One of the big highlights of the year in terms of going through media was fully becoming a fan of Sword Art Online. It was a really great experience that I don't think deserves nearly as much hate as it gets, especially with most of it's criticisms being really ridiculous bad faith arguments, or completely missing what it's going for. However, if there's anything I can strongly criticize SAO for, it's that it really doesn't put its best foot forward. It feels like a bit of a hot take to say when comparing arcs with each other, but Aincrad is ROUGH. Even ignoring how much the anime adaptation butchers the source material, the arc feels like it really rushes through it's concepts, has fairly dull character writing aside from Kirito, and as a result isn't really able to explore it's most interesting themes to the best of it's ability until the arcs that come after it. The various weaknesses of Aincrad are something that the series' writer, Reiki Kawahara, is also well aware of. This is where Sword Art Online: Progressive comes in, a complete ground-up retelling of the first arc. While I'm much more familiar with Kiseki Himura's manga adaptation of this story, Progressive breathes so much more life and depth to each of the characters, it's a fantastic showcase of how much Kawahara has grown as a writer since the start of the series. Something very notable is that Kawahara doesn't have much reverence for the original version of Aincrad at all, and his afterword of the first light novel makes it incredibly clear how his intention with Progressive is to tell a completely different story from that.
Which is part of what makes Sword Art Online -Progressive- Aria of a Starless Night such a deeply frustrating film to sit through on pretty much every front.
To start off, remember how just a few sentences ago I said that Progressive was made with very little reverence for the original version of Aincrad? Well, in incredibly sharp contrast, it feels as reverent as humanly possible to the original Aincrad story. The amount of callbacks to the original series both visually and even through it's soundtrack are stuff that I'd usually find really charming, but feel pretty distracting when adapting a version of this story that made a very conscious effort to form it's own identity. The most distracting of these was Kirito wearing the game's starting gear for most of the movie, even when in-universe he'd been playing for over a month and would be the last person who would be wearing it.
Speaking of Kirito, and this is something I never thought I'd say with how adamantly I fought against this perception of his original series counterpart, he is REALLY boring in this movie. His reserved nature in this doesn't have any of the insight we get into his headspace in the original series to help it flourish, which makes him really dull to watch in any of his conversations with Asuna. While it is fair to argue that Progressive shouldn't really put as much focus on Kirito, especially since it takes more influence from the Himura manga in the sense that it places focus on Asuna as the main character of the story, that only makes things worse since it puts him in the crossfire of being compared to Progressive's take on Kirito, who's absolutely drowning in personality. Manga Progressive's Kirito feels so far removed from how the movie portrays him that the parts where it directly does adapt parts of that Kirito's personality, like his conversation with Asuna about his cabin or the aftermath of the first boss battle, those moments feel really out of place here. But that's enough about Kirito, let's move on to talking about Great Value Kirito.
Mito is such a baffling addition to this movie. Up until the point they separate she's basically serving as a placeholder for Kirito's role of guiding Asuna and helping her get more used to how SAO works, but she has very little to her that doesn't feel incredibly derivative. The one character trait I found genuinely charming about her is her preference in playable avatars (and I do like that they got Ryuusei Nakao, Frieza's voice actor, to voice her initial avatar), but even that goes away once Kayaba reveals everyone's true appearance. But what makes her go from pretty dull to borderline parasitic is how her presence impacts Asuna as a character.
To put it in perspective, I REALLY love Himura Progressive's depiction of Asuna. The series does such a good job of presenting her fears and emotions, the intense anxiety placed on her from both her personal life and the reality of being stuck in Sword Art Online. Her family situation and the pressure they've placed on her over her life in particular was incredibly compelling. How does the movie depict all of her depth from this early on? It does so by saying all of that is entirely tied to Mito. All of the other baggage she has internally is shoved to the side in favor of having her relationship with Mito, which itself feels like borderline queerbait with how it's depicted, and Mito's subsequent abandonment of her (which I also thought was handled really strangely narratively) before the actual adaptation of Progressive was what made her who she is. It's so much less interesting than the internal conflict she endures in Progressive that she almost becomes more dull than ORIGINAL Aincrad Asuna.
When one of my friends saw this movie, he made a comparison to the animated adaptation of Batman: The Killing Joke, and I honestly can't think of a better way to put it. It's a painfully dull adaptation that takes forever to start adapting Progressive proper, and it's additions before that only serve to detract from the overall storytelling, which could've been better spent fleshing out the story that it's adapting. You're much better off experiencing through the light novels or the Himura manga. All of this being said, I'm still cautiously optimistic to watch Scherzo of the Deep Night, since it's adapting parts which are uncharted territory outside of the LNs, and prominently features Argo, one of my favorite characters in all of Progressive and SAO as a whole.
OH YEAH THAT'S ANOTHER THING, Argo is completely cut out of the story until the literal last minute of the movie, which is absurd with how much she adds to Kirito and Asuna, as well as giving a better understanding to the role of beta testers and informants to the story. God, this movie is so irritating.
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