Review of Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale

As someone who got into anime thanks to SAO I couldn't help myself but to watch this movie. I didn't really want to expect much but the rating and many positive reviews got my hopes up, yet it disappointed quite a lot. Story 2/10 The begining of the movie is promising but the rest of the story is a big downfall. The concept of mixed reality with VR is unique and there are a lot of paths the anime could continue from but it becomes your typical cliché where main protagonist gets from zero to hero in only 24 hours, is extremly overpowered and adults just lethim handle everything even though there are many lives at stake.

The plot feels really empty, there many filler scenes like Kirito's cooking, Asuna's bath scene, when they were in café and played pacman to win a cake or singing Rika. There is no progress whatsoever, not even in characters. It's also dump how Kirito always ignores Yuna when she points somewhere.

Unfortunatly fights get repetive and you have already seen them in first two seasons just in different colours. If you had deja vú in at least one fight then it's because the choreography was already used before. The final fight has no impact at all because of how poorly was the story developed and how there were trown many side characters that were shown only maybe once or twice in the story and on top of it only in TV. The final deus ex machima sword fighting isn't even worth mentioning in my opinion.
(Also my friend loved how everyone always dies in one hit but the final boss apparently isn't that strong)

Characters 3/10

Don't expect much of character development here and characters stay one-dimensional. But the concept of new characters is reasonable, interesting but as with the story, wasted. The idea of Eiji's backstory and motive is well made, but that's probably it. What i did like though is the white design for Yuna. Kirito hasn't changed a bit same as his harem.

Visuals 7,5/10

Clean and bright colours are nice to watch and the animation of final fight was outstanding, together with good music being only reason not to drop it. Unfortunatly, good visuals are not enough for a show to be good. It's really hard to enjoy it, when there's so little of story and characters acts sometimes unnaturally.

Overall 4/10

If you want to see Kirito cooks or waving his sword in the air to IK monsters, you can probably enjoy, but if you expect some progress in the series, don't watch it, by the end of the week I already forgot almost everything that happend, there's no other coffee soda stucked in your head or some memorable fight scene as with Gleam Eye. I give it 4/10 only because I liked the first seasons when I started with anime but it probably deserves less.