Well, I just watched this as the blu-ray has come out, and oh boy is it a doozy. If you want the SparkNotes, here it is: No Game No Life Zero is a movie with amazing aesthetic that's ruined by occasional trashy moments, and a great plot that's ruined by dreadful rushed pacing. It still manages to be a pretty darn great and enjoyable movie overall and in my opinion better than the main series, so I highly recommend you watch it. Now, at this point you could go straight to watching the movie, but if you want more detail then read on.
Ratings: Story 8/10, Art 10/10, Sound 7/10, Character 6/10, Enjoyment 10/10, Overall 8/10.
First of all, the aesthetic is really damn fitting for what they're trying to portray. It's dark as all hell and it works perfectly. It's very different from what you see in most anime so it might feel a little wrong at the start but you continue watching and it's oh so right. It's done very well and it really feels like a complete world even though you haven't really got much introduction to it. The struggles of humanity (and yes, I'm pretty sure they're "Humanity" in this movie, not "Imanity") are portrayed perfectly.
Plot is pretty meh, I like military/strategic plots so I liked it but someone without this bias may not find it that great, there's some stuff whose almost sole goal is to move forward the plot. Not to mention that most of the good plot (IMO) is concentrated between the 55 and 85% complete mark (this is only a rough estimation though), before that there's a lot of nothing and after that the pacing is way too fast, it's kind of incomprehensible what's going on. It would have been a lot better as a set of movies or an extremely long movie, and required 2h15 at the very least to properly convey what's going on at the end. While you understand on a basic level what's happening, it could be difficult to understand why each strategy is being carried out.
Animation is quite good, it's excellent most of the time and works well with the aesthetic but there's some very bad use of CGI, especially for the Ex-machina. Apart from that though, animation is top-quality.
Now what you probably want to know is whether it's as trashy as the original series. And the answer is... kinda? Like there are some trashy moments and it fits in absolutely horrendously with the rest of the movie because of the general aesthetic. I feel like there's less trashyness than the series but that it is more detrimental to overall quality, if that makes sense.
There's also some cliche scenes which sub out for character development for the main character, Riku. I'm especially hard on these kinds of things so you may not feel it as much, but I dunno. I feel character development has been done pretty well for him overall however. For the other characters, I think that Schwi (secondary main)'s character development is fairly well done. I won't go deeper into that because it'd be spoilers. However, one other thing about the character development is that there's a major moment that feels too early, but only because there's a one year timeskip, which you won't even recognise as a timeskip the first time you watch. This timeskip is also very unfortunate because it comes during what in my opinion is the best part of the movie.
The animation and aesthetic are immensely well done and the only major issue with the movie is its pacing. Because of that, I feel it definitely deserves a watch, especially if you were a fan of the main series.
