Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online - Refrain

The only thing good about it was the little extra clips after the ending, where they pissed around with the clips. Adding weird sound effects, retarded editing and honestly it was funny as fuck.

Other than that, there is no real point to watch most of the episode unless you have memory loss or something, just watch the little ending clips.

There isn't really much else you can say about this over than ... it's a recap ... it's going to be the same thing you saw before, just edited together as if they are "Watching the battle afterwards", therefore it's only showing the tournament, not the ... back story.

'Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online - Refrain', also known as 'Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online - Refrain From Watching' is a recap episode of the first 5 episodes of SAOA GGO. The reason why this exists is rather simple: the anime was on hiatus this week and the studio broadcasting it had to fill the time slot with something. And so this masterpiece of modern anime was born.


If we compare this to the first 5 episodes, it is basically the same thing but abridged version of it. In terms of editing, I have seen better shortened versions of anime made ... by folks on youtube who have less than 1k subscribers. As a comparison, I have rewatched the first 5 episodes on 4x speed and I can conclude that following the story in that way is much easier than to understand what is happening the recap version. I wish they had done that and added some sick songs in it just to make it the fastest paces and longest AMV produced by the industry itself. Instead all they did was put the least liked guy in the studio to use Vegas Pro for 2 hours and made few seiyuus do a voice over. At least they turned the volume down on the original audio track.


At the end, there is like 3 seconds of new material where the seiyuus yell weird Japanese sound effects like "byo" but instead of the characters making this sound, it's the guns and some boat motors, so I guess at least the people who had to make this thing enjoyed the making of it. If you for some reason want to watch this, I would recommend jumping to the time stamp of 22:00 and continuing from there because that's the only part worth of watching.

In short, I found this as unnecessary, though after watching the entire thing, my score went up significantly.

There was no story, first off. If you’re new to the world of anime, then this might surprise you, thought the word ‘recap’ should be pretty self explanatory. This is simply going over the last 5 episodes. There is pretty much nothing new in here at all except the commentary-- which is grating and annoying, in my opinion.

The animation was very well done, as usual. It’s clean, beautiful, and nice to look at. In some ways, it makes up for the shitty storyline.

The sound so far has ... been great. The opening and closing haven’t really grown on me all that much, but the background music, sound effects, and voice actors are all great, so there isn’t really anything major to complain about.

In all honesty, I think my commenting on the characters would be biased since I don’t really expressly like most of them. This is a recap too, so I doubt anything I say will be any different than the way the characters are portrayed in the full series.

I had taken a month long break (due to work and lack of time) from anime in general so I had seen episode 5 and didn’t really get around to watching anything until episode 9 was already out. I had a pretty solid understanding of what happened, but I watched this just to make sure, but it was honestly a waste of my time. All you need to know is that LENN and M won SJ. That’s pretty much it. In terms of enjoyment, I did have fun watching the spoofs at the end and how the author parodied himself, which is what made this recap redeemable.

I would recommend this if you: like GGO and took a LONG break between the 5th and 6th episode, like spoofs (just watch the few minutes after the credits then), love GGO so much that you just want to relive it in a shorter timespan

I would NOT recommend this if you: are watching episode 5 and 6 in succession, aren’t a big fan of spoofs, don’t have time to rewatch things/time to spare, don’t like GGO all that much

Have a great day everyone!