gun Gale Online, which we only got a brief glimpse of in the main SAO series. Unfortunately, AGGO focuses more on the battles between the players than on the world of GGO itself, and on the guns that the players use. The author of the series, Keiichi Sigsawa is apparently a bit of a gun nut himself, so the books go into great details about the guns all of the characters use. Anyway, I was hoping to read more about the types of monsters and dungeons that exist in GGO, so not getting much of that was kind of a letdown. For those who’d like to learn more about GGO’s environment and monsters, I’d recommend playing the video game, Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet.
Yet while I initially picked up AGGO for its setting, I stayed for its characters. The thing that makes these characters so wonderful is that they’re all a little insane to varying degrees. Even Karen/Llenn herself could be considered a little nuts. The battles seen throughout the story also tend to get wonderfully absurd, with the characters often “dying” in rather gruesome ways. Sigsawa definitely made the most of the virtual game world setting these battles take place in.
One area where AGGO outclasses the main SAO series is that the game avatars all of these characters use are vastly different in appearance from their real world selves. If you look at characters from the main series like Leafa and Sinon, the only differences between their in-game avatars and their real world selves is their hair and eye color. This is not at all the case with the AGGO characters. The difference between the six-foot tall Karen and tiny little Llenn is but the first example of what I’m talking about. I’d go into more detail about this, but I feel like I’d be dropping major spoilers if I did so.
Now if I had name one big flaw this series has, it would have to be that after a while it starts to feel a bit repetitive. All of the major arcs in the series focus on Llenn and her friends taking part in the Squad Jam tournament. There are some smaller arc in between the tournaments where Llenn and co. take part in special GGO mini games, but each of these are all only one volume and don’t really help to break up the monotony too much. Speaking for myself, I would’ve love to have seen a multi-volume arc Llenn and her squad mates do a crawl of a new dungeon that’s rumored to have some special prize for those who manage to beat it. Such a scenario still could’ve provided battles against other players, as Llenn and her friends likely would’ve had to fight rival teams who are after the same prize.
One other problem with AGGO is that a couple of the later arcs created these mysteries that ultimately wound up going unsolved. For instance in the events leading up to the fourth Squad Jam (SJ4 for short), Karen ends up having to attend one of her father’s business parties and meets a young executive named Fire Nishiyamada, who quickly wants to pursue a romantic relationship with Karen. Fire’s pursuit of Karen gets so aggressive that he basically cyber stalks her and follows her into GGO. Now I have numerous issues with how things with Fire were resolved, but I’m not going to get into them here because that would be major spoiler territory. One of the things that really bugged me though was that we never find out how Fire was able to discover that Karen was Llenn, and I have to wonder if the reason we never found out was because Sigsawa simply forgot to answer that question.
Another major mystery in AGGO that ends up going unsolved with the fifth Squad Jam tournament (or SJ5). At the start of that arc, it’s discovered that someone had put a bounty on Llenn’s head. Basically, anyone who managed to kill Llenn in SJ5 would get a million credits, and as those familiar with the main SAO series might recall, GGO has a feature that allows players to convert in-game currency into real world cash. The question of who put the bounty on Llenn’s head remains present throughout the arc, and by the end Llenn and her friends decided that the bounty could’ve been placed by anyone and just let the matter drop. I’m sorry, but that is such a copout!
It’s also major missed opportunity. I mean, the person who placed the bounty could’ve been a new character that would’ve shown up in the climax of the tournament, come face to face with Llenn and revealed that they were the one who put the bounty on her. And when Llenn asked why this person put a bounty on her as she faced down the barrel of their gun, that person would’ve smirked and said something like, “You don’t remember me, do you?” Boom, instant new comedic rival character right there! The character could’ve been some rich inept gamer who held a grudge with Llenn over something really stupid.
Then again, maybe it’s best that the question of who put the bounty on Llenn’s head ultimately went unanswered, as Volume Fourteen ended up being what could be considered a temporary series finale. The reason that volume may or may not be a finale is because of the Unital Ring arc happening in the main SAO light novel series right now. Basically, some unknown intelligence takes all of the VRMMO worlds created by the Seed and throws them all into a blender to create a massive survival game called Unital Ring (UR for short). In other words, the world of GGO gets destroyed. The events of AGGO, Vol. 14 take place right before the Unital Ring Incident begins, so Sigsawa was forced to bring the series an end with that volume in order to keep things cannon with the main SAO series.
This is kind of a spoiler, but in the final chapter of AGGO’s fourteenth volume, Karen and her friends meet a character who warns them not to log into GGO or any VRMMO created using the Seed for a while because they sense something bad is about to happen. So the end of the final chapter was written like a series finale, which really made things bittersweet. I mean it was kind of sad because it felt so abrupt, even though I knew it had to happen due to my knowledge of the main series. Given what I know, I can’t see Llenn and her friends playing Unital Ring, and such a setting would’ve prevented Sigsawa from doing the over the top gun battles that he likes writing. All things considered though, I feel like the series ended in a good place.
The thing is, Sigsawa could write at least one more arc for the series. Once the Unital Ring arc in the main series comes to an end, GGO could get restored. If there were to be another arc, I’d personally would like it to be something other than another Squad Jam tournament, such as the dungeon crawling scenario that I mentioned earlier. Whether or not another arc happens though depends completely on when Unital Ring ends, and with the way things are going that may not happen for another twenty years. That’s just one of many issues I have with Unital Ring, but I’ll save that rant for another post.
Of course we could potentially get more of AGGO before Unital Ring comes to an end. In some of his afterwards, Sigsawa talked about doing short story collections as part of the series, and all of the story ideas he mentioned could be done during Unital Ring as they’d basically be prequels. In fact one of his ideas could potentially fill an entire volume. There’s no telling when or even if Sigsawa will actually follow though with doing these prequels though. We may all just have to accept that Vol. 14 of AGGO is also indeed going to be the final volume.
In conclusion, I’d say that Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online is definitely the best SAO spinoff out there. There’s a reason why it’s the only spinoff so far to get an anime adaptation. I hesitate to say that AGGO is better than the main SAO series, but it is at least on the same level. It’s a fun light-hearted series filled with over the top gun battles like the kind seen in Die Hard or any Michal Bay film, and violet deaths that are at times used for comedic effect with great success. I hope that we one day get another installment of this light novel series in the future, even though the odds seem to be against it.
