The official website for the Sword Art Online: Alicization , the third season of the television anime adaptation of Reki Kawahara 's Sword Art Online light novel series, began streaming the anime's first promotional video on Saturday. The video reveals the anime's staff and its October premiere date. The site also revealed a new visual for the anime. (Note: The YouTube video in the link above is region-locked to Japan.)

" Sword Art Online: Alicization " anime teaser PV. Coming October 2018 https://t.co/T1wBW7jJ3c pic.twitter.com/J8BAKtPLGp — moetron | pKjd (@pkjd818) March 24, 2018

Manabu Ono ( Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere , Saki , The Asterisk War ) is directing the anime at A-1 Pictures . Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale animation directors Gou Suzuki and Tomoya Nishiguchi will join Shingo Adachi for the character designs.

The series will again star Yoshitsugu Matsuoka as Kirito and Haruka Tomatsu as Asuna. Ai Kayano will play Alice, and Nobunaga Shimazaki will play Eugeo.

The anime will cover the entirety of the novels' "Alicization Arc." The Alicization arc is in volumes 9 through 18 of the original novel series.

The novel series has two television anime adaptations, an anime special, and a recent film. The franchise has also inspired multiple manga series, games, and a virtual reality demonstration in Japan. Aniplex of America releases the anime in North America. Skydance Television is planning a live-action series on Netflix based on the novels.

The Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale anime film, which opened in Japan in February 2017, had teased that " SAO will return."

Source: Comic Natalie

Thanks pKjd for the embedded video.