©2016 Reki Kawahara / PUBLISHED BY KADOKAWA CORPORATION ASCII MEDIA WORKS / SAO MOVIE Project

During the E-Sports and Gaming Summit 2016 convention last weekend, the staff of Bandai Namco booth handed out posters for the upcoming anime movie Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale, which hints at a possible screening in Philippine cinemas.

The movie posters are given away to attendees who played a sample of the franchise’s upcoming game Sword Art Online: Hallow Realization.

Photo by Red Mendoza / Anime Pilipinas

 

The poster indicates the movie has been licensed by Singapore-based Odex Pte. Ltd., who previously screened several anime movie titles in the country, but there is no word regarding when and where the movie will premiere.

Sources tell Anime Pilipinas the licensor may be looking at a possibility the Philippines will be a part of the “simultaneous” screening in February next year, but no official word at the moment.

 

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In 2026, two years since the SAO incident, a new game called “Ordinal Scale,” an Augmented-Reality MMO, is becoming popular among the players. But… strange things are happening in the game and Kirito and the gang are facing a new danger. (Synopsis from Aniplex of America)

Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale is the anime film adaptation of the highly-popular light novel series Sword Art Online, written by Reki Kawahara with illustrations by abec.

The novel was released by ASCII Media Works since April 2009 under their Dengeki Bunko imprint, which currently has 18 volumes. After the release of its highly-popular anime series in 2012, the franchise has expanded to multiple novels, manga and video games.

The upcoming film will be an original story that will take place after the “Mother Rosario” arc (Sword Art Online II), which will be written by Reki Kawahawa and directed by Tomohiko Ito. Character designs will once again be made by Shingo Adachi for anime studio A-1 Pictures.

Yoshitsugu Matsuoka (as Kirito), Haruka Tomatsu (as Asuna), Rina Hidaka (as Silica), Ayahi Takagaki (as Lisbeth), Miyuki Sawashiro (as Sinon), Hiroaki Hirata (as Klein) are set to return to voice their characters in the movie.

 

The upcoming movie was launched during World Cosplay Summit last August, where the film’s trailer was played simultaneously in Japanese with English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, and Thai subtitles.

Japanese publisher Kadokawa had announced in October that the movie “will be simultaneously released worldwide” on Saturday, February 18, 2017, but the publisher did not indicate how will it be done.