In 2022, a massively multiplayer online virtual reality roleplaying game titled Sword Art Online is launched, and on 6 November ten thousand people log into it for the first time but then discover they cannot log out of it. The creator Akihiko Kayaba (the voice of Koichi Yamadera; David W. Collins in the English dubbed version) then reveals himself to tell the players they must defeat all one hundred floors of Aincrad, the steel castle in which the game is set, if they want to be able to log out. If they die inside the game or have the headgear they're wearing removed, they will also die in reality. Asuna (Haruna Tomatsu; Cherami Leigh in the EDV), who has logged into it with her friend (Inori Minase; Anairis Quinonis in the EDV), initially struggles with having living inside and beat the game, until she meets knowledgeable lone wolf Kirito (Yoshitsugo Matsuoka; Bryce Papenbrook in the EDV), who joins forces with her.
This second entry (after 2017's Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale) in the anime movie series based on Reki Kawahara's light novel series Sword Art Online: Progressive is technically amazing, with intoxicating animation and Yuki Kajiura's pulsating music score. But before seeing it I was unfamiliar with both the novel series and the previous film and while I could follow the narrative well enough, I didn't find very much here to appeal to people who weren't already avid fans of the franchise (here I think I should note that Kawahara also wrote the screenplay). I certainly detected no backstory to help non-fans familiarise themselves with the story, anyway. Director Ayako Kono demonstrates an enthusiasm for this narrative and a lucidity with keeping the visuals consistently crisp, but again I think she needed to make that narrative appeal more to people who were going to see it without knowing the franchise's previous entries, as I think it's safe to say that was probably inevitable that some viewers would be in that boat. As it is, Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night therefore underwhelmed me. 6/10.
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