Review of Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale
Virtual reality goes into the Augmented Reality. LA will be brutally honest with the Sword Art Online series, LA saw SAO go through ALOT of shit, from LA fairly liking the Aincrad arc, utterly hating how lazy the Alfheim arc was in how they pretty much flanderized MANY of the characters, then come Gun Gale and LA gave some "liberties" to it but saw some gaping plot holes and more of that flanderization showing from Alfhiem and finally comes Mother Rosario's arc where LA saw glimpses of good writing here and there but LA still wasn't convinced by the end of it that Sword Art Onlineturned out to be mediocre, this wasn't helped by the fact that LA was naive and not as experienced in showing how LA really felt about anime at the time and LA joined in the hate train of fellow reviewers. Now however Sword Art Online as a franchise has been talked about even to this day, debated against as one of the worst animes in anime history merely because it's popular for newbies or popular in general.
With that last statement however is something LA will talk into detail a bit later, but for now, we're talking about the movie Ordinal Scale, so does it outdo the anime series or will having a "movie-only" character be it's biggest detriment to it all...well uhhh LA thinks this runs MUCH deeper than the excuses LA even talked about right now.
Be warned however LA will be going to spoilers with this movie.
Ordinal Scale's plot somewhat pays homages to it's previous arcs into something rather huge and with the obvious enhanced technology the SAO world in it's real world has progressed from VR to AR mirroring OUR real life gaming progress, the parallels of Pokemon GO is quite the obvious ones for world building for Ordinal Scale's in terms of one of it's plot set pieces of Raid Bosses in AR Real Life and it's Ranking Systems and in this little world building comes our main plot of a mysterious idol singer by the name of Yuna voiced by Sayaka Kanda helping with these Raid Bosses, however when Kirito's gang wants to participate, something else brews in the darkness of past that will haunt them.
Ok, first thing first to get through all this and the one that LA found to be the most implausible would be the entire fact of since this is AR and most of the "actions" they take would feel silly of the other people looking at the Raid Area let alone the AR allowing them to do feats they couldn't exactly do in real life at times, plus some of the destroyed terrain obviously wouldn't show up in the real world would be even weirder.
With LA's defense with this is that there can be a bit of implausibility to the story a "suspension of disbelief" as it were an escapism mindset for this kind fo series as it were and this one for LA's intention is warranted if only the only annoyance being Kirito is the skin we're wearing here.
One of the most known and earliest villains of this movie is Eiji Nichizawa voiced by Yoshio Inoue who is something of a contrast to Kirito if only in AR (as Kirito got into the fad late...he's a newbie at AR), he's also one of the driving forces of the plot as he interacts with the mysterious idol Yuna which makes him somewhat important early on and the thing is his motivations and belief about SAO is somewhat warranted to the point LA was rooting for him in some cases of this movie, that of Eiji wanting to erase ALL memory of SAO from ALL the survivors, to this LA says that YES this makes sense of a sympathetic villain wanting to right the wrongs even if his ways are somewhat reckless mercenary-styled ways of doing things.
Really the main villain pulling the strings to Ordinal Scale, Tetsuhiro Shigemura voiced by Takeshi Kaga does have a similar reasoning to his motivations however gets even more desperate to reach his goals than Eiji does and has an intrinsic link to Yuna, plot-wise.
With Yuna being a movie only character, yes it was inevitable as to what would happen to her like MANY movie-only characters that's been done time and again, but since the source material is there and her inevitable outcome would be, LA actually likes how they handled her for the most part.
In terms of animation by A1-Pictures, A1-Pictures went all out with this movie, by giving us vibrant coloring and backgrounding and an utterly amazing battle choreography. What can LA say but the animation from the crisp character designs, amazing battles and choreography let alone one of the best fights shown near the end of the movie and beautiful backgrounding, A1-Picture really outdid themselves with Ordinal Scale.
In terms of voice acting, LA would say that the voice acting was great overall with most of the voice actors reprising their roles from the anime series, with special MVP to Haruka Tomatsu as Asuna and Sayaka Kanda as Yuna in which Sayaka Kanda is an actual singer which has it's added benefits when her character is an idol. Thankfully for Ordinal Scale, they gave the rest of the harem as well as minor characters not only from the movie but the entire span of 2 seasons of living characters some screentime, the voice cast is massively impressive even with their somewhat limited screentime anyways. (LA is mostly saying this because of Miyuki Sawashiro as Shino)
If there was anything LA Ordinal Scale was saying to LA the loudest wasn't Kirito or Asuna's relationship, trying to world build as much as possible or show how cool AR is (and how extreme this would be in actual real life), no if anything LA saw Ordinal Scale as a sincere apology letter for what it did in Alfhiem's arc. In a ways the main villain's goal of erasing all the memory of SAO was pretty much Ordinal Scale saying sorry for it's lazy writing and with Eiji and Shigemura being the extremes of this analogy in erasing ALL the bad deeds SAO did, Kirito, Asuna and Yuna are the ones saying, not ALL of it was SAO's faults and problems and erasing everything makes it pointless.
LA is getting somewhere with this analogy and to that it's yes, Sword Art Online is mainstream popular and because it's popular many people bash it, or love it, it's divisive as possible even now. But is it the worst anime ever made, pfffffttt are you kidding LA?, this is hardly the worst anime franchise let alone series, anime as a medium has churned out for itself, so what if SAO has gaping holes in it's plot, doesn't makes any sense of one huge fault leads it to be the worst anime ever. If there was one little belief LA had about the SAO franchise as a whole by the end of it's second season run is that, yes it had it's major problems but LA cannot for the life of LA say it's the worst anime ever made...seriously you NEED TO LOOK DEEP in finding the worst and SAO being the target of being extremely popular backfired on some people because of one little fault and made it the worst?...it's insane what kind of logic it turned into and guess what LA had that mindset long ago, but now...it's mediocre at best nothing too horrible but nothing too great either, SAO for the anime community changed for both the better and worse and to that that's ok to LA, it got anime exposure and helped gather more fans of anime together. If there was one little thing wrong with every anime ever, anime let alone media in general wouldn't be booming as it is now, so crying foul over one petty fault is just sounding pretentious, entitled and annoying for the sake of "being popular must be punished"...LA just finds this mentality baffling, if you like it, you like, be it ironically or not, if you don't...you don't. Yeah fine call LA a hypocrite for giving SAO's first season a 4 and LA's second season a 6, but is it worth a 1 for the sake of it being overly popular and that LA found Alfhiem and Gun Gale to be subpar?...well uhhh one, being overly popular doesn't even factor into it for LA so LA wouldn't do it in the first place and with Arc Fatigue of Alfheim and Gun Gale, LA can point out the faults of any anime like everyone else and put that into consideration like anyone else would but LA would not go to the point of condemning the series because of it.
This is what LA sees Kirito, Asuna and Yuna's belief about the "memory of SAO" to be, sure it had it's faults but is it to the point of erasing ALL of it...well then we wouldn't have Kirito and Asuna's relationship grow in Ordinal Scale and have some level of tension with Kirito wanting to bring Asuna's SAO's memories back (both the bad and good of it), hell without the memory of SAO, Asuna and Kirito's relationship would die out, so yeah Kirito has a reason to fight this time.
And to reiterate LA's point of LA's nitpick about Ordinal Scale's AR being implausible or "wrongly done in real life", no LA would not condemn Ordinal Scale because it wasn't "realistic enough". Ordinal Scale if anything gave us lots of world building of Sword Art Online through it's technology, gave us lots of character interactions and lots of growth to Kirito and Asuna's character individually by it's plot structure and growing relationship, the villains have legitimate purpose in the plot and aren't half-baked villains, they for one contrast Kirito back in his SAO days and two they are sympathetic just with the wrong methods. Heck they even did the entire "movie-only" character right without LA being annoyed this time.
Ordinal Scale for LA only now has shown that Sword Art Online as battered and bruised the franchise has turned into can swing back and give us, no convince us that it's trying to pardon it's wrongs and it did it amazingly even if Ordinal Scale itself as a movie has it's own problems which can be for LA be given grace for a pretty good solid story, growing cast of characters and gorgeously and amazing animation to it all.