Anime Review: Sword Art Online EXTRA EDITION

The long awaited movie sequel to Sword Art Online is finally out and available for streaming on Crunchyroll, and the fans are going insane.  Personally, I could almost care less.  Even at the time, I thought Sword Art Online was really dumb, and the second half of the show had almost no narrative strength to it.  It was good to watch, but now that I've watched it, I'm not going to look back to it.  As far as wanting a second season, I'd probably watch it, but have no excitement for it.  These feelings were greatly amplified by watching Log Horizon, which takes the same concept of being trapped in an MMORPG video game and does just about everything better than Sword Art Online.  As a result, I wasn't too excited to watch EXTRA EDITION, but I figured that I'd give it a very fair shot, while keeping in mind that Log Horizon is biasing me against it.

To the best of my ability, I'm not going to lie about what I think about Sword Art Online EXTRA EDITION.  I'm not going to exaggerate how good or bad I think it is if I can help it; I'm going to be telling you exactly what I saw, what I was thinking then, and what I think now.  And it is going to upset a lot of people, because my opinion is significantly less than favorable to put it gently.  If you're the kind of person offended by disagreement, you may want to stop reading right now.

The movie starts off by playing the show's original opening theme, which brought back pleasant memories.  In the background are opening credits interspersed with main character Kirito and his sister Sugu riding to school on a motorcycle.  Once the credits are over, Kirito and Sugu arrive.  As it turns out, they were meeting with three of their friends, all girls Kirito met in the games, to have a pool party at the school, but Kirito instead has to deal with emergency counseling in the school building instead.  During this scene, Asuna, the female lead of the show and far left in the picture below, says something very, very wrong:

The problem with this line is that during the ALfheim Online arc, part two of the show, SHE WAS LOCKED IN A CAGE THE ENTIRE TIME.  She has no way of knowing that.  I'm sure the fanboys and fangirls will tell me that I'm wrong here and come up with some explanation, but this line is what tipped me off that EXTRA EDITION was going to be EXTRA bad.  Okay, well, maybe not EXTRA bad, but this was not a good sign.

So, Kirito heads off to the counseling office, and hello, nurse!  And then the "real" councilor turns around in his chair.  Kirito recognizes him as, "an elite member of the Virtual Division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs."  That a long enough title there?  It seems this federal agent wants to question Kirito about what happened in the games yet again.  Kirito is initially uncooperative, but after being bribed with candy and implicitly threatened with suddenly gaining media attention, he starts talking.

Before Kirito has a chance to say a single word, the scene cuts to the girls, who are now changing in the locker room.  When a movie has shameless fanservice in the first five minutes, that is a guarantee of the show sucking.  Fortunately for EXTRA EDITION, the shameless fanservice starts at five minutes and thirty-five seconds, passing the guarantee limit by less than a minute.  Also in this scene is lame comedy which was old before the first time someone ever attempted to make the event a joke.  In less than a minute, I was begging for the scene to change back to the interrogation.

Ten seconds later, my wish was granted.  Kirito finally starts talking to the fed, and we cut to the show, the scene which establishes the central conflict of the show.  You know, the same central conflict which I wrote a prior blog post pointing out how it's flat-out stupid.  And the best part is that the scene isn't even edited down in any way.  After three minutes, I realized that it's just going to be copying and pasting segments from the show.  After a 25 second break from flashbacks where Kirito and the agent exchange a few words, we see another flashback.

This flashback ends with Kirito yelling so loud the scene changes to the pool.  And at the pool, we learn that Sugu apparently can't swim and has a bit of a fear of water.  As a result, she gets teased for it by one of the other girls, to the point that the other girl starts sexually assaulting her, all for the laughs of the audience.  I shouldn't need to say this, but there is absolutely nothing funny about sexual assault.  At this point, I decided I would be skipping the remaining pool scenes, because this is just outright wrong.  I wanted to turn the movie off right at this point, only thirteen minutes in.

But I persisted anyway, and the reward for my persistence was nothing more than more flashbacks straight from the show.  I got so tired that I decided to start skipping in five minute intervals until the flashbacks finally stopped.  Here's an excerpt from the notes I was taking.

20:38  Recap.
25:49  More recap.
29:52  EVEN MORE recap.
34:54  re-
40:31  cap
45:30  And we're not even done with the first half of the show.
50:20  Now they are.
55:11  And now we're recapping part 2.
59:45  Yep.
65:55  YEP.
70:29  YAPPERS!
75:12  It's seriously a movie-length recap episode.
79:25  FANSERVICE!
79:45  DONE RECAPPING PART 2!

So, for the first hour and twenty minutes of EXTRA EDITION, all I have gotten is flashbacks to the original show mixed with incredibly lame fanservice and failed attempts at comedy which have served only to piss me off.  Only twenty minutes remain, but despite what I already failed to endure I remained optimistic that the remaining twenty minutes of material would still be worth watching.

The remaining twenty minutes takes place on a beach inside one of the virtual video game worlds, where all of the characters from earlier as well as two others are vacationing to.  During this scene something actually entertaining happens.  After the stupidest water-fight ever between the girls which is only there for the alleged fanservice appeal of seeing girls splash each other with water, we get the only genuinely funny moment in the show.  Kirito announces that it's time for their mission to start.  So the girls all start walking out of the water in slow motion, parodying baywatch.  One of the other guys, Klein, watches this, and is about to explode from the amount of sexy he's seeing.  Just before this happens, the girls press a floating button, and all of their clothes comes back on.  Cue Klein falling on his knees, crying tears of disappointment.

Aside from this joke, the rest of the twenty minutes is either boring or stupid.  The quest is one in which they have to dive deep underwater - good thing Sugu was taught how to swim earlier - to perform a quest where a whale then appears.  Yes, their goal is to go whale-watching while inside a video game.  The quest somehow involves them breaking into an underwater temple, stealing a pearl, discovering it's really an egg, getting their butts kicked by kraken, and then getting rescued by a stand-in for Poseidon and sent back to the beach riding on a whale.  If that sounds exciting, it's because I removed all of the cringeworthy fluff from that summary, including the part where the single best player of all VRMMORPGs falls into the most obvious pitfall trap ever.  Had the other characters not made fun of Kirito for this, I would have turned it off right then and there.

Somehow, I made it through to the end without having to skip through the final twenty minutes.  And when it ended, I was laughing. No, it wasn't because the ending was funny; I was laughing because I couldn't believe just how bad this whole thing was.  The twenty minutes of original material contained only one thing of any entertainment value whatsoever, and the plot of it is completely irrelevant.  Reading back through my notes only minutes later, I realized just how bad EXTRA EDITION was.

If I had any interest in watching a second season of Sword Art Online, EXTRA EDITION just completely killed it.  The short version is that EXTRA EDITION is to Sword Art Online as the Star Wars Holiday Special is to Star Wars.  The first eighty minutes of this movie are nothing more than recap, consisting of scenes copy-and-pasted straight from the show, mixed in with the tiniest amount of dialog between the main character and a federal agent trying to figure out what happened, alongside some of the most lame excuses for fanservice and comedy I've ever seen, all of it so bad I had to skip through it.  The remaining twenty minutes are worse than any other twenty minute segment in the show.  It contained no character development, nor did it advance the plot in any way.  If anything happened regarding characterization, either one's characterization was completely destroyed for the sake of lame comedy, or my memory of the character is really bad.  As for the plot, it contributes nothing to the overall story and can be completely ignored with no loss whatsoever.  There wasn't even any extra details of the setting given out for the fans as far as I could tell.  Seeing as how this movie is nothing but things I've aready seen or things which are just cringeworthy, there is literally no point to watching this movie, even if you're a fan of the series, and especially if you're not.  Just watch the show. Or better yet, don't;  Watch Log Horizon instead.  It's the same concept, but done so much better!