Lupin III (2015): Italian Game

This is a complicated special to review. Despite giving it a 5 this film is more like a 7 or 8 however it is completely dragged down by one crucial thing. 70mins of the film's 90 minute runtime is comprised of 3 "Lupin III (2015)" episodes played entirely in their full. This means that only 20 minutes are actually comprised of new story and animation. And of what is new, most of it is not particularly good and mostly functions to loosely tie the plot of the three episodes together. So the only purpose this film serves is if you haven't already seen the 2015 ... series and can't be bothered to watch it, which is an incredibly small number of people. If you have already seen the 2015 series, don't bother with this special. And if you haven't, just watch the 2015 series.

What even is this special? Over 70% of the run time is abridged version of the first half of Part 4 aka "Lupin III (2015)" Thus the actual original content lack any time to develop and is rushed near the end.

And I have to say, by this point when you say "Count Cagliostro" in a Lupin III story, nobody is gonna realize you are referencing the original Arsene Lupin story, everyone's gonna assume you are talking about the one from "Castle of Cagliostro", it's already a bad choice and the special also didn't do a job stating that case.

With so little actual run time, how ... are there even any mystery to the supposed mysterious villain, since this Special is supposed to happen in between Part 4?

There's really not much watching value to this, even though there are some good parts, for one, the train chase scene is pretty good, so much so I'd rather it's its own 20 min or so episode.

Also the Opening is really awesome though, sadly it's attached to this excuse of a clip show.

I can say I've developed a standard for my Lupin content, and this failed on the character development. One thing I can take away from this is after seeing the character development go so wrong I have a better understanding of what right looks like.

The opening is way to long with clips that happen in the movie, with no context. It even some shows very dramatic scenes, but I have that "why should I care" when they scenes are around the girl I don't know yet. And, the opening is too long.

Speaking of the character development girl, I don't feel like she actually learned anything ... because her development was rushed and it felt empty.

The plot and storytelling are rushed and feels empty. This is also one of the ones where Fujiko is useless.

I don't suggest this to fans or new comers to Lupin or anime, in general.