Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale Review

Hello there anime fans and if you are here SAO fans i'll admit right now i'm a huge SAO fan i've seen every episode of the anime and read the original manga as well as watching the extra edition a few years back so i was excited when they finally announced SAO was getting a movie so here is my review of Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale.

So then what is the plot of this movie i here you ask well in 2026 two years since the SAO incident a new game called "Oridinal Scale" an Augmented-Reality MMO is becoming popular among the players but strange things are happening in the game and Kirito and the gang are facing a new danger. In short the story for this movie was exactly what i was expecting from a movie based on SAO but what i wasn't expecting was how we would get from A to B i won't reveal what happens but it's really cool. Unfortunately tho the movie really doesn't do much with the thing i cannot mention despite it being a cool idea and the film has mixed pacing sometimes it's slow and sometimes it's quite fast.

All of the cast from the TV show reprise there roles those actors being Haruka Tomatsu as Asuna , Yoshitsugu Matsuoka as Kazuto Kirigaya/Kirito , Ayahi Takagaki as Rika Shinozaki/Lizbeth , Ayana Taketatsu as Suguha Kirigaya/Leafa , Hiroaki HIRATA as Klein plus many more but since this is a movie there's also a few new actors as well Sayaka Kanda as Yuna , Takeshi Kaga as Professor Shigemura and Yoshio Inoue as Eiji and if i'm being honest since i'm more used to the characters from the show i loved hearing them again and all of the cast both old and new do a great job in this movie there's not a bad performer among them.

The art in this movie was freaking beautiful i could recommend this movie just for the visuals alone but since this is an anime not many will go and see it so i'll also say that the movie has some truly stunning animation which i will go further into later in the review by the way but there was a lot of fluid movement there was no issues when it came to lip syncing either.

The character designs for this movie for me were really good they were very true to the style that was set in the show but at the same time it also showed that they had a bigger budget and could there for make improvements which they might not have been able to do on the TV show. The new characters for me look the best because the animators didn't have to stick to a set model like they do with the returning characters.

Now as i mentioned before the animation is really good and where the animation shines in this movie is the same place where it shines on the show and that's in the action scenes these were great to watch everything in those scenes had a great fast paced movement to them and it's helped by the fact that each action scenes not only helps drive the plot forward but is also different from the one that came before it and that stops them from being dull in my eyes.

The music for me felt very SAOish and by that i mean it felt like something i've heard before in the show but that doesn't mean there isn't new tracks in there because there is it's just that i personally couldn't hear them that well but what i like about the sound track is that SAO season 1 opening theme singer LISA returns to sing the end theme for this movie and that Sayaka Kanda sings all the songs that her character sings and she has a great voice.

Overall i'd say that if your a fan of SAO then not only should  you watch this movie then there's already a chance that you've seen this movie at least five times by now if your not a fan however then don't watch this movie it won't make you a fan at all for me as a fan this is an 8 out of 10