Back to QuestRam's Profile QuestRam's Profile

About an hour out of the theater and I'm still reeling from how much Ordinal Scale managed to get it right.

Although I enjoyed the latter three cours of SAO seasons one and two, the first cour of season one still holds up as one my favorite anime of all time, even five years later. Its unique blend of adventure, discovery, and situational weight is stunning; it's something special in a way that few other shows have been able to emulate.

Ordinal Scale manages to capture that same essence that was present in season one and build on it. The characters are delightfully familiar, the ... story's scope is appropriate, and the callbacks are enough to make me giddy with nostalgia. The weight of the characters' actions is once again brought to the forefront, building the same sense of tension that had me so heavily invested in season one. When characters were in danger, my stomach dropped.

To me, Ordinal Scale feels like the perfect next step for SAO, taking the buildup of the previous seasons (their cast, world mechanics, and storylines) and bringing them together in something great. It's a culmination of SAO's best aspects, taking what we have seen so far and giving us a direction for the series's future.

To top it all off, this movie is undoubtedly A-1 Pictures at its best. The visuals are stunning, the soundtrack spot on, and the sound effects weighty and solid. The voice acting and writing are exceptional as well; these are definitely the same characters I've grown to love watching the SAO franchise. Development on the relationship between Kirito and Asuna is something I've been waiting for in the series, and this movie just does it right.

In all, Ordinal Scale has proven to be a fantastic movie that I'd highly recommend. For SAO as a whole, I can't wait to see where things go from here.