'Sword Art Online' Season 3 Will Reportedly Be Split in Two

Sword Art Online's third season is set to adapt the longest arc in the light novel series yet in Alicization, and fans are wondering just how long the season will be as a result.

Going along with reports that the third season would be four cours long, there's another recent rumor stating that the four cours would be split into two parts.

A person who participated in the Japan premiere of SAO Alicization's first episode claims that during a talk show segment of the event, Matsuoka Yoshitsugu (voice of Kirito) mentioned that Alicization's 4 cours will be split into 2 x 2-cour parts.//t.co/WTsITIecA6

— SAO Wikia (@sao_wikia) September 15, 2018

Sword Art Online: Alicization recently held a special premiere event in Japan, and those in attendance claim that during a talking segment of the event that Kirito's voice actor, Matsuoka Yoshitsugu, mentioned that the third season would be split into two waves of two cours.

For those unaware, "cours" refer to the release schedule of anime series. A cour is usually 12 or 13 episodes long, lasting for an entire anime season (from Fall to Winter, for example). Two cours usually means that a series would get 26 episodes for the season, and Sword Art Online could be potentially touting double this. If this report is accurate, it would mean that Sword Art Online will be around for two waves of 26 episodes.

Meaning that, counting a short break in between, Sword Art Online's third season could potentially dominate 2019. It really all depends on how everything is scheduled, but fans would definitely be happy to see Sword Art Online's new season for however long it lasts.

Yoshitsugu Matsuoka and Haruka Tomatsu will both be returning to the series to portray Kirito and Asuna respectively, while Ai Kayano and Nobunaga Shimazaki have been confirmed as new characters Alice and Eugeo. Manabu Ono (The Asterisk War) will be directing the series for A-1 Pictures, and Gou Suzuki and Tomoya Nishiguchi are returning from Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale to oversee the character designs with Shingo Adachi.

The Alicization arc takes part in Volumes 9-18 of Kawahara's light novel series. In this Sword Art Online arc, Kirito is offered a job with a firm named Rath in order to test a new type of FullDive equipment known as the Soul Translator. But Rath is secretly working to make a new military AI with a trapped human child's soul inside of it, and now Kirito is stuck between "Alice" and those who want to keep Kirito away from her.

Sword Art Online was originally created by Reki Kawahara with illustrations provided by abec. The series follows a boy named Kirito after he and thousands of gamers get trapped in a virtual reality video game known as Sword Art Online. The gamers must band together to defeat the game's final level to escape, but Kirito and his guild learn there is more behind their prison than they were originally told.