Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Hoshi Naki Yoru no Aria

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: SAO Progressive Movie, Aria in the Starless Night, Hoshinaki Yoru no Aria

Japanese: 劇場版ソードアート・オンラインプログレッシブ星なき夜のアリア

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Information

Type: Movie

Episodes: 1

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Oct 30, 2021

Producers: Aniplex, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Egg Firm, Straight Edge, Kadokawa, Sonilude

Licensors: Aniplex of America

Studios: A-1 Pictures

Source: Light novel

Genres: Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Theme: Video Game

Duration: 1 hr. 37 min.

Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older

Statistics

Score: 7.97¹ (scored by 97,884 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #666²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #961

Members: 253,532

Favorites: 2,143

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Crunchyroll

7.97

Ranked #666Popularity #961Members 253,532

Episodes: /1

Synopsis

Excelling socially and academically, Asuna Yuuki is on track to ace her high school entrance exams. Her friend and classmate, Misumi "Mito" Tozawa, advises her to take a short break from studying and join her on the launch day of Sword Art Online (SAO)—the highly anticipated online virtual reality multiplayer game. Asuna accepts her offer and soon meets her in the game.

In a cruel twist of fate, Asuna, Mito, and every other player logged into SAO find themselves trapped in the game permanently. The only way out is to clear all one hundred floors of the game, and to make matters worse, dying inside the game will kill the player in real life. With SAO now turned into a nightmare death trap, Asuna and other gamers—such as the lone swordsman Kazuto "Kirito" Kirigaya—must adapt and survive, all whilst attempting to beat the unforgiving competition to the top.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Hoshi Naki Yoru no Aria has been licensed by Aniplex of America as Sword Art Online the Movie -Progressive- Aria of a Starless Night with the launch of the Official USA Website on November 19, 2020. Aniplex announced the movie's theatrical and IMAX release in the USA on December 3, 2021.

The movie's first limited edition advance ticket was released from December 28, 2020 to January 11, 2021 on the Aniplex+ website, which recorded the world's fastest advance ticket sale.

Episode Videos

Episode 1

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Related Anime

Adaptation:	Sword Art Online: Progressive
Alternative version:	Sword Art Online
Sequel:	Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Kuraki Yuuyami no Scherzo

More characters

Characters & Voice Actors

Kirigaya, Kazuto

Main

Matsuoka, Yoshitsugu
Japanese

Yuuki, Asuna

Main

Tomatsu, Haruka
Japanese

Tozawa, Misumi

Main

Minase, Inori
Japanese

Tsuboi, Ryoutarou

Supporting

Hirata, Hiroaki
Japanese

Ayano, Keiko

Supporting

Hidaka, Rina
Japanese

Kayaba, Akihiko

Supporting

Yamadera, Kouichi
Japanese

Mills, Andrew Gilbert

Supporting

Yasumoto, Hiroki
Japanese

Argo

Supporting

Izawa, Shiori
Japanese

Diabel

Supporting

Hiyama, Nobuyuki
Japanese

Kanamoto, Atsushi

Supporting

Oosaka, Ryouta
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Futami, Yousuke

Producer

Niwa, Masami

Producer

Kuroi, Hitomi

Assistant Producer

Nakagawa, Hazuki

Assistant Producer

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Opening Theme

No opening themes have been added to this title. Help improve our database by adding an opening theme here.

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Ending Theme

"Yuke (往け（ゆけ）)" by LiSA

Reviews

Feb 13, 2024

ZADOCC

Recommended

I am hugely invested in telling people that this movie is actually good, so I'm going to tell a story about how I discovered this movie.

As part of an (ill-advised) attempt to make a comprehensive isekai tier list, I decided to sit down with some friends to watch every piece of SAO media available to me in as close to one sitting as I could get. This was the last piece of media I watched after finishing Ordinal Scale (I didn't realize it was before Alicization. Whoops) and was so checked out of the end of that movie that the bar of expectations was on ... the floor for this one.

Cue my surprise when half an hour in, I realize I want to go get something to drink but don't feel like I can because I'm too invested in what's happening onscreen.

SAO did that? Really?

I have no nostalgia for this series, I got into anime early in college. So when I sat down to watch this, I took in all the ugly plot-hole ridden mess that was SAO Seasons 1 and (to a lesser extent) 2. By this point I expected little out of the series, but this movie gripped me in a way nothing that day had even come close to doing.

First, the elephant in the room. The SAO Progressive Aria movie is very loosely adapted from the light novel of the same name, and this movie take many liberties in adapting that material. Though a handful of scenes and themes remain from that novel, the first entire half of this movie was fabricated for the sake of this movie. This is objectively a bad adaptation of its source material, and if you go into this looking for that, you will be disappointed.

I was not, however, and having since read the novel, I've come to the conclusion that the movie tells a better overall story.

What SAO always lacked, in my opinion, was the proper worldbuilding and time to flesh out its death game setting. How people act when put in a game environment under extremely high stress, and how people cope with that. This movie has that in SPADES, all through the eyes of our POV character, Asuna Yuuki.

This movie is told through the eyes of Asuna as it tells an alternate point of view of getting through episodes one and two of the Aincrad arc of SAO S1. To that end, Asuna is far from the confident, melancholic badass swordswoman we see in episode two, quite the opposite really. This movie tells the story of both how she learned the necessary skills to survive in SAO's world, how she ends up in the melancholic, doom-and-gloom state she is in episode two, and how she overcomes those things to find renewed purpose. It's more character work than we've ever gotten for the main cast outside of the Mother's Rosaria arc of SAO II, and by a very very long shot.

To that end, many of the characters we know and love(?) from SAO are recontextualized to make them fit better in a story about Asuna's growth, and to give them personal stakes in the story of their own. It recontextualizes beta testers, the role they played in SAO, and makes their misunderstood hero status more complicated by the end of the movie. There is a surprising amount of subtlety here if you look for it.

The greatest thing this movie does, though, is make Aincrad truly scary again. Trash mobs are legitimate threats. Early in the movie we see a group of players brutally hacked to death because they opened a rigged chest. Our main characters are constantly in danger of being overrun by strong monsters, or hordes of trash mobs that matter so much more because there is no respawning. This game makes you feel the dread of looking at another player, watching them crystalize and knowing they're gone. It's absolutely the thing SAO needed most and we got SO LITTLE of it in the original series.

This movie is everything I personally wanted SAO to be. It's not carrying deep messages about the human spirit, no. But it's so much more emotionally engaging than anything the main series has put out. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who was disappointed in the original SAO, if you're like me than this movie was exactly what you're looking for.

9/10

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Gift

Jul 25, 2023

Pixelbuddha

Mixed Feelings

The Movie tells the period of the first 2 episodes of the anime, but from Asunas point of view.

Well it is SAO. What do you expect. It is a bit generic, but also it's a source for a lot of pop culture, references and we all probably watched SAO as one of our first 10 animes or something around that.

The Animation is 100 times better than the original, but the constantly crying, bitching and drama that all could be resolved with a single sentence is a bit too obnoxious for my taste. That said I know it will get a bit better in the future, ...

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Gift

Apr 24, 2024

keyboardroll

Not Recommended

I really regret watching, despite looking for a cheap/cute/dumb fantasy/isekai anime. why? let this complete plot summary make the case. (spoilers)

- asuna is a normie stacie from an elite family who gets pretty good grades, but her (female) classmate and friend, Misumi, is better at school and video games. she gets her into SAO.
- system announcement: if you die in the game, you also die irl. hundreds of newbs go out fighting monsters and dying, giving the viewer a sense of the stakes.
- Misumi and asuna kill some wasps and get stronger and explain the game mechanics to casual viewers.
- Misumi and asuna farm monster-plants. ...

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Poll: Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Hoshi Naki Yoru no Aria Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) removed-user - Oct 29, 2021	254 replies	by C0ST4 »» Mar 28, 5:25 AM
Can you watch this without watching the original anime? Strat2005 - Jan 13	11 replies	by Sara_Karma »» Jan 14, 10:39 PM
How dare they??? Haroldinho07 - Jun 23, 2023	25 replies	by GakutoDeathGlare »» Jul 27, 2023 12:27 AM
Comparison Scene ClubAnimeYT - Jul 13, 2022	5 replies	by hacker09 »» Jun 20, 2023 12:07 AM
To anyone who don't know what SAO-P is and to those who didn't like the show and wanted a well written version of the show. I'll try to clear any doubts about the show. ( 1 2 ) Anayan_Kashyap - Sep 20, 2021	56 replies	by hacker09 »» Jun 19, 2023 11:55 PM

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Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Hoshi Naki Yoru no Aria

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Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Hoshi Naki Yoru no Aria

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