The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online II

LLENN has returned as her and Fuka gear up for the newest round of Squad Jam. This time she's looking to have a rematch with the girls from Team Shinc, and she's managed to bring M and Pitohui along for the ride. With such a powerful line up, they should have no problem dusting the competition. There's just one problem: none of them have played GGO in the last two months! Will they be able to prevail or will getting rusty get them knocked out of the running?

Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online II is based on the Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online light novel series by Keiichi Sigsawa with illustrations by Kouhaku Kuroboshi. It is a spin-off of Reki Kawahara's Sword Art Online franchise. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

After a six-year absence, our favorite gun-toting gamer girls are back for a new season. As someone who's never cared much for Sword Art Online proper, I had a lot more fun with the first season of this show than I expected, and while the stakes are certainly lower, it delivered enough high-intensity action and humor to make up for it. More importantly, it feels like it was made by someone who at least understands the fundamentals of PvP games, which is more than can be said with early SAO and MMOs, so by virtue of that alone, it was always going to be a winner in my book.

For the most part, this premiere picks up where season one left off as LLENN finds herself getting roped into another Squad Jam event, this time with the intent of settling the score with the Amazon girls from the Shinc squad. Rather than just pairing up with Fuka though, this time M joins her, and most importantly, Pitou, who seems to have chilled out a little bit after her season-long murder-therapy session with LLENN. While she's still more than happy to plow down the competition, she's mostly just here for the two of them to have a good time together. While that does seem like it could be an interesting little team-up, we're going to have to wait an episode to see how all that pans out, as a lot of this is premiere mainly involves just reintroducing all of the teams from season 1, and re-establishing the dynamic between our heroines (and M too, I guess), which is fine, but not the most exciting thing for an opener. The only real thing of note to the whole premiere is the revelation that the four of them haven't played GGO in a couple of months since they've been busy, and if there's one thing I know about competitive multiplayer, it's that being out of practice is a death sentence. It should be fun to see exactly how much that holds back their performance.

Actually, there is one other thing that stood out here, and that's how it looks: Compared to the first season, this already feels like a bit of a visual downgrade. While nothing in this premiere looked outright bad, the designs did look a bit more simplified compared to the first season, and there was a weird shiny filter over the characters that looked a little off-putting. Combined with the fact that A-1 Pictures hasn't exactly had a good track record of stable productions recently and the following episode preview being composed entirely of stills, I'm more than a little worried this could end up melting fast. Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid, but it would suck to wait this long for another season only to have it fall apart. For now, though, that's a concern for the future, and at the moment, I'm still fond enough of this spin-off to see where the new season is going and if it can manage to be even half as fun as the first season, then we should be in for a pretty good ride.

Despite what the 3.5-star rating might imply, this is not a bad episode of Gun Gale Online. The only reason the score is this low is because, besides the cold opening, there's none of the gun-fighting action the series is known for. Though a bit disappointing, this is actually the best choice for the series going forward.

Personal drama is at the heart of Gun Gale Online (which gives it higher stakes than people simply playing a game for fun). This is the show's strongest aspect, but it can also be a bit of a double-edged sword in cases like this episode. The back half of the first season—including its climax—was hyper-focused on LLENN and Pitohui. And after six years between seasons, it's understandable if that is the only thing you remember of season one.

Thus, this episode's job is to remind you about all the other characters that will be important in this arc and how they relate to LLENN and Pitohui. The episode does this rather well, showing the various teams talking about their defeats and their desire (or lack thereof) to face the two young women again.

It also does a good job of stacking the deck against our heroes. Aside from LLENN, our heroes are woefully out of practice. Fukaziroh's been grinding in ALO and Pitohui and M have been busy with real-world stuff. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. LLENN is the winner of the first Squad Jam—and she or Pitohui would have been the winner of the second if not for Pitohui's own personal death game and LLENN's need to save or defeat her. The idea of the two of them on the same team—along with the other various teams' need for revenge—is enough to get all of the other teams onboard to unite and hunt down LLENN and Pitohui's team first. We get a taste of this outcome in the cold opening and are left with a question as the episode closes: As good as LLENN and her friends are, can even players like them overcome such a difference in numbers—especially when they're as rusty as they are?