Review of Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale

I thought this movie was a wonderful addition to the franchise. It may be because I haven't watch SAO in a little while, but this movie really ticked all the important boxes for me. For starters, the art is always beautiful. SAO is something that could fail very easily without good visuals, so it's a definite plus that they've always been top tier. You'll see a lot of boss monsters in this movie, so it's pretty awesome that their abilities, their designs, and the fights with them are animated to perfection. The sound is something that's sort of always been give or take, in my opinion,but this movie does have a few good songs that set the scenes beautifully.

The story also gets mostly positive comments. I will say that the antagonists and their motives, while interesting and deep, weren't very well conveyed. I think that was probably because this is a movie and there wasn't enough to time to properly flesh them out, but nonetheless, they felt a little bit stale.

That's probably where my complaints end. One of the better things about this movie, to me at least, is its return to Asuna and Kirito. After the initial events in SAO, their relationship took a bit of a backseat to make room for other aspects of the story, but this movie brings back some of that original spark. There's a lot of Kirito fighting for Asuna as he did in the SAO game, so it was quite nostalgic to watch. Speaking of nostalgia, their original characters designs come back! That is also one of the best things about this movie. It will take you back to the original characters, and it's awesome.

In general, I think this movie is solid simply because it grounds the series once again in the initial story. As I said, if the antagonists had been done a bit better, it probably could've been grounded more, but with Asuna and Kirito returning to who they were when they were trapped in SAO, it makes this movie so worth watching.

P.S. if you were ever curious about the final boss on floor 100... well, you should probably check this movie out!