Sword Art Online the Movie: Progressive – Aria of a Starless Night is a retelling of the 1st floor of Sword Art Online from the Perspective of Asuna. Here is our full Sword Art Online the Movie: Progressive – Aria of a Starless Night Review
The movie was released in the Fall 2021 anime season with a sequel that came out Fall 2022. Sword Art Online the Movie: Progressive – Aria of a Starless Night was animated by A-1 Pictures and based on the spin-off light novel Sword Art Online the Movie: Progressive. A-1 Pictures is also known for anime like Kaguya-sama, 86, Fairy Tail and Persona 3.
Before going into this movie I knew almost 0 about Sword Art Online other than people playing an MMO, but I quickly got surprised by how well they introduced the premise for people without any knowledge of the series, something that I didn’t expect due to it running for such a long time and most anime fans probably knowing already.
The story follows Asuna, a girl who borrowed the VR headset and the game from her brother to play with a friend from school. Something that nobody knew yet was that the moment you log into the game, you are stuck with 2 ways out, Death or completion. If people from outside the game remove the headset or if you die in the game you die in real life. To win and survive you need to complete all 100 floors the game has to offer.
Asuna got lucky and met up with the guy that got the farthest in the game during the beta. But this isn’t without any problems, because the friend she had left her party during a time when she needed her the most and each of them thought they died.
the part with the plants felt actually really exciting and had me on the edge of my seat hoping for a good outcome. The battle was just hopeless with any outcome you expected with that many enemies and with the actual death of a character on the line, it just felt much more like a life-or-death situation.
Kirito reminds me of a nice version of Levi from Attack on Titan, he is just kinda cool, and collected in the movie and seems to know everything and take down enemies with ease. I just loved how he tried to be good to Asuna while it didn’t seem like he actually is used to being around other people as a “solo player”.
The boss battle was probably one of the coolest boss battles I’ve seen in anime so far with an enemy that actually felt like a threat to the main characters. After having seen the first few episodes of the anime, the boss looked better than in the anime and felt a lot more threatening. It felt like it was an actual end of the movie battle, it was a lot longer and it felt like there was a lot more at stake
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