Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale is the best movie about Augmented Reality since compilation videos of people falling off of things playing Pokemon GO. It’s two hours of all your favorite things associated with SAO: underdeveloped characters, Gary Stu Kirito, nonsensical plot, a villain with ridiculous motivation, and the romantic equivalent of watching a pickle and a pickle in a wig make out.

It starts promising enough. Kirito and the Trope Troop are into a new piece of technology called an Augma that is pretty much Google Glass. It allows you to play a fantasy video game in the real world while walking around town, earning promotions and such for ranking up in game. At this point in the movie I was pretty happy and content. It’s a decent idea, even if I think it’s ridiculously far-fetched to think that this type of technology would be used en masse after the events of SAO.

Spoilers ahead for those of you who actually want to sit through this dumpster fire.

It turns out that the guy who created the Augma has sent out a former SAO player to beat up players in the real world so that the monsters inside the fantasy game defeat the player and said player loses his memory. Because the bad guy’s plot is to steal the memories of former SAO players, upload them to a database, and recreate his daughter who died during the SAO incident using said memories.

This begs a number of questions. First of all, if this technology has the capacity to steal memories and leave a person with irreparable brain damage, why the fuck was it allowed on the market? After the SAO incident, you’d think anything that is able to connect directly to the brain would be vetted extremely well (but apparently they still sell Amuspheres...because those things weren’t the cause of 4000 deaths or anything).

Secondly, if you have the technology to steal people’s memories and upload them as data, why not just copy their memories? That way you can recreate your daughter without going to all the trouble of having people get defeated by monsters before you can steal the memory.

Third, why are SAO players playing Ordinal Scale? After being trapped in a life-or-death video game for so long I have a hard time believing that nearly every SAO player would happily pick up anything that transports them to a virtual world. “Oh, I nearly died playing a video game, but fuck it! I’m gonna keep playing video games that are out to kill me!”

Fourth, why can’t the bad guy remotely steal the memories? If he’s going to steal them, why go to all the trouble to have the player be defeated by a boss monster when you could just figure out who is an SAO player, tag them, and steal their memory remotely? In fact, this would make a lot of sense considering I’ll assume that not every player of SAO who was trapped in-game is from the immediate city area Kirito and friends are at. Or maybe SAO was only released to a tiny demographic of people in a tiny portion of Japan to make plot happen in future arcs.

Fifth, why steal the memories of every SAO player in order to recreate your daughter as an AI? I’m going to assume that the vast majority of players didn’t know her, let alone remember who she is. This point alone makes the plan so stupid I couldn’t take the last half hour of the movie seriously.

The catalyst for the rising action of the movie is that Asuna is defeated and starts losing her memories. So Kirito goes out of his way to defeat the bad guys and return the memories stolen from her. Because the catalyst for the action hinges on my suspension of disbelief surrounding circumstances found in a sci-fi b-movie from the 80s, the emotional resonance that is meant to be felt for Kirito’s desperate struggle for his fiancee is lost entirely.

The end of the movie has Kirito confronting the “assassin” character sent out by the main bad guy to do the dirty work. He was in love with Yuna, the daughter of the villain. In a fight for the memories of his future wife and payback for the pain she has been put through...Kirito turns on the AR device and fights the dude in AR. They are both physically present inside the room. They could both duke it out man-to-man. But that wouldn’t be stupid enough. So here’s a sword fight in a parking lot.

Then it turns out that in order to return everyone’s memories, the characters have to defeat the 100th floor boss of SAO. This makes sense because the movie needs to have a pathetic attempt at emotional manipulation by forcing all the heroes of the series to show up to fight a monster inside of a game they thought they’d never return to. So as they do a deep dive using their AR headsets (Why can the Augma be used as a deep dive device? Because fuck you!), their clothing is changed to reflect their “iconic” outfits. Cue the fan favorite side characters who show up to help out for no reason. Cue up Yuuki’s ghost manifesting. And cue the theater full of teenagers crying and clapping hysterically because they recognize things. Because we are at a point in human history where merely recognizing things is enough to trigger emotional responses from people.

Anyway, the final plan for this guy was to get all of the former SAO players to show up to an idol concert because, again, every SAO player has an Augma (to the story’s credit, they all got a free Augma for being an SAO survivor. Not to the story’s credit: WHY THE FUCK WOULD SURVIVORS PLAY WITH IT AFTER WHAT THEY WENT THROUGH? “Sorry you nearly died playing a video game, have another video game!”) and lives in the immediate vicinity of the story’s action. Suddenly, monsters attack the concert as our villain stands over everything watching people’s memories get ripped from their brains and uploaded, all to recreate his daughter. Because that’s enough motivation to become a potential mass murderer.

Thankfully Kirito saves the day and the police, who were too busy arresting me for watching Eromanga Sensei, finally show up the moment Kirito has saved the world.

You know...the police could have intervened way earlier...the government could have told everyone to not use Augmas because they will give you brain damage.

But nah. In fact, the government and police of Japan are so inept, Augma’s are still being used even after it was found out they can steal memories, replace memories, and do pretty much every plot device from Ghost in the Shell (which begs the question, are all the characters actually androids or cyborgs? Do they all have cyberbrains? Because you can’t rip memories out of someone’s biological brain using a device that you take on and off like a headband).

I wish I had one of those Augma’s to rip my memories of watching this steaming pile. I feel like I lost IQ points watching Ordinal Scale; and given my anime viewing habits I don’t have many more to give. This movie continues Sword Art’s streak of good ideas being ruined by the incompetence of a writer who doesn’t know how to craft a sensible plot grounded in a realistic world. I can forgive the fact that this AR tech would be extremely dangerous to use in real life (getting hit by cars, falling down stairs, all kinds of potential hazards), especially if it changes your perception entirely to that of a fantasy world. I mean, that was my first major question but for the sake of enjoyment I can let it slide.

Sword Art Online as a franchise has a problem and this movie exemplifies it: the games are cool and the technology is interesting but the author feels the need to constantly push over-the-top villains and real world drama into a show that would be better as a slice-of-life about an overpowered cardboard cutout and his harem playing a variety of futuristic video games. Mother’s Rosario continues to be the only shining spot in SAO’s history purely because it didn’t have some ridiculous villain and stupid stakes. It was applying the technology to a realistic situation and building characters through slice-of-life drama rather than action drama.

I’m not a baseless SAO hater. I actually like quite a few facets of the series. But I also can’t brainlessly fanboy over something that gives the middle finger to my capacity for thought. The promise at the end of Ordinal Scale that SAO will return is a double-edged sword. I’m excited to see the game the author creates next but I’m terrified by the stakes he’ll attach to it.

Ordinal Scale is a bad movie with high production values and a couple good ideas here and there. It’s pretty much on par with the stupidity of every arc that came before (and nowhere near as good as Mother’s Rosario). The stupid plot, the desperate appeal to emotions at the end, and the weak motivation of the villain leaves the only real reason to watch this the two seconds of Asuna’s nipple you see in that one shot where they show her leaving the bathtub. Because they couldn’t cut it when the audience intuits that she is going to leave to do something, you have to physically see her leave the tub. And see her nipple.