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A dramatic improvement from the original 2012 anime (and by proxy, the 2002 novel). I didn't understand how the 15-year-old me got so hooked on the show, but this movie reminded me of why. The animation and soundtrack did a brilliant job illustrating just how hard each character fought - when I saw both Kirito and Asuna run towards the first boss I almost wanted to run as well, as if the action sequence was giving me adrenaline.

The movie also did a good job developing the friendship of Asuna and Mito in the first act, and I found myself emotionally connected to both of ... them. Mito, an already-skilled player who thought she failed to protect her closest friend, and Asuna, a new player thrown into a game where she had no choice but to get better at. And all of this is driven by a strong, yet simple motivation: to live. Defeating the first floor proved everybody that beating SAO and coming back into the real world was possible and they would finally live again some day, but they have to continue working hard to get there.

Of course, it's not free of complaints. Kirito still doesn't have proper character development - the way he abandoned the clearing party sounding all badass felt forced, especially since he was introduced as a shy and socially awkward kid beforehand. And apparently, Asuna has a bathtub hyperfixation. It felt like they broke Asuna's standoffish character just to have one tedious fourteen-year-old-girl-in-the-nude scene, especially since it wasn't established before. It's just a shameless reminder that even with a female protagonist, the movie was still a shounen at heart (animated by grown men, by the way). I skipped that scene altogether.

All in all, the movie is a 7.5/10 from me, but I'll round it up to an 8. I personally recommend it as the first thing to watch for those new to the series.

Studio Trigger's animation never misses. When I binge-watched this with my girlfriend, I thought that this was the best anime I've seen this decade. Looking back at it now, there are a few bugs and glitches that this cyberpunk adventure didn't patch out. The anime gives off the illusion of an original, well-written story with three-dimensional characters, but in reality it takes too much from Johnny Silverhand's story in Cyberpunk 2077.

Johnny Silverhand is the deuteragonist of the video game who, 50 years before the start of the game, had a relationship with one Alt Cunningham, who created the Soulkiller device that was capable of digitizing ... the user's consciousness. Arasaka, the main antagonist of both the game and the anime, kidnaps Alt and steals the Soulkiller device, intending to use it for their own purposes. Johnny Silverhand's arc ends as he and his band raid the Arasaka building in a failed attempt to save Alt, who had died after the Soulkiller device was used on her.

The plot towards the second half of the anime was just like this. At some point the anime's deuteragonist, Lucy, also gets kidnapped by Arasaka for reasons I still don't understand. Her boyfriend, the main protagonist David, has to come and save her while falling in and out of cyberpsychosis. His team did all they could to keep David lucid enough to rescue her, at the cost of their own lives.

At the very least there was some originality (like David's cyberpsychosis), but already being familiar with Cyberpunk lore by the time of watching this anime it still felt bland to me. Obviously people won't care about this if they're uninterested in the game lore, or haven't even played the game at all. Personally I'd still recommend this, but I still wonder about the potential this story had.