Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online

Episode 4

With the flashback now over, episode 4 brings the story right back to where we left off at the end of episode 1, with team LM scoring a victory over the team of professionals. But as M is quick to remind LLENN, they're not done yet. Two other teams remain, and they only barely manage to fend off one of them when the opponents charge in on hovercraft. (M later speculates that vehicles are made more readily available as the number of players dwindle, which seems sensible.) That results in a fairly tense standoff as LLENN rolls around to avoid shots while M sets up his shots.

This is when we finally find out what's in that huge pack he's been carrying around: it's not extras guns or ammo, as I had assumed, but a portable parapet made of spaceship armor that's impenetrable to small arms fire. As cool as that is, M then outdoes himself by taking out the hovercraft crew without using the game's auto-targeting system. A later flashback to Pito and LLENN training explains that the advantage to firing without assistance is no sighting lines to give away your shots, but the big disadvantage is that shooting this way depends heavily on real-life skill, so most players won't be good enough marksmen to reliably hit targets at range.

In other words, the episode devotes a couple minutes to explaining the game mechanics necessary to understand why something a character did was cool. There really isn't a great way to do this, so I suppose the story handles it about as well as it could, but if your interests don't include explanations of ways to exploit game mechanics, then I could see this scene being a little tiresome. We should probably should get used to it though, because beyond even SAO's penchant for this sort of exposition, SAO-A: GGO's writer Keiichi Sigsawa has proven in past works to be enamored with such technical details.

That aside, this episode has more going on than just that action scene, the exposition surrounding it, and the flight from the last team to follow. It also spends much more time on character development for M, who freely admits that he's a sniper because he's a coward. He also apparently has an uncanny talent for remembering map details. Karen also demonstrates how pumped she is about the game by not hesitating to gun down an incapacitated avatar, which interestingly was the one scene where we didn't actually see the characters getting shot. Even without any blood or gore present, the camera still pulled back from the carnage. We also get to see that the last remaining opponent is an all-female team, and I do believe several of those characters appear in the opener, so this tournament may not be the last time we see of them.

Of course, the big twist comes when M pulls a gun on LLENN at the end. The way LLENN handled this – flipping the safety on his gun when she grabbed him – made for a slick reversal, but the lingering question is why he betrayed her at all. Was that note from Pito? And why did it have to be read exactly at 15:00 hours? This intriguing mystery partly makes up for the episode not switching back to the real world at all. As much as I'm enjoying the game scenario so far, I do hope the series gets back to splitting its focus between the real and virtual worlds, since this approach always broadens a good SAO story.

Rating: B+

Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.