Review of Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale

Intro: Before I get into my review I just wanted to clarify where I come from in terms of the SAO universe. In short I am a huge fan of SAO. I’ve watched the entirety of the series a couple of times, played 2 of the PS4 games Hollow Fragments and Hollow Realization (I actually enjoyed the story of fragments a lot), currently reading the light novels (started book 13 recently) and played way too much of the mobile game. Now that my standing is basis is out of the way, here’s a debrief of why I thought SAO Ordinal Scale fell short of my expectations. Also notethat I will be strongly referencing the plot of the movie, so please bear in mind there will be spoilers and comments which won’t make sense if you have yet to watch the movie.

Animation: 10/10
This is by far one of the best animated movies I’ve seen recently with such amazing attention to detail, especially in the fight sequences. I was in awe with all the colours, sharpness and fluidity of every scene. Even with the transition scenes, you can tell that the animators went out of their way to capture the detail to make you feel fully immersed in the movie.

One scene which stood out to me the most is how the captured the essence of a live performance show by darkening the everything but the stereotypical glowsticks which are customarily handed out. Heck, they even managed to get some good product placements in there with the likes of Sony, Dell and McDonald's.

But of course, the main meat was during the fight scenes. Each frame was drawn to an outstanding level of detail, which definitely gave me a feeling that this fight was on an epic level (Something which was far greater than the reality of a few kids running around playing imaginary sword fighting).

My only gripe was that a couple of the visuals were used numerous times without any change. I.e. The transition during the raid boss fight where the city turns into the playable environment and each time Yuna introduces herself in each of the raid battle (this could be choice due to how video games in real life reuse animation sequences).

Sound: 6/10
The voice acting for this movie was good. I say that because I think that each character really sounded the part for the scene they were playing. However, what didn’t do them justice, was the fact that there weren’t enough scenes which explored the dynamic voice ranges of each character (I’ll get onto this later in my review).

The soundtrack of the movie was enjoyable as well with each of the fighting sequences having, what I thought, was their own song each time which kept to the pace of the fighting. However, this is where the soundtrack feels like it has missed something. The original SAO series had great background music in many of their scenes which definitely made me feel more in touch with the SAO world and story. But in Ordinal Scale, many of the scenes were dialogue heavy without any other audio cues, making the movie lack a certain depth. I was hoping to hear something along the lines of ‘Swordland’ or ‘Gracefully’, but sadly any music that I recall was reserved for the action scenes.

Story: 3/10
Here is definitely where I see the movie miss a great opportunity, especially with all the effort that was put into the animation and the sound.

To keep it spoiler free, the premise of the movie is that a new experience is presented to our protagonists; the Augma. A device which lets users enhance their daily way of life by overlaying visual elements on top of the real world environment (Look up Microsoft Hololens if you need to visualise it).

Our characters which we have come to know, of course use this also to partake in an augmented reality game called Ordinal Scale, whereby players can participate in events to win points that can also be used to redeem real world prizes. These events consists mainly of a sizeable amount of players grouping up to take on an in-game boss and use both their augmented weapons and real life agility to win.

Throughout the movie, it does pay it’s respects to previous characters and areas which have been featured in the anime, making it a nice gesture for the fans which have kept up to date in the SAO universe. There aren’t many action sequences which justify the amount of detail in the animation, causing most of the movie to feel like an exercise to read the subtitles (I will say the last fight scene was fantastic and definitely helped redeem a portion of the film).

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It felt that a sizeable portion of this was exposition. Although this is important to ensure viewers understand the rules of the movie, it was done in such a way which was not engaging. In the first season of SAO, the first episode talked about the basic rules of the ‘Death Game’ and other aspects of this were discovered along the way (Making it one of the reasons why I enjoyed it so much). But Ordinal Scale took the approach of trying to explain everything in what felt like the first third of the movie and then going into the actual plot of the movie.

The two main antagonists are Eiji; who is one of the best players in Ordinal Scale and Prof. Shigemura; the creator of the Augma device and Ordinal Scale AR game. Eiji is given a nice introduction and some good action scenes to showcase why he is ranked 2 in Ordinal Scale. Prof. Shigemura on the other-hand is given a very brief introduction, a couple of minutes towards the second act and a few more scenes towards the end of the third act.

My issue with the antagonists (and plot of the movie) is that the reasoning behind their actions are not shown to the audience until the the last couple of scenes in the second act. Having to watch through two thirds of the movie only to discover their reasons felt like a very big build up, to what was a poorly executed point in the story. The plot does not go into detail as to what the relationship between Eiji and Yuuna was, making it hard to empathise with why Eiji went to such lengths to reach his goal. The professor’s reasoning is understandable given that he’s a father, but due to the lack of screen time and emotional investment of these characters and their relationships, this is where the plot fell by a significant degree.

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There are also various plot holes which come to mind when re-thinking about this movie. One of which was who it was never explained why the gem(?) on Eiji’s back somehow granted him superhuman agility powers. This could be more understandable if the setting was in the VR world, but given it’s an AR environment, no explanation was provided about how we could literally bounce off walls and backflip 10ft into the air.

Which brings me to the other point as to the speed in which Kirito becomes a match for Eiji. We’re given about 5mins of a montage and suddenly he’s transformed from the “indoor gamer, whose girlfriend comments about his physical abilities and tripping up on the pavement” to “someone who is now able to go toe-to-toe with against a person who we has the jumping capabilities of a character off Naruto”.

Characters: 4/10
I definitely felt that this was a movie filled with more drama and seriousness, with very little comedic elements. Yes the plot was to try and return Asuna’s memories back so that the relationship between Kirito and Asuna would blossom further, the plot did not have as much weight behind it compared to that of the series. Some may bash the plot of the series to be repetitive (Die in game, die in real life), I really enjoyed that aspect of it as it felt like the characters had more at stake. Whereas in Ordinal Scale, although they could potentially lose their memories from the days in Aincrad, the story did not expand on this enough to make it feel comparable or emotionally impactful.
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I have become accustomed to Kirito’s character throughout the series as one which is easily embarrassed by others, analytical of any situation and one which goes to extreme lengths for his friends. Ordinal Scale did not seem to play on these qualities very much which made Kirito feel mostly emotionless (at least in the first half), wondering around from scene to scene without any noticeable character development. (We learnt that he’s deciding what to do in college and his go to meal, but I don’t think that counts)

The other main characters of SAO had very minor roles to play in this movie, causing them to lack any depth or progression in character development. They were performing with their typical tropes such as Silica playing the girl that constantly needed saving, Liz with her bravado, Sinon as mostly background noise, Agil only showing up as source of info / axe wielder and Klein, who is constantly looking for a girl / trying to flirt with Asuna.

Conclusion: 6/10
I am still a fan of SAO after this, and maybe it was due to my overexposure into this universe which brought my expectations to a high standard, but despite all that, this film is missing that something which got me excited when I first started watching the anime series.

This movie had the potential to be something I would definitely see again. But due to the lack of good character development, unrelatable antagonists and the predictable and shallow plot of the movie, I can only recommend this movie for its visuals and if you are a serious fan of the series and wish to consume everything there is to know about Sword Art Online.