Review of Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale

Clearly the lesson of this movie is don’t play anymore Pokémon Go. Having watched the first two seasons of SAO, I did enjoy the franchise somewhat, although there’s a bunch of stuff that I don’t care about. Because of this I didn’t have much high hopes for this movie. Ordinal Scale was surprisingly a blast. The animation was the key to this anime. Each boss battle was such a feast for the eyes. It’s not just the fight animation that was awesome, even the death animation was cool to watch. Some CGI monsters were kinda problematic, but the ones at the beginning and the last boss lookedamazing. This was a significant step up compared to the first two seasons. It vastly improved the enjoyment of the movie.

The story itself wasn’t the best, but it was decent enough to warrant investment. There were a lot of callbacks to the first two seasons, which I’m sure fans of the anime would have great times with. The father daughter relationship wasn’t as deep as it could have been, and the story would have more values if this part had more screen time.

Overall, Ordinal Scale was still a really fun time, even though it could have been a tiny bit shorter with more time dedicated to the story. 7.5-8/10