The final trailer for the Sword Art Online 10th Anniversary project has been released along with the announcement of the Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online Season 2 during the 30th Dengeki Bunko Summer Festival that was held on July 15, 2023. The video consists of scenes from the anime along with a message, thanking their fans for supporting the franchise in the past 10 years. The YouTube video is only available in Japan at the moment, but international fans can watch it on Twitter.
The scenes from the video are from Sword Art Online‘s different arcs from Aincrad to Alicization: War of Underworld as well as the two Progressive movies. The franchise marked its 10th anniversary on July 8, 2022. The events for the 10th anniversary began during the Sword Art Online: Full Dive event, which was held on November 6, 2022, the exact day when the original story began in the anime.
Sword Art Online premiered on July 8, 2012. The franchise had a movie in 2013, and it was followed by the second season in 2014. The franchise came back in 2017, with the theatrical screening of Sword Art Online: The Movie -Ordinal Scale-. Tomohiko Ito directed all of it. Manabu no directed the Alicization arcs, which began in 2018, and ended in 2020. In 2021 and 2022, two spin-off anime films titled Sword Art Online: Progressive -Aria of a Starless Night- and Sword Art Online: Progressive -Scherzo of Deep Night- premiered respectively. Ayako Kono directed both movies. Studio A-1 Pictures animated all of it. A new original movie has also been announced but the details are not yet revealed. You can watch the entire Sword Art Online series on Crunchyroll.
The anime is based on Reki Kawahara’s Sword Art Online light novel series. ASCII Media Works has been serializing the series since 2009, and it currently has 27 volumes with more than 30 million copies in circulation. Yen Press is publishing the novel series in English and describes the plot as:
Read the novel that ignited the phenomenon! In the year 2022, gamers rejoice as Sword Art Online – a VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) like no other – debuts, allowing players to take full advantage of the ultimate in gaming technology: NerveGear, a system that allows users to completely immerse themselves in a wholly realistic gaming experience. But when the game goes live, the elation of the players quickly turns to horror as they discover that, for all its amazing features, SAO is missing one of the most basic functions of any MMORPG – a log-out button. Now trapped in the virtual world of Aincrad, their bodies held captive by NerveGear in the real world, users are issued a chilling ultimatum: conquer all one hundred floors of Aincrad to regain your freedom. But in the warped world of SAO, “game over” means certain death – both virtual and real…
Source: Dengeki Bunko Stream and Official Website
©Reki Kawahara/ASCII Media Works/SAO Project