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Warning: Lots of spoilers ahead!

Aaaaaaah tis was such a frustrating movie to watch because of how much it butchered the source material. Yknow what? maybe because there was literally no source material to begin with. In FGO, the last singularity was more of just a fancy way to have closure over the singularities and introduce some new mechanics. The story was literally nonexistent, and the romani and mash plotlines were literally everything that were going on. A large part of the story was just focused on beating up the 72 demon sticks which was a good way of having closure over the past singularities by ... presenting some interesting thoughts on how the previous singularities could have been written to actually be good by showing some rly interesting relationships that the characters in them could have had. And despite them kind of being shoehorned into the plot to fix the past singularities, it was honestly one of my favorite parts of the singularity and y know what they did? THEY LITERALLY CUT THE WHOLE THING OUT! like wtf man! Curse budget restraints(what im guessing is the cause)! So instead of a bittersweet fight to the end, all we got was a stretched out plot filled with flavorful language that did absolutely nothing other than pad run time and confuse everyone. big sad.

Oh yea they also somehow failed to even adapt the part that they chose to adapt and flipped the order of several events around and made the romani twist way too obvious. Additionally, they also kind of rushed thru the mash plotline and made there be like absolutely no emotional impact whatsoever. I would have much rather seen some better dialogue than a fight scene that made absolutely no sense and went on for way too long. And speaking of the battle with solomon, that was messed up too. They literally skipped over an entire phase of his, and power balance was all over the place. Plus plot wise, nothing made sense either. How tf was a beast defeated so easily? nero was able to destroy his arm in a single shot despite the big tiddy mespotamia monster being op af and being almost nigh unkillable and the team had to actually do some tricks and stuff like throwing it into the underworld to debuff it in order to defeat it. And then if Goetia could regenerate his arm, why did it take a whole entire cut scene for him to heal it? and why were so many servants able to be resummoned that the end despite Goetia destroying their attachment to the singularity? I dunno if that was a thing in FGO since it was a while since I beat it but dam if that was true that would have rly messed up the plot. I understand that they wanted some more servant cameos, but that isn't justification for screwing up so horribly. In addition, how in the world was Fujimaru able to fight one on one in the climax? a F tier master like him has no chance in beating a beast. Heck, I don't think he should even be able to pick up mash's shield!

Additionally, Lev was also rly annoying. He was as basic of a horrible anime antagonist as he could be, and literally explained every thing that was happening in the movie like a lifeless puppet. also his hand gestures felt rly out of place. and what was with the decision to have him arbitrarily close his eyes for half of the scenes? made absolutely no sense at all.

And one final thing, which may just be my largest complaint. The directing in this movie was lowkey bad. I went to sleep last night wondering about why despite goetia being such a almighty being, I could barely even feel any power seething out of him. And after a long time of restless wandering, I finally realized it. In many of the shots used, everything is zoomed out to a large degree, which stops the viewer from realizing just how large and towering of a being goetia is. Additionally, when it zooms in, a lot of the time the camera instead follows the servants attacking goetia instead, making the servants take up a lot larger piece of the frame and making them seem like more of a force to be reckoned with instead of goetia. Another thing that is only tangentially related is goetia's design. Goetia's muscles are in the perfect spot where they seem comically large to fit on a being on the size of a human, but his frame is too small to make his seem like he is a ginormous otherworldly being. FGO got around this by having a more outlandish design for goetia, instead opting for a mesmerizing design where one can not simply pinpoint where one limb ends and another one begins. Take his arms as an example. you can clearly see that there is indeed a forearm and upper arm, but his muscle structure is so outlandish that the two basically blend into one. Additionally, his chest curves in way above where it should curve in and his abdomen curves out in irregular geometric shapes that when combined with the rest of his design, make an almost Lovecraftian creature that unlike man yet also unlike a true monster. But I kind kind of forgive them for that point since I am almost sure that sticking to goetia's og design would have killed the animation staff so im kinda fine with that i guess.

However, this does not mean that everything in this movie is trash. The god pillar cg in this movie was on point. by shedding the 2d art style and instead going for a more realistic look, they were able to make the cg look like it wasn't just infuriatingly barely out of place. I think there was only one scene where they didn't rly fit in to the background, and with so many shots of them in the movie, I'm fine with one small detail like that.

Furthermore, despite most of this movie being nonsensical, the nostalgia factor was absolutely there. The movie used many of FGO's soundrtracks which made me feel rly invested into the story which all culmunated with mash's soundtrack near the end. ykno, I rly have a soft spot for that song. It just goes so hard and the emotions that I felt when I first saw mash sacrafice herself came out with it.


tldr; nothing makes sense at all so just empty out them wallets and go play FGO

well anyways thats the end of this rly long rant cya

Its been a while since I watched the anime so I have no idea if this applies only to this special or to the entirety of the series but here I go anyways.

Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note - Tokubetsu-hen is what you get when someone tries to cram as many ideas into a story as they can without taking the effort to flesh any of them out. The explaination of the primary magic used in this special was lackluster at best, making me confused on what was going on, especially with the way that it twists what kind of magic ... projection magic is. And as someone who has fallen way to deep into the fate rabbit hole, many of the uses of magic seem completely unfeasable in the magnitude of their power. The story is also extremely rushed, as many of the characters are only fleshed out from small snipbits of their lives which stops one from truly getting to know the character other than the most basic info about them. Like there is only enough information given to have a prelimilary understanding of the motives of many of the characters, but thats all that they have. The anime expects its veiwers to piece together what kind of person each character is, but not enough to make the characters actually seem human. Plus there is kind of a reliance of tropes in the story, as many of the main plot points in it are as generic as they can be. but hey tropes are tropes so i can let it slide a bit.

overall, Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note - Tokubetsu-hen could have been a much better story if it had a longer run time in order to fully flesh out many of the characters, but being limited to being a special stopped the story from ever expanding its roots and becoming something other than a pretty basic story.

uhh theres so much to like about this movie yet so much else to hate on
light spoilers excluding a single part which i have marked later on

first of all, great fights like always. I don't think that I'll ever get tired of such hi action fights. I also understand the use of CG because of the jungle environment and other things that made it an actually acceptable way of animating things given the budget of the movie.

but then there's the bad
First of all, there is a slight overreliance on CG, as many of the camera shots are made from angles that could only be done ... in 3d, but many of them are fancy for the heck of it. In the first half of the movie, one very common camera shot is one that is placed basically directly beneath the gun. This kind of choreography may seem like a good move because of how intense such a first person perspective can be, but only being able to see so little of the tank that the camera is mounted onto makes understanding which tank the camera is currently following extremely difficult, and I constantly found myself trying to piece together what was happening. This gets better in the second half of the movie with the more zoomed out angles, but there is still a bit of confusion to be had.

another thing is that the second half of the movie feels a lot more rushed when compared with the first half as many of the matches are over in a matter of minutes which hinders any chance of the viewer being able to process the situation that the tanks are in. yes there were many delicious maneuvers, but the rush made even the finest scenes a lot more confusing than they should have been. Heck, even the final match which returns back to the perspective of the main gang seems a lot more rushed, as if they were trying to rush an ending after absolutely destroying their budget in the first half.


BIG SPOILER PART
something small that I want to point out too is how there was kind of some plot armor/ plot antiarmor in the final fight with the main tank being able to escape being surrounded by multiple tanks without a hitch, a situation which the tank definitely should not have been able to escape from. Furthermore, the main tank being shot at by the sniper tank after escaping felt kinda forced and upsetting to me since that team had pulled the same trick in the previous round and if anything, ourai with their masterful strategist should have been able to study their tactics and have seen the sniper coming the second that they realized that there was a lone tank on a hill somewhere. plus seeing repeated camper strats was kinda disappointing too since I feel like that kind of trick can only be pulled once before it looses its shine.
BIG SPOILER PART OVER

Finally, although the fight scenes were intense, they paled in comparison to the utter euphoria that I felt at the end of the first movie with a genius plan bearing fruit in one heck of a climax. Instead, this movie was more like a patchwork of many different scenes as it finnished up a previous fight, went over some of the other fights of the other teams, and finally started another match. This kind of break up of matches really sucked the happiness out of me as i couldn't become properly immersed into any single given match.

overall, I feel like this movie lacks quite a lot when compared to many of the other entries in this series, but hey its still a panzer movie and I can get behind that. I'd probably rank it a 7 because of how it fares when compared to the other movies, but imma give it an 8 cuz at the end of the day im still happy that we got another movie out of this franchise

I was lucky enough to be picked at animenyc to see a prescreening of Pompo: The Cinéphile, so here I am. Warning: spoilers ahead

Pompo: The Cinéphile is by no means a masterpiece, but it set out to be what it wanted to be and executed exactly what it wanted to do perfectly. It is about Gene, a random souless movie studio employee who got the change to direct a movie thanks to the help of the greatest director of all time, loli who for some reason only works on b movies despite her prowess as a director. throughout the movie, we watch him utilize ... his op directing skills that came out of nowhere in order to make a movie that is proclaimed to "be a critical success" the moment it hits theatres.

Yes. the summary so far seems like the most generic stuff ever, and having an op main character can never be a good sign, and the movie itself realizes it. it is one of the most self aware movies out there, as it draws many parallels between the movie itself, the characters, and the movie that is being produced within it, although hte former is a bit less direct. yes, very meta i know. just as a few examples, Gene is paralleled with the mc of the movie that he is producing, and many things in the movie such as the run time even match up perfectly with the run time of the actual movie itself. heck, even the movie centers around a b movie director!

as one may expect, having an op protagonist and whatnot other crazy stuff the movie uses at the beginning really weights down the story a lot. some of the weakest scenes in this movie are ones where it is trying to explain the backstory of the characters and how in the world they could possibly end up in the extremely unprobeable situations they are in, and this is especially prevalent in in the 15-25 min mark of the movie. luckily, the loli comes in to save the day(or at least salvage as much as she can).

you see, pompo is honestly one of the strongest assets this movie can have, even if she has no assets of her own. she is extremely cheerful, and her almost comical attitude towards things make her very fun to watch. and because she herself stretches the boundaries of what is acceptable, she is also under the burden of explaining all which is unacceptable. all of the improbabilities of this anime are all explained through her and written off as one of her antics, even is the consequences that they create are way too strong in order to even remotely thought of for someone in her position. as mentioned before, the director getting his role was completely due to the loli acting of a whim and saying stuff like "hmm yes lets let this souless lump of flesh of a human be the director of a giant movie even though he's basically done nothing before cuz i see potential in him". and get this, this doesn't happen just once, but twice! same thing happens with the country girl whose character design seems like it was ripped out of fire force of a main female lead!

as one final thing that I want to say about the failings of this movie, the ending sucks ass. deus ex machina all the way. sure, it tries to stop the power of ex machina a bit, but it still powers thru everything in the end because it wanted to have one final struggle for the main cast that was honestly way above their pay grade and ended up failing miserably. but hey at least the subplot about the blonde guy that led up to it was half decent, and made for a good parallel between the mc and what he could have been.

oh yea as some more detail about the ending, the deus ex machina involved was absolutely absurd, and destroyed everything that the movie had built up inside of both the directing part of it along with the actual movie part of it. and it gets even worse. the final conflict that Gene has was paralleled with his counterpart from inside of the movie, and although the final part of their arc isn't technically the climax of the movie (even though its pretty gosh darn close to it) i still want to say some stuff about it. like both the mc and his counterpart go full out edgelord and start emitting black fumes and have shining eyes even tho all they are doing are mundane things like playing the piano and editing a script. its honestly so bad that it even ends up coming off as a bit comical, and ruins all of the emotional impact of the movie.

yall might have given up on this anime by now due to how much I've been slamming down on it, but hear me out, it actually has some pretty good parts to it too. first of all, this movie is actually pretty funny. it has a really good running gag and has funny character reactions to things, but its nothing earth shattering. just pretty darn above average is all.

second of all, this movie has a lot of great transition shots, and the ones used have to be some of the most unique that I've seen in a while. they can come in the form of the good old cut through a character covering a part of the screen and merging two unique but similar backgrounds together while they move through it to cutting the screen into many separate parts and going from there. its honestly really interesting, and fun to watch.

Finally, the parts where this anime shines the most are the parts where one can forget how improbable the situation of the mcs are in and just enjoy the movie making process with them. the beautiful art and sound perfectly compliment the ups and downs of the movie making process, and watching the characters grow throughout the movie is honestly really exciting. the calm parts of both the movie and the meta movie are all very soothing, and one can really get invested into seeing everything to the end. this part of the movie encompasses most of the movie, as it is basically everything except for the aforementioned 15-25 min min mark and the ending. if this movie had fixed its ending along with fleshing out better backstories for the characters, it could have no doubt easily gotten into the 8 range on mal.

Final thoughts:
the bad parts of this movie were pretty bad, but it also had quite a lot of good scenes, and honestly got pretty emotionally invested. low 8 cuz of the pretty bad stuff and if you rly care about having a rly good plot then this movie isn't the movie for you. I kinda tried to ignore the bad parts of the movie, and that ended up helping me appreciate the movie for what it is. honestly just your run of the mill b movie but would watch cuz of its good parts.

and finally heres a collection of random tidbits that i jotted down while taking notes for this review that didn't exactly fit into anything:
i think that i might have seen this wrong because of how absurd it sounds but apparently at one point in the movie Nathalie started doing a fortnite dance???
small detail but Gene doesn't use a mousepad
loli's poncho has a ridiculous hood that covers her bangs and goes to maid cafes
the movie isn't actually 1:30:00 long if you include the credits and stuff

Helck is a manga that started off as nothing more than a gag, turned its shaky foundation into an almost plotholeless masterpiece, before dragging on for who knows how long for an epic "final battle" that ends up taking up literally up half of the manga (adjusted for page inflation of the second half of helck since some of the final chapters were rly like 2-3 chapters stuck into one and the last chapter literally had 8 parts to it lmao).

As long as you can somehow sit through the first tournament arc and some of the beginning comedy skits, I can promise you that you'll ... have a good time with one of the best arcs I have honestly read in a while. This in question no joke carries the manga imo. As previously stated, it ties together a lot of absolutely crazy loose strings that I thought could never have been answered properly, and the way that it did so was also very unique, as it flipped the humans vs demons trope onto its head.

Furthermore, the comedic timing in this manga is superb, as it can resolve problems by using gag characters in a satisfyingly way, which is something rly hard to pull off. And the finale has one giant ass turn that uses this so perfectly that it literally left me shocked.

If you care about waifus, then this show is definitely for you, as There are some legit S+ tier waifus in this series. Heck, I don't particularly care for waifus, but some of these characters got me salivating. trust me.

The art in this series starts off kind of rough, especially in regards with helck's nose. it looks so weird. Luckily, the art vastly improved over the course of the series, and it actually becomes pretty decent. Furthermore, the way that they changed the art style was genius, and I didn't even notice when it happened! If ur wondering how, im pretty sure that it used a flashback arc to change it.

anyways, helck was pretty good and I give it ten potatoes out of 16 telephones

from yours truly,
LoliSlayer_.