Sword Art Online (SAO) had three outings by now, teaching us a few things throughout its weird and mostly bad existence. There were two major aspects we’ve learned of it: the tale progressed in a much better pace and with much better quality when Kirito was not involved; it worked better when it dealt with real-life along with the virtual world of its multiple shitty games.

If you’ve seen the previous three seasons (two main seasons and a spin-off) you know the very first one was the most severely impaired by these two aspects I’ve mentioned. It had Kirito full-time onscreen and it hardly ever touched the real life aspect of the tale. It was a storm of piss in most ways. Ordinal Scale is once again all about Kirito, yet it does try to focus more on the real life aspect, or so it seems.

The heart of the movie is the new Augma system, an augmented reality device that made Pokemon Go a game where people actually swing tiny sticks around the streets fighting virtual monsters that only they could see. It happens though that this device is yet another deadly piece of tech from the creators of the Sword Art Online, so it falls to Kirito to solve all the shit once again.

It’s the most corny SAO yet

It’s shameful how the early minutes of the movie play out. It is once again about Kirito’s friends talking about a huge load of ridiculous terms and trying to give you an impression that this new technology is something incredible. The visual effects are indeed amazing, putting every other SAO in the bag, but the presentation is damn corny, something akin to watching Bill Gates unveil Windows 95 or making you feel as if you’re giving audience to a bunch of Apple fans during the unveil of a new iPhone. There’s a virtual idol flying around too and it seems everyone in Japan is now part of this big game, which take us back to old problems.

The author clearly needs to study human psychology

I mean, he likes throwing terms and even in this movie there is a lot of text dump during conversations, but all is for nothing as they make no sense whatsoever when your characters are survivors of a death experiment that deprived them from reality for two years and saw the death of four thousand people. It is baffling how the SAO survivors are happy to play other games at all and here they willingly jump into this augmented reality BECAUSE it uses SAO’s asset. It is even more bullshit how they ONLY remember their fear of dying when they are stuck by the monster they are fucking fighting against right at that moment. Really? There is no one who stops Kirito and Asuna and says “guys! STOP! We nearly died in this shit, we lost friends, we lost time, we lost sanity. Just. Stop. Please!”. It seems the survivors all became sadistic beasts who only live for the next death experiment to happen to them. Nope. Humans do not work this way my friend, and because of that most stuff happening in real life feels stupid.

Kirito

Once again, the virtual world is about to kill people (or something like that) and it falls to Kirito to investigate and solve all the problems. When he is the spotlight of SAO there is no way you get to be thrilled. He is a boring asshole who does nothing besides smooth-talking Asuna yet it seems everyone is always so worried about him they could die if he is not present anymore. In fact, it seems Kirito’s disposition is more important to the support cast than the fact they’ve survived a death game. In Ordinal Scale the sheer asspull skill is turned up a notch for Kirito because he does not rely only on virtual cheating, but actually performs all the sword swinging, jumps, and flips to fight the monsters of this augmented reality. By the end it seems the movie was only meant to tell us Kirito was not only the best cheater in virtual reality, but in augmented reality too. Oh god.

It’s all here… everything

Not only Kirito is the heart again but SAO (the game) is. We get a bit more of the maniac with no motivation whatsoever who did the death experiment of the first season and now his background is finally enhanced by… showing there are more maniacs like him to create death games. This time it is up to his damn teacher and research leader, who willingly wants to kill thousands of people for his selfish desires. It is baffling that, once again, the authorities mean shit and only that same guy Kikuoka seems to embody all the responsible adults of the world… but only after he asked Kirito for help.

Unlike the second season and the spin-off, which tried to move away from Kirito at some point, Ordinal Scale is like a direct sequence to that first season, which means a lot of shitty things are going on. The stunning visual presentation can hold your attention, especially because it has more action than the full first season, but it seems the corny factor was leveled up too, making the experience as shameful as watching Kirito and Asuna hanging in the woods back in the days.

I was reluctant to watch this and I didn’t know why, but after spending a few minutes I’ve understood. This is a full compilation of makes SAO a terrible thing. It is all about a single guy capable of beating stuff without any kind of common sense. It is about an author that has amazing ideas to explore but lacks the skill to use them. It is about a info-dump dialogues with lots of cliche terms trying to sound complex. It is about never getting the hand of its own setting and making us feel as if the real world matters.

Anyway, if you somehow wish to watch the next season you may want to force you through this crap. It is beautiful, so that’s maybe enough, but if you had trouble suffering through all that first season annoyance I might say this is a very big compilation of that and you will suffer once again. I really hope that the Alicization comes back to explore other people and leave Kirito out once more.. because gods, it’s hard to hang with him and all the “virtual badass savior” aura of a novel’s protagonist.