Hakuouki Movie 2: Shikon Soukyuu

hmm. my ability to evaluate the quality of this film is really hampered by the lack of decent english subs. i could tell that the translation was way, way off in several of the scenes, and some of the translations simply didn't make sense at all.

bearing that in mind, from what i was able to understand of this film, i would have to say it did not live up to the promise of the first film. whereas in the tv series there was a little too much emphasis on the battles, to the extent that i could not follow who the Shinsengumi was fighting and ... why, this film went to the other extreme. consequently we don't see any of the battles that Hijikata underwent. instead we watch Chizuru journey to reconcile with Hijikata, which made much less compelling viewing. another consequence of this change of focus was that the deaths several characters were very rushed, anticlimatic and lacked any emotional impact.

speaking of Chizuru, her character regressed back to helpless damsel who never tries to defend herself, which was very, very disappointing.

kazama was overused, at the expense of the Shinsengumi characters and his devil associates.

the fate of Chizuru and Hijikata made more sense, and was an improvement on the series, given the scene that takes place between them in the forest. and the sword fight between kazama and hijikata was ok, although i have seen better.

the art and sound were good as usual, but ultimately this is a rather disappointing sequel. 5/10

This review compare heavily to the TV series!

Given how bad the two TV seasons were, I was hesitant to start the movie recaps. Surprisingly, movie 1’s pacing turned out to be great, introducing characters with incredible fighting animation (and Chizuru is finally not as useless). However, movie 2 went back to the pacing TV series were, in fact, worse. By trying to incorporate every charcters feeling towards Chizuru, the plot lines were very incoherent and messed up. We get to know each character a little more (ex. Kazama’s and Harada’s story) on the sacrifice of the overall story. In conclusion, this movie made me so ... much more confused that the 2nd season of the TV eps. The only good thing were the art designs and animation (way better than TV), Shinsengumi’s hotness just went up by another level.

P.s. there’s some small scenes that contains characters from the prequel (reimeiroku)!