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This movie is amazing, the visuals, animations, characters, and art, are all stunning just like other Makoto Shinkai works. If you are a fan of his previous films, then watching this in the cinemas is a no-brainer, which I had to pleasure of doing so when it came out in the Philippines today.

However, beyond my bias of giving this show a 9. there are some gripes and deficiencies that needed to be mentioned.

This film is quite formulaic, the third, in fact, of a series of movies from Makoto Shinkai that featured our male and female lead crossing the whole country of Japan simply because they ... fell in love at first sight. Not to mention the side characters who just follow our male/female lead like brainless chickens because the plot urges them to do so without questioning anything beyond the surface level.

The second gripe was with the repetitive nature of the story. Without getting into spoilers, the male and female lead literally moves from city to city to do the same thing for what is basically 2/3 of the entire film. While I was able to notice these issues, I can also easily look past them as my own minor gripes.

This review may sound like a negative one, but all the positive things have already been said by other reviewers. So here are simply the criticisms I laid out as someone who genuinely did enjoy the film while looking past its flaws. I genuinely got chills when I first heard the OST blast in the cinema, maybe it's because this is the first time I watched an anime film in the actual cinema, or it's the air conditioning that was just way too cold than it had any right to be.

Anyways, thanks for reading through my first review on this site! I just needed to get my feelings out there after watching my first anime film in the cinemas.

With all the terrible official names licensed websites are known to be using. For once, I thought that they actually gave a better title to this series than whatever "The Heavenly Demon Can't Live a Normal Life" is supposed to be.

Anyways, I was pleasantly surprised that the series actually provided me with a pretty decent plot and storyline that didn't turn out to be boring for the first 50 chapters. Yes, this is still a power fantasy where our protagonist overwhelms all his foes in two or three swings of a sword. However, the author was able to make the side characters at least somewhat ... memorable and likable, especially our female lead who wasn't just another damsel in distress like the other counterparts. Halfway into the series, the art got a much-needed upgrade from chapters 1-20 that made all the characters look cleaner and sharper. The story became tighter from that point onwards as well, with the story always staying linear in terms of its progression.

All in all, it is what it is, a generic power fantasy manhwa that turned out surprisingly well.
Art: 8/10
Story: 7/10
Characters: 7/10
Overall: 7/10