Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online: Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online, Vol. 1 (manga)

Reki Kawahara · Keiichi Sigsawa

Nov 2017 · Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online Vol 1 · Sold by Yen Press LLC

About this ebook

Karen Kohiruimaki always felt out of place in the real world. Due to her extreme height, she found it hard to make friends with other girls her age. Everything changes when she's introduced to VR and Gun Gale Online. In GGO, Karen is free to play the cute, chibi avatar of her dreams! Can Karen find friendship in this bullet-ridden MMO...?

Ratings and reviews

As someone who very much dislikes SAO's main series and wishes that someone else could take that universe and do something better with it, Alternative Gun Gale Online was basically everything I could ask for. Despite the page saying it's been written by Reki Kawahara, this was actually written by Keiichi Sigsawa, just under Kawahara's supervision. This is an adaptation of Sigsawa's light novel, with character designs by Kouhaku Kuroboshi and drawn by Tadadi Tamori. I haven't read or watched anything else by these creators, but I can tell they worked together well on this project. Story/character-wise, Alternative Gun Gale Online is really enjoyable. The main character Karen has some dimensionality to her, clear weaknesses and strengths, which is better than Kirito ever managed; her partner/rival/potential villain friend Pitohui, while not fleshed out yet, has enough to make me anticipate what they do with her; and M, though it seems he's mostly here for exposition, is cool enough that I can forgive it. The concepts explored in the story so far show a much better understanding of how to use the setting; characters use GGO for escapism like actual people do, and the conflicts are primarily character-based as opposed to some hackneyed murder mystery shoehorned into a VR setting. I really loved the research and thought that was clearly put into the setting. Sigsawa clearly took some time to figure out how a game like this would actually work (including having actual microtransactions), how combat scenarios would actually play out within the game's mechanics, how real-life combat actually works, and how to integrate it all together. The characters have clearly defined strategies and tactics that make sense within the system. My complaints are mostly minor: the main character's initial competence is a little too high, and there's not as much of her improving slowly as I'd like, but the counterpoint is that we can get into the action a lot more quickly, and I expect there'll be more character development later on. There's also a few things that make little sense realistically, mainly that all the VR games that let you transfer avatars have randomized character models for no reason, but since it's a problem from the source material and it's treated like the pointless annoyance it is, I can look past it. Visually, this adaptation is great. The action is well-paced and they do a lot of cool stuff with the game's mechanics. There are a lot of cute drawings and a lot of awesome action shots. I'm also a big fan of the character designs, which are much more distinctly military-themed than the original Gun Gale Online, right down to Karen's pink camo bandana. It's also good to see that the designs don't have any unnecessary, stupid fanservice, and look like they'd actually be practical in a fight. One final aside: the gun nerd in me loves the attention to detail in the gun drawings and descriptions to no end. In any case, this is the manga that, in my opinion, takes all the potential SAO had and made damn good use of it, and I'm extremely excited for the upcoming anime and second volume. Well worth the $7.

Completely awesome, thought I'd read it while playing Fatal Bullet.

Amazing, I just wish Elza didn't look like a minor, for obvious reasons.

About the author

Keiichi Sigsawa is the artist of Sword Art Online: Alternative Gun Gale Online.

Reki Kawahara is an award winning author best known for his light novel series, Sword Art Online and Accel World.