An anime film to be released in Oct/2021, its long title abbreviated to SAO.
©2020 川原 礫/KADOKAWA/SAO-P Project
As it is known, it is a prequel to the TV anime work of the popular light novel work.
It is quite a long-running anime work, with SAO Phase 1 (25 episodes, Jul-Dec/2012), Phase 2 (24 episodes, Jul-Dec/2014), SAO Alicization (24 episodes, Oct/2018-Mar/2019), SAO Alicization War of Underworld (23 episodes,. Oct-Dec/2019, Jul-Sep/2020), and SAO Ordinal Scale (theatrical spinoff, 2017), which follow the same lineage.
In this near-future science fiction story, players of a virtual action game are unable to return to the real world unless they clear the game world, and the story revolves around the main character Kirito (voice: Matsuoka Yoshitsugu), the strongest swordsman, and his partner Asuna (voice: Tomatsu Haruka), a swordswoman.
This work depicts the prequel to the game, the story of how Asuna came to the game world, which was never depicted in the TV series.
The female warrior depicted as a quasi-protagonist in the PV and poster is Mito (voice: Minase Inori), who is also Asuna's best friend in the real world.
The second half of the story progresses along the line of Asuna's attraction to Kirito, and Mito rather fades away.
This was a bit unexpected, but it makes sense if you consider that the story depicts the conflict between "the person I want to be" and "the person who accepts reality" through Mito. At any rate, the main character, Kirito, is so strong both physically and mentally that it is impossible to portray him as a representative of a weak person.
The battle scenes, which impressed me even when the first TV series appeared (2012), are even more powerful in this work after 9 years. The powerful visuals and sounds are astounding.
There seems to be a continuation of this prequel in the form of a series of movie versions. I can't wait to see the rest.
