If I wanted to take a bag of shit, color-code it Pink, and then brand it as cute and sell it back to you at 100x its worth, it definitely would be SAO-A-GGO!
Even the title leaves one breathless prior to the filth of disgust over this steaming pile of garbage.
We start out with a tall girl named Karen who didn’t like her height and thanks to her inability to use a height-slider in her baka-mode decided to play the first game that made her short. So a few dozen games later, she appears in GGO; a western-themed gun-based mmo as a super-small all-pink female character named LLENN!
Apparently GGO online is coded poorly as characters seem to gain random abilities based on their creation, as her ability is super speed! This overpowered ability allows her to get into close range and kill everything (including other players) with her short-ranged weapons.
Play any online shooter and players will always go for either more health (to not be one-shot sniped), speed (as movement is king in these games) or if you play call of duty… Martyrdom (Leave a grenade upon death to kill the player that killed you).
Its amazing how any anime based on Online Games has the dumbest player community who seem to know near-nothing about games to the point it strikes an experienced gamer in awe at how a game can even function!
Lets go through the story so far.
Spoiler Warning… If you read past this, tough shit! You’ve been warned!
The first five episodes deal with two characters, LLENE and M entering in a tournament called Squad Jam as a two man team. A tournament so linear and slow in plot, that it begs to wonder how any match in such an arena can even take 1 – 2 hours to complete. The story is completely linear and always has conversations between characters that makes you wonder why they aren’t typekilled. Lets not mention the idiotic “lets hide in a suitcase and kill several players at point blank range even though they are military types in real life who should be used to close range combat”
In fact, lets forget about how LLENE manages to always win her battles by using super speed against any number of opponents. Who needs Kirito when we have a perfect substitute! We can count the total number of battles fought by our main heroes in our left hand fingers across five episodes, good game! Even better is a team of two always winning against teams of 4 – 6 players….even better GG. Try doing that in a real game! Hell, try being allowed to play with a small character (with a much smaller hitbox) with super speed and see how long you will last prior to being booted out of the server!
I didn’t have a major problem with this anime until Episode 5.5 came out. They decided to RECAP the first five episodes in one episode in a way that made me think… “Couldn’t they just make the five episodes into three episodes including the “why/how I joined GGO and won Squad Jam without any real experience compared to others” bullshit. They could have then avoided a recap episode so soon and just made those three episodes and have much better pacing….