2017, 2-hour film:
AniDB,
follow-up to 2012's
Sword Art Online
and 2014's
Sword Art Online II.
Two years after the SAO Incident, virtual reality is out of fashion as
a new augmented reality game has become hugely popular. But Kirito
reckons there's something just a bit odd about it.
He's right, of course. But on the way to finding out, there's
some lovely material as the people who are sticking to the old games
try not to worry or admit that it's less fun now that rather fewer
people are playing. (As someone who was there for the death of USENET,
I found this very familiar.)
Soon enough it's back to the battles for which this series is largely
known; the script goes through some significant contortions to try to
persuade the viewer that these really are problems which can be
solved by virtual- or augmented-reality fighting games, and if it
doesn't entirely succeed that just means that one has to be in
sympathy with the story being told. It's been two years, and they're
teenagers; they've changed a lot, and it's welcome to see a growing
maturity reflected in their behaviour.
On the other hand, while the stakes seem high, there's no real
progress or achievement: a menace appears, it's defeated, and things
go on much as they did before. This would be fine for iconic
characters, but previous parts of this series have ended with their
characters in significantly different places from where they started;
this one doesn't.
In the end this feels more like a dispensable side story than an
important element of the overall narrative, which I gather is standard
for films released in between series. Followed by season 3,
Alicization.
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