SAO Alternative Episode 1: Decent Military Moe?

Sword Art Online’s online community perception has been an interesting thing to watch over the years. From a cool show released in 2012 with an interesting premise which blew up in popularity, to a show that became heavily criticised. Recently, SAO has gotten a bit of a reputation, or a stigma depending on how you look at it, as being something of a golden goose among online content creators. Opinions on the show don’t seem to matter anymore as much as they once did. Content creators realised that just by placing the name of the show in their titles and youtube thumbnails, that their video or post will get a lot of attention, regardless of the opinion they actually express towards the show. In a sense SAO has become something more like a meme than an anime, and it’s difficult to find someone who still takes the intellectual property seriously. The show still has its dedicated fans of course, but SAO doesn’t seem to dominate the online discussion the way it once did, petering off after the end of the second season.

What do I think of the first two seasons of SAO? I think terrible, obviously, I don’t really have an original opinion on the show even if I did like some of the initial episodes of the Aincrad arc back when I was a naive teen in 2012. Sword Art Online is one of those anime that's so terrible that even slight improvements in the storytelling can feel like major events worthy of celebration. Those events unfortunately tricked people into thinking that Gun Gale Online was a return to form for the show after the intolerable Fairy Dance arc, when in fact, there hadn’t been any overall improvements at all during GGO. In fact, GGO was arguably worse than the Aincrad arc in some respects, but I'm not here to review that show.

Gun Gale Online is obviously important to mention because that’s the game in which this spinoff takes place. I was quite surprised to see SAO alternative show up on the chart’s list- this was a SAO anime and I hadn’t heard anything about this production or the Light Novel (not written by Reki Kawahara) this anime is based on, which to me just seemed ludicrous. If SAO is supposed to be a golden goose, then why was nobody talked about it? Was it because it wasn’t a main entry? Because it wasn’t written by the original author? Or did simply nobody care anymore after being worn down by years of negativity? This state of affairs might change as the series progresses and it might become more popular, but who knows. Let’s stop beating around the bush though and actually dive into SAO Alternative popular.

Alternative is set in Gun Gale Online from the third arc of the SAO series, a virtual reality military shooter where the players can play for real money. After a very brief dose of exposition reacquainting us with the SAO universe we’re very promptly popped into a tournament called the ‘Squad Jam’ which featured in the original series (though back then it was called the ‘Ballet of Bullets’ so this might be a different event even though the rules seem to be the same.) and we get to see the two characters LLEN and M as they participate. Kawahara had many ideas for GGO that were never really fully developed or properly utilised, given that the plot was mostly centred around a villain named Death Gun who was killing players for real in reality via the game, so that the anime could maintain the same iconic ideas that had been present during the Aincrad arc. This meant that a lot of GGO’s rules were being broken long before Kirito actually shows up, so the actual rules and culture surrounding GGO never really mattered much, especially by the second half of its arc. The fact that LLEN and M are simply playing a game makes it easy for us to understand what they’re trying to do without us having to know anything about their characters outside of GGO. Previous viewers of SAO will also know that GGO players could earn real money playing the game, so it makes sense why they’re taking things seriously here. Although the money aspect is never brought up during this episode. That said, despite the SDF showing up this is still probably the least anything happening in the narrative has ever mattered in SAO has ever been despite the tone being quite serious. Simply because no real lives are at stake here, which is pretty new for SAO, as Kawahara had always tried to ensure that the events of the game directly or indirectly tied to the health of the characters in reality. It just goes to show that a villain or some kind of death game mechanic doesn't need to be implemented into every arc to keep it interesting- a video game like GGO can be intrinsically interesting to watch, and it makes the characters more interesting to speculate about as a result. They can have more personalised reasons for competing outside of falling into the camps of Hero, Villain, or red shirts. The SDF for example are using GGO for training exercises- it's impressive the anime had ideas for applications of a VR game like GGO that go beyond what would be immediately relevant to gamers.

This makes the episode something of a refreshing watch, since most of the dialogue and exposition is mostly focused around explaining the rules of the game and the reasons behind the actions the characters are taking in the moment, and the world itself is left for the viewers to figure out through the visuals or through having prior histories with the franchise. Alternative doesn’t need to explain what the sight lines are or what the HUD represents, and the scanning feature which prevents players from remaining in one place and camping is something that’s easy enough for a viewer to intuitively understand without the characters having to explain it in depth. While I did feel that some of M’s explanations felt like they were more for our sake than LLEN’s sake on occasion, just the way the show handled exposition alone felt like a huge step up in the quality of the writing compared to the mainline anime.

Alternative doesn’t thus far feature any reference to nor any appearances from any of the established SAO characters, and so far that in and of itself feels like something of an improvement. Kirito was always as bland as wet paper, and LLEN has a fairly striking design. She’s a short moe girl in pink combat gear, which will likely be self-evidently stupid for some and pretty cool for others I imagine. It is a video game after all, so it makes sense that the game wouldn’t be a perfect reflection of what would make sense in reality. It’s even brought up that LLEN’s costume would be poor camouflage in a forest environment, so for half of the episode she’s given a green cloak to wear. LLEN’s design is probably representative of one of the weirdest aesthetic choices in this show- the blending of Moe with a gritty military aesthetic. SAO was never a show to shy away from cute girls, but I’d have never before said that the show was ‘Moe’ in its aesthetic. Since besides Yui, all of the girls felt like they were designed to be appear older and sexier in design. However the ending, which had a group of girls watching the Squad Jam on TV, as well as the ending credits seemed to suggest that LLEN isn’t going to be the only Moe girl in alternative, and that the show is directly aiming to appeal to that crowd. Which to me, begs the question why Gun Gale Online was chosen as the primary setting for this show rather than some brand new game with an aesthetic that would match LLEN’s design a little more. The contrast is funny in a way, and I almost kind of like it. But I’m not sure if the contrast was meant to be intentional given that so far alternative is taking itself every bit as seriously as the main show does, if not more so, given how much this episode is focused on no-nonsense tactical warfare. I’ll be interested in seeing if there’s some kind of payoff to this clash of aesthetics, and whether or not this will put off or entice the majority of viewers going forward.

There’s also M, the other major character introduced in this episode. His role in this episode is largely about providing exposition and explaining his battle tactics to LLEN. He does most of the work here, but a lot of the actual execution, and thus attention, comes down to LLEN. M doesn’t have a particularly striking design and personality, but I liked him just fine. A trap that many anime fall into is something I like to call the Lelouch effect, or maybe the Light Yagami effect. Where any scene revolving around characters outsmarting or overpowering each other has the winning character coming off as impossibly smug, with the direction of the writing of the scene trying very hard to get the viewer sharing in that smugness. That feeling of a plan gone just right, of getting your own back against someone who thought they were better than you. While this can be entertaining, especially in the case of Death Note, when a lesser series tries to replicate this style it often comes off as amateurish and juvenile to me. The original SAO came off this way to me on occasion, with Kirito being able to both outsmart and overpower most opponents. Kirito was too bland for himself to ever come off as smug, but to me it always felt like the show was trying to make the viewer feel powerful, especially in scenes such as the final fight against Sugou in Fairy Dance. (I despise that scene) M and Alternative manage to avoid the payoffs to their plans coming across as overly egotistical or mean spirited. M is intelligent but LLEN is the one to execute his plans, so they feel like a team and not like one of them is a one-man army who overshadows the other. M also just feels like a no-nonsense character who’s here to win as a professional rather than as a gloater. His patience is a testament to this character trait, in the way that he’s perfectly happy to wait and watch more arrogant players kill off each other from a distance, and analyse the other teams to realise that he and LLEN will be going up against SDF troops and that they should be taking those players more seriously as a result. LLEN also has cute reactions to him very casually using her as a decoy in some of his plans, which in a sense creates something of a cute dynamic. They feel like total opposites in personality and design, but you get the sense that they work well together.

The writing has also improved in the sense that there’s a lot more that I want to know about this world going forward. The first episode of the original SAO tipped its hat very early as a way to hook viewers- the villain reveals that the players are trapped in SAO almost as soon as they log in from the viewers perspective, and the premise for the show becomes abundantly obvious by the end of the episode, which obviously worked for SAO at the time. Alternative so far lacks that kind of hook. Right now, I have almost no idea what Alternative is about or where they’re going from here, I have no idea what LLEN’s motivations are or what her real life counterpart, Karen, is like as a person either. Is the show going to focus more on Karen’s daily life or on LLEN? How much is GGO going to matter, what’s M’s deal and who is this other girl showcased in the opening? Why does LLEN wear pink and have such a cute design when most GGO characters are typically randomly assigned a generic male avatar? How can LLEN move at super speed? Why didn’t the Squad Jam have an equal allocation of teams- LLEN and M were a two person team while most everybody else we saw had more than five people in their squad, which doesn’t seem balanced from a gameplay perspective.

While some of the later questions on that lists were nitpicks, I legitimately feel these questions add some intrigue that makes someone like me want to watch to at least see where they’re going with this. I’m pretty happy to drop the show if the answers to these questions turn out to be unsatisfying- and that’s fine, because this first episode did a good job at making me want to know more. It largely did this by making LLEN a fairly cute and charming character who can hold her own in a fight, and by displaying some solid, if not outstanding fundamentals in writing, animation, and sound design. I mentioned earlier that I and perhaps the community as a whole have fallen into a trap of thinking any improvement upon the SAO franchise is a monumental success- and that that mentality might end up burning us, and historically we’ve been burned almost every single time. But given the new author for the source material, the detachment from previously established characters, and the new production studio I’m willing to give Alternative the benefit of the doubt.

Alternative hasn’t raised my expectations to the point where I’ll be devastated if I end up not liking the show, but right now, I’m cautiously optimistic, and I’ll be pretty confident in recommending this episode to anyone looking for some military fun for now.