The Complete Sword Art Online Anime Timeline
by Richard Eisenbeis,Sword Art Online is a massive anime juggernaut. Since it first aired in 2012, it has expanded into a franchise with nearly a hundred episodes across four TV series, a feature film, and an OVA—and that's without even getting into all the anime spin-offs and related series. Needless to say, with so much going on across the various story arcs, it can be hard to picture when exactly events occurred about one another. Thus, Anime News Network proudly presents “The Complete Sword Art Online Anime Timeline.”
This timeline is broken down by story arc and contains not only the arcs of the mainline series but also spin-offs like the Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online anime series and the Sword Art Online: Progressive films. Also included, for the sake of completion, is the Accel World anime along with its film and OVAs. While this series, also written by Sword Art Online creator Reki Kawahara, is not explicitly part of the Sword Art Online timeline, it is implicitly so (and if you don't mind spoilers for both series, you too can go down the rabbit hole of how the two are seemingly connected).
Whenever possible, the dates shown in this timeline were taken directly from the various anime. When dates were not explicitly stated in the anime, they were taken from the corresponding light novels instead. In the rare case where no dates were to be found at all, context clues were used to narrow down the time period as far as possible.
In an ongoing effort to keep things as complete as possible, this timeline will be regularly updated whenever a new Sword Art Online anime comes into existence. Such updates will be listed below.
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.
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