5 Point Discussions – Sword Art Online Alternative: GGO 8: “Booby Trap”

The second Squad Jam begins! LLENN and her new partner have to fight their way to Pito and M, but they’re on opposite sides of the map!  Remember, if you like this article and 5 Point Discussions, please share it on Facebook or Twitter! It really helps. And if you’ve got any comments or questions, please hit me up @SageShinigami.

1. It’s amazing what just a little bit of confidence can do for a person. LLENN could barely make it through a single encounter during the last Squad Jam without guidance from M, but after having won the last one it all feels familiar to her. Though she’s got a heavy burden on her shoulders by having to be the mentor this time around, really quickly we figure out she’s already fantastic.   Though she’s got Fukaziroh around as help, it turns out to be unnecessary for their first major encounter–she abuses her superior speed to lay waste to an entire team in mere seconds.
Shouts out to them for showing LLENN’s not afraid to go for the dirty shots too when necessary to achieve her goals. She burns through half the squad of the first group they run into purely by abusing her speed and knowledge of in game mechanics in literally a matter of seconds, and probably throws the rest off by slicing through one player’s groin then slitting his throat. Yikes. Though I winced through the rest of the match, this was still some excellent battle choreography, showing how much the Pink Devil has grown in just a few weeks.

2. I love that Fukaziroh is able to carry her weight in this while not fighting like an ace just yet.  It’s a thin line, but this episode walks it well. In the first match, Fuka’s careless behavior sees her walk right into a wire trap. She lives, but loses her legs. Of course, it’s a video game so it’s still an injury she can recover from–once she does, she immediately makes up for causing so much trouble by volunteering to take on the next team without LLENN having to fight at all. It sounds like a terrible idea, but her plan winds up being pretty solid: with LLENN as her sight, she fires her rocket launchers from long range, effectively bombing the other team until they’re wiped out. It gets the point across that she has been training, even if she’s a little more likely to make mistakes than LLENN, who’s gotten so used to looking for traps she checks for them around her home now.

3. More than anything, LLENN only wanted to rush in, beat Pitou, and then probably just quit the game herself. But fortunately for us viewers, they placed all the major teams on opposite ends of the map–SHINC, LLENN and Fuka, PM4, even Memento Mori are all placed as far from one another as possible.  They could’ve just called it bad luck, but instead they explain it away by saying it was intentional–keeping the highest ranked teams apart to see who could survive to the end before they faced off. It makes sense–if new teams are good then they’ll win anyway, if the older teams are better than why have them die early on?

4. The curveball to this episode comes with the last satellite scan. After Pitohui, M, and their group spend too much time holding the same position, seven teams decide to team up to take them out all at once. As all the other big threats notice, they all comment on how cowardly a tactic it is–the leader of Memento Mori even says they would’ve pretended to join only to kill them all, since they’d just have to do it eventually anyway. Granted, it does make a bit of sense to be more team-oriented in this case, since this entire tournament is team-focused and GGO itself is usually about single player 1v1 matches. If they were really so opposed to teams you’d think they would be aiming for Bullet of Bullets.

5. LLENN immediately panics after noticing the scan and starts rushing off to try and make it in time to help Pito and M…only for Fuka to point out how pointless it is since she’d never make it in time to begin with. Fuka implies Pito would have the good sense to simply escape…and LLENN relaxes after forgetting that’s not how Pito works at all. Instead, she’s actually more excited than ever–after waiting around for thirty minutes doing nothing, the idea of fighting over three dozen people at once has gotten her blood going.  Looks like I’ll get to see bloodthirsty Pito after all!
Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.