if you asked me for a list of my favorite light novels, there's a few titles I'd immediately reach for (and many more I'd want to reach for but forget). so i'm a spider, so what. a sister's all you need. ascendance of a bookworm. instant death ability.
however, of among all those titles, I truly feel gun gale online is the most eminently readable. it's the blockbuster action movie of books and it is simply fun. I've never failed to read one in more than a single two-hour sitting.
i'm right because ggo 11 spent like 2 pages having everyone do a pre-battle quip
since I have a poor memory but love to context-switch, I basically have no idea where I am going at all times with light novels. especially when naroukei novel titles and characters can blend together so often, it really helps when a light novel can get me up to speed quickly, and ggo is among the best at this.
ggo deftly blends the benefits of battle royale and mmo stories by ensuring its arcs are always fast-moving encapsulated in a very natural way, with clearly understood (but not overdramatized) stakes and distinctive characters, in the same way that some names start sticking out of the crowd when you run back and forth between the limsa fountain and market board in ffxiv enough
the "i will never log off" of books, ironically
everyone in ggo is an absolute lunatic in the way that all the best fantasy lns are, but their absurdity is grounded by the personalities we see fleshed out in real life. of course it's sensible that llenn the small pink gremlin is a 6-foot-tall plain woman looking for escapism by going goblin mode online, and her friend miyu/fukaziroh who has never stopped shitposting online or offline serves as a perfect foil.
people play ggo because they've fired guns irl, and people play because they never would. in an innately relatable sort of online way, everyone derives their own meaning and feral enjoyment from ggo, and it helps all the exaggerated characters make sense, in that sort of "of course there would be a team that just puts every bit of their spec and personality into making machine guns go ratatattat"
ggo is by no means a realistic novel, keeping just enough toes in the surreal both in and out of game as a means to give the story some exaggerated spice, but it's a relatable one, and one that feels good to blaze through like llenn just going completely ape shitt.
oh right this was a specific book review
the 11th one, covering the start of the fifth squad jam, is probably one of the more convoluted ones, pouring forth chekhov's-gun-sorta-rule-changes like a fortnite loot crate, while also centering the action with another big twist that's guessable from the color illustrations at the front.
yet the complication never feels messy or heavy-handed because of the way ggo carries itself; it's just the contract between the magician and the audience, pitohui waving her hands over a cruise ship as she asks everyone to take a good look, before enacting a truly absurd and spectacular action set piece half a book later.