Over the weekend ANIPLEX released the second trailer for the upcoming anime film Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night.
I. Love. Sword Art Online; the music, setting, characters, and the drama. Last year, it was announced that there was going to be a kind of re-telling of the beginning of the story in the upcoming film Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night and released a small teaser trailer.
Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night is a re-telling of the first Sword Art Online series story, but from the perspective of the female protagonist, Asuna. In the first chapter of Sword Art Online players enter a world called Aincrad, a virtual world in the first-ever full-dive VRMMORPG Sword Art Online. Once players are logged in, however, they find that they are trapped and can not log out. If you were to die in-game, your avatar would be lost forever and you would also die in the real world, as the NerveGear headset would destroy a player’s brain.
I can’t really tell if this is actually a re-telling or a re-imagining of the first SAO Arc. The trailer states that it is a brand new Aincrad Arc, but if you watch the series, you would know that it is not possible. Is it a re-imagining similar to how Square Enix is doing with Final Fantasy VII Remake? I personally think that it is going to be a re-telling of the story, but with many of the plot holes that were present in the initial airing of the series filled in and some new characters being introduced, as this story will be from Asuna’s viewpoint.
Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night is set to hit Japanese theaters this Fall. At the time of this writing, there has been no announcement of an international release.