Movie
Description
Professor Tetsuhiro Shigemura is the central antagonist of Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale. He is a professor of electrical and electronic engineering at the Toto Institute of Technology, where he established the Shigemura Laboratory, a research group that trained several prominent figures in virtual reality technology, including Akihiko Kayaba, the creator of the original Sword Art Online. Shigemura is widely respected for his technical brilliance and his willingness to pursue research that more conservative members of the academic world consider risky or inappropriate. His public achievement is the development of the Augma, a wearable augmented reality device, and the creation of Ordinal Scale, a popular augmented reality game that allows players to fight virtual monsters superimposed on real locations.
Privately, Shigemura is driven by grief. His daughter, Yuuna, died inside the Sword Art Online death game, and he never came to terms with her loss. While acting in an official capacity connected to the investigation of the SAO incident, he uncovered the Ordinal System hidden within the old SAO server. Working with the company Kamura, he secretly built Ordinal Scale around data taken from that server. The game appears to be harmless entertainment, but its underlying purpose is to harvest the SAO memories of the survivors who play it. Whenever a player who lived through Sword Art Online is defeated, a drone collects an orb containing fragments of that player's memories of the game. Shigemura's true goal is to gather enough of these memories to reconstruct his daughter's soul and resurrect her as an artificial intelligence.
In personality, Shigemura is cold, withdrawn, and intensely absorbed in his work. He is socially awkward and avoids emotional connection with other people, preferring to lose himself in his research. He is brilliant, determined, and completely uncompromising, treating the success of his project as more important than the well-being of the players whose minds are being affected. When Kirito visits him at the university to ask questions about the strange events surrounding the game, Shigemura refuses to answer and offers no explanation. Only later, after his agent is defeated, does the full scope of his scheme come to light.
Shigemura's role in the story is largely behind the scenes. He develops the technology, arranges the game's events, and uses others to carry out his plan in the real world. The most important of these agents is Eiji Nochizawa, a former SAO player who knew Shigemura's daughter and ranks as one of the top players in Ordinal Scale. Eiji performs the physical actions that Shigemura cannot, attacking other players and ensuring that the memory collection runs smoothly. Shigemura also creates the artificial idol Yuna, an AI singer built from data associated with his daughter. He treats this Yuna as a tool rather than as a person, using her concerts and in-game appearances to draw players in and set up the final stage of his plan.
The climax of his scheme takes place at a large concert at Tokyo National Stadium, where the high concentration of SAO survivors allows his drones to scan the brains of many players at once. This mass scan carries a grave danger: it can damage the players' minds and potentially kill them, just as the NerveGear did during the original death game. Kirito and his allies are able to stop the process by activating a hidden full-dive function built into the Augma and defeating the final boss of the original Aincrad, which shuts down the harvesting system and saves the gathered players. The plan collapses, and Shigemura's attempt to bring his daughter back through the memories of others fails.
Shigemura's notable abilities are entirely technological and scientific rather than physical. He is a gifted engineer capable of designing the Augma hardware, the Ordinal Scale system, the Yuna AI, and the devices used to extract and store human memories. He also demonstrates considerable cunning in the way he hides his true purpose inside a publicly popular product and in his use of the Ordinal System left behind by the SAO server. He is not a fighter and never engages in combat himself, relying instead on his technology, his position, and the loyalty of Eiji to advance his plan. His story is defined by the contradiction between his public reputation as a celebrated inventor and the destructive lengths he is willing to go to overcome his personal loss.
Privately, Shigemura is driven by grief. His daughter, Yuuna, died inside the Sword Art Online death game, and he never came to terms with her loss. While acting in an official capacity connected to the investigation of the SAO incident, he uncovered the Ordinal System hidden within the old SAO server. Working with the company Kamura, he secretly built Ordinal Scale around data taken from that server. The game appears to be harmless entertainment, but its underlying purpose is to harvest the SAO memories of the survivors who play it. Whenever a player who lived through Sword Art Online is defeated, a drone collects an orb containing fragments of that player's memories of the game. Shigemura's true goal is to gather enough of these memories to reconstruct his daughter's soul and resurrect her as an artificial intelligence.
In personality, Shigemura is cold, withdrawn, and intensely absorbed in his work. He is socially awkward and avoids emotional connection with other people, preferring to lose himself in his research. He is brilliant, determined, and completely uncompromising, treating the success of his project as more important than the well-being of the players whose minds are being affected. When Kirito visits him at the university to ask questions about the strange events surrounding the game, Shigemura refuses to answer and offers no explanation. Only later, after his agent is defeated, does the full scope of his scheme come to light.
Shigemura's role in the story is largely behind the scenes. He develops the technology, arranges the game's events, and uses others to carry out his plan in the real world. The most important of these agents is Eiji Nochizawa, a former SAO player who knew Shigemura's daughter and ranks as one of the top players in Ordinal Scale. Eiji performs the physical actions that Shigemura cannot, attacking other players and ensuring that the memory collection runs smoothly. Shigemura also creates the artificial idol Yuna, an AI singer built from data associated with his daughter. He treats this Yuna as a tool rather than as a person, using her concerts and in-game appearances to draw players in and set up the final stage of his plan.
The climax of his scheme takes place at a large concert at Tokyo National Stadium, where the high concentration of SAO survivors allows his drones to scan the brains of many players at once. This mass scan carries a grave danger: it can damage the players' minds and potentially kill them, just as the NerveGear did during the original death game. Kirito and his allies are able to stop the process by activating a hidden full-dive function built into the Augma and defeating the final boss of the original Aincrad, which shuts down the harvesting system and saves the gathered players. The plan collapses, and Shigemura's attempt to bring his daughter back through the memories of others fails.
Shigemura's notable abilities are entirely technological and scientific rather than physical. He is a gifted engineer capable of designing the Augma hardware, the Ordinal Scale system, the Yuna AI, and the devices used to extract and store human memories. He also demonstrates considerable cunning in the way he hides his true purpose inside a publicly popular product and in his use of the Ordinal System left behind by the SAO server. He is not a fighter and never engages in combat himself, relying instead on his technology, his position, and the loyalty of Eiji to advance his plan. His story is defined by the contradiction between his public reputation as a celebrated inventor and the destructive lengths he is willing to go to overcome his personal loss.