A real mess. I have a vague understanding of what the main plot is, and when the story thinks it's ok to throw a twist in at the end without solidifying what the primary conflict is, you know that I'm sitting here going, "I have no idea what's happening."
Characters have unknown connections that are so important that they react adversely to their deaths, decisions are made that don't make a lick of sense in regards to the potential canon (I say potential because I don't know a single law about this world), and things just happen because "oh right, we're at war."
Tropes take place that have no value other than being tropes. Most notably, whenever someone dies, someone else says something profound in regards to their life, but since we never are shown anything about anyone, or anything related to character development, the whole thing is a ton of schlock.
I will give credit where credit is due. There are some tropes that had potential to be of real interest. A narrative shouldn't be reliant on tropes, but effectively use tropes in ways that haven't been experienced before. This is difficult, and it's the reason not everyone is a writer. To that end, this narrative is one such story written by someone who, quite literally, merely had the resources to produce his poor narrative.
No, I am aware of this film being a condensed version of a 3 part OVA, and that could be the cause of so many events that lack any value, but that doesn't disregard the issues that this film still holds.
Art:
Animation is fairly decent, but some scenes are incredibly dark, a few animations are repeated, and for some ungodly reason, instead of showing us the combat in a fluid format, we're treated to a lot of black background/slash animation cuts. They are kind of neat at first, but since they're shown over and over and over and over, it grows tiresome and I wonder if it's used for nothing other than laziness.
Settings all look the same and there's nothing to define one location from the next. Body proportions are a mess in the early section of the film.
Sound:
Some of the songs are ridiculously dumb, one of the songs were really cool, and the sound effects themselves sounded fine. With monsters, I would have enjoyed hearing unique sound effects, but it would have been neat to hear something humbling or terrifying when the demons were in frame. A missed opportunity, that's for sure.
Character:
Oh man, it's just terrible. There's nothing here, nothing makes sense, and people just do stuff because reasons. Only one character has any real resolve in this narrative and even then, the way we learn it is so poorly executed, and the way it's used as the story moves forward is just pure crap. Holy cow.
Enjoyment:
The animation was kinda neat, the ideas thrown around during the film were so-so, but the execution of the entire product made for one giant mistake. I wasn't bored the entire time, but somewhere along the last quarter I found myself checking out. At that point, things happened that made no sense to me. I didn't really know why anyone was doing anything at that point. I was just confused. A real mess of a film if I've ever seen one.
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