One Piece Movie 05: Norowareta Seiken

I agree with one reviewer that it does seem to be a movie with one piece characters written into it. With that being said, I thought it was a good movie! You had some memorable characters, Saga & Maya, & Esp the Old Lady she was great.


You get met with a few inconsistencies (as per usual) for the canon. The ones that I noticed include them saying they came there to find the treasure. You can't just head to islands unless you get an eternal pose, so saying they came there for the treasure doesn't make any sense. They did this in the third ... movie as well, they even had a map in that one lol.

Also, at one point when they are first talking about it I believe Nami says that the Cursed Holy Sword, or Sacred Sword? is the greatest treasure of the Grand Line... I thought that was the One Piece? lol

One other would be when they are discussing Saga's backstory, how after the explosion he miraculously survived but his arm wasn't usable, so he "wandered into the grand line to this island" like, how? That must have been pretty hard right? Idk I guess at this point the Grand Line isn't as hard to get to as we thought at first.

Some things I loved though where the fight between Sanji & Zoro, like damn that was intense!
And the bit with Luffy & Usopp in the caves.

Also when Sanji is fighting one of the goons and he goes. "My steel armor can't be borrken by your foot" and Sanji kicks him on top of the head and says "Then maybe your head and your face need armor too" That was great XD

The fact that this movie seemed to be centered around Zoro, with him even beating the antogonist, but still not having as much screen time as the others I thought was interesting.
Also we did see more of his backstory though! If it's canon anyways?

I enjoyed more than I think I should have if that makes sense. Definitely a fun movie all in all.

As the rating suggests, this one was... fine. I'd even say good, overall. It just wasn't particularly moving or fun. It's a pretty standard standalone movie plot. I didn't spot any majorly gaping plot holes. (Though their description of Saga just "drifting" along the Grand Line until he reached this village after seeing just how hard it is to enter and navigate grated on my mind a bit...)

Unfortunately, this entry is guilty of one of my all-time least favorite standalone movie tropes... The villain being an old never-before-mentioned childhood friend of one of the protagonists. Thus explaining away any motivations said protag might need ... to justify helping them. It's just such a meh cop-out to me. I like to see more effort put into movie characters. Zoro's a simple guy. Stubborn, but I feel like they definitely could have found some way Saga could have appealed to him and gotten on his good side as a stranger. They probably would have had to cut out the dojo being a facet of the marines-- and thus being in opposition to everything he now is by default-- but that part never really flew with me anyway. As loyal as Zoro is, I'm not totally sold that even keeping a promise to a childhood friend would have been enough for him to put up with this group loudly gloating about their intentions to separate him from his crew.

And honestly, that final fight was a bit lackluster. But the plot itself was executed fine. And visually, this movie was a really good one. I really liked the settings and color.

Well, that was a semi-fun movie. It had a decent premise going for it but missed a ton of marks.
Review:

Story/Plot - 3 - It's premise is decent, albeit cliche. It was relatively interesting and had plenty of potential, however, I feel like it was wasted. The first problem being the way it was presented, and how the whole thing started off. Zoro just flat out betrays his crew at the beginning... that's bullshit! Especially considering how deeply he cares for his friends! Talk about awful character writing! I found it dumb how Zoro didn't get the slightest clue that Saga had ill intentions until the ... plot demanded him to do so. The way everything unfolded was really predictable and nothing interesting is done with the ideas the writers had in mind. My next issue is the pacing. It's just really inconsistent, and when the movie finally gets to the climax, it quickly jolts through it at lightning fast speeds! It doesn't build up to a satisfying climax and suspense becomes non-existent due to the poor execution. The other problem is how events just occurred for the convenience of the plot, and character actions and behavior were altered for the same reason but more on this later. The direction this movie takes is just awful! In the end it feels like it has no substance!

Characters - 2.5 - I love the One Piece cast, however, whoever was writing the script for this film completely fucked up the characterization! Their behavior and personalities are altered to 1-dimensional versions of themselves and only barely resemble the bare outline of their character. It's as if the writers were given brief descriptions of the characters that summarized them into simple, run down versions of themselves. Luffy may be dumb and reckless at times, but he's not a complete moron who puts both him and his friends in danger while being unaware of it! "Woah this is fun!" he says as both he and Usopp are in a life-threatening situation. Next are the movie characters. None of them really had a hint of personality, even Saga, the antagonist. I just couldn't bring myself to care about any of them or feel any kind of emotion. The only good thing I have to say here, is that it at least let some characters share the spotlight.

Visuals - 7.5 - One Piece movies always pull through in this aspect! If the story fails, at least there's cool animation! The final fight between Luffy and Saga was really well done and had very nice choreography coupled with flashy sakuga to compliment it! The art also has this nice, polished look to it. I do have some gripes with it though. My main one being the CGI used. There were attempts to create dynamic shots and fast, cool-looking camera panning, zooming and movements with it, but it ended up looking pretty jarring. This results in the characters looking like they aren't part of the environment and are just plastered on.

Sound - 4 - The usual stuff. Except the voice actors feel like they're trying too hard to fit into their roles, which is strange considering how long they've been doing it for. It's probably a consequence given birth from the script which gives the characters these awful lines that sound really forced and fail at giving life to the characters. Everyone sounds artificial and dead.

Overall: I didn't like this film. Bad writing, poor characterization and usage of the characters, it's just not a well executed film. Take a mediocre idea, and do nothing unique with it.

Final score: 3.83/10 Rounded to 4/10 for MAL score.