Review of Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale

You know, its just dawned on me. Sword Art Online, a series targeted at the teen demographic staring a self-insert blank space as a protagonist that is constantly surrounded by members of the opposite sex, all of whom could be potential partners, that is hugely popular despite having about the same critical acclaim as a slightly unclean and unflushed public toilet from everybody that isn’t a huge fan, having a reputation for being watched by people who hate it just to take the piss to the point that the series now has more negative things said about it than the series itself is probably worthgetting, receiving so much hate that at this point that most of it is probably unwarranted, but will inevitably continue so long as it remains popular.

The point I’m getting at here is that Sword Art Online is Twilight for the anime community (something that I didn’t think of myself, but I’m stealing from my brother considering it’s an excellent comparison).

Also, there is a moment at the start of the film in which Kirito asks if him and his friends are playing too much video games. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is him showing any self-awareness or character development, because its not.

Anyway, with those little gripes out of my system, I’m going to write the review now.

I wanted to like this. I honestly did. So many of the ideas here have to potential to go somewhere interesting, but then they just don’t. The AR and its gear is an interesting idea, creating something that could be a commentary into technology entering our everyday lives (a path we are already on looking something similar), and how this would affect the SAO survivors etc. Although it doesn’t explore any of this.

Making Kirito bad at the game because, realistically, somebody who would be good in VR would be unfit as shit and therefore bad in real life. This makes sense from a realistic, storytelling and tension-creating perspective. Potentially interesting? Yep. Utilized? Nope, lets just make him OP again after, like, a 2-minute montage.

Villains that are sympathetic and not just generic evil-dudes? Definitely! Explore them in an effective way at all? No can do!

And don’t even get me started on how little the plot and mechanics of this universe don’t make sense – something I’d be a little more forgiving on if any of the potential that this had to be a good movie was lived up to.
I think it’s this potential that really drags this down for me. What should have been my favourite SAO content instead almost ends up being my least favourite. I enjoyed SAO II more than the first one because I seen more effort put into the story and characters. I don’t enjoy this more because you would have to be trying to fuck this up to ruin such a potentially good premise with lots of the elements of an interesting movie at least.

Either way this concludes my SAO binge for now. I’ll maybe watch SAO III or even the GGO spin-off when these shows are completed, but it will have to be in a while because all the alcohol in the world wouldn’t convince me to spend another second of my precious-little free time watching any more Sword Art Online content for now.