Review of Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale

To give you a background, I like the first half of Season 1 the most, then it started going downhill from there but I was still interested and liked it to a point. This movie made me question all that, here's why. Story: It's kind of progressive considering it deals with transferring games into real life through VR and not Full Dive but it doesn't really go anywhere, of course something is wrong but Kirito doesn't like it (despite being one of the top players as always) he wishes games would be like the good old days when you were fighting for your life on aday to day basis and that to me seems cheap, why even have that as a story element? I understand that the original was better but don't try and make it something it's not. I guess they try to add a nostalgia factor but the series isn't THAT old.

This whole movie is pretty contained besides calling back to a few things but you could go into this without ever watching SAO and I think you would still get it. With that it doesn't add much to the overall plot of the series.

Art: Art is fine, not much higher than usual but I will say they show more of Asuna's bath scene than I would have asked to see.

Sound: Whatever, it's SAO, they try to pop some new stuff in but I guess the old stuff sticks out as more of a victory lap.

Character: For some reason it seems lacking, I really like the characters originally but they just don't do anything very notable here and don't really progress to be a better character. New characters aren't all that bad imo and they have something between Asuna and Kirito but that's about it. They also have this moment with Klein and it desperately uses it as a reason to keep watching to see what happened to him (though it seems obvious) because he doesn't appear again until the end and seemed really out of place.

Enjoyment: Barely, this movie was bad, I didn't enjoy it. I was texting someone during it, kind of giving them updates on what I thought about it and they were immediately turned off by it and swore off watching any more SAO (they were on Season 2 at the time). I'm giving it a 6 overall as a generosity, I've seen worse but I've also seen so much better even within the series. Also I've gone on to watch Alicization which is basically SAO3, you don't need the movie for it.