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Honestly, I don't usually write reviews for anything, and I especially don't like MAL's guidelines on reviews, but a friend of mine said that writing a review is like obtaining your own catharsis, so that's what I'm gonna base this review on. I'm making peace with the fact that it's finally over, and there's not gonna be another one like it ever again.

Story:
Let me just start by saying one thing, and that is there is NO WAY that people won't be disappointed. I mean, even I was fairly disappointed in a sense. The original EVA was Anno's greatest masterpiece. No one can deny that. But ... the fans wanted more. They wanted more than an unintuitive, enigmatic ending. So out comes EoE. Okay that's surely enough to please the fans now right? Wait, but you STILL don't understand? Well okay fine, here's a four part movie series, and this time FOR SURE the whole thing is gonna be explained, word by word, scene by scene, and motif by motif. Wait you think it's too shallow, and it's not "EVA" enough, and it doesn't deserve to be a final movie? Well can't please everyone I guess. And that's my point. People will always be disappointed, and that's their choice, but what I watched was a man making his long overdue peace with his work, and that to me, is all that mattered.

Rebirth is the central theme of the story. Yes it's a bit cliché, and yes the motif was overused with the baby and whatnot in the first half of the movie. But don't ever tell me that all hell didn't break loose in your head when Anno gave you that title drop. I mean, 25+ years of work, finally culminating right here in a loop of its own. Don't tell me that it didn't give you goosebumps.

Art:
The only thing you can hope for art these days is EFFORT, and this movie certainly had a lot of that; definitely among the greats.

Sound:
A perfecting Ending Song for a great ending. I mean it's no Komm Susser Tod, but in terms of catharsis it's top notch.
BGMs are decent as usual, though understandably for some it may be over the top.

Overall, all one could ask for while watching this, is to make his peace with it while enjoying as much as one can. And that's what I did. But if you didn't make your peace, then perhaps this movie isn't for you.

Spoiler alert... and then some bullshit happened and everyone lived happily ever after.

Oh noes, a girl gonna die and your my only hope witty main character. But the main character is destined to save her but NO the girlfriend sacrifices herself instead. But WAIT we can save that girl too by GOING BACK IN TIME. YAY we saved the girlfriend but the other girl will die. BUT WAIT I WANT TO MARRY WHEN I GROW UP. And everyone is peachy. False alarm it was just a dream.

That was the whole movie. That was it. Oh and there some crying.

Plot:
The fact that this poor and ... sorry excuse of a movie is lauded as something great and not seen as the inane ramblings of a retarded child who just heard his first bedtime story and wanted to give storytelling a try. The fact that it presents itself as a movie or story is even laughable. No it's not laughable actually, it's disappointing and beyond that extremely despairing that what counts as good storytelling these day is some time travel and twieesssts.

Plot holes you say? What plot holes. I don't see anything of the sort.

Sometimes in a story, there comes a point where everything becomes meaningless drivel and nothing matters at all. This movie is the epitome of that. I'm not even talking about the no stakes or that we know the main character has plot armor. I'm not even talking about the fan-fiction, wish fulfillment, all the girls live level of crap here. I'm not even talking the deus ex machina ass pull either. All of that can be forgiven to some extent and some shows can even be enjoyable despite those failings.

The meaninglessness I'm talking about is the utter disregard for the viewer. The audacity of the writer to think that we can brush off simple story coherency because hey look your waifu lived or look the main character is so chad, he can talk to girls. The blatant pseudo intellectualism to make viewers with less than on brain cell think that its smart. MUH SCHRODINGERS. MUH RELATIVITY. MUH RED SHIFT. DID I MENTION I WATCHED A YOUTUBE VIDEO ON QUANTUM MECHANICS. It's pathetic. If the movie was only that, it would just be plain trash and not the infuriating cloud atlas level waste of time that it is.

The most egregious though, the thing that put this movie into the god forsaken sodomite level of maddening trash was the drama. The forced meaningless drama worse than all the telenovelas you can find. Worse than all the shoujo bullying and child abuse. Yes it was that bad and it was that bad because it didn't matter and the writer knew it. The writer knew that nothing mattered because it will all be alright and yet he shamelessly wrote "and then they cried". That was the worse part of it all. The scam of the whole movie. The blatant melodrama all for what. For nothing.

Art:
If you watched the series, It's what you knew you'd expect. Nothing special.

Character:
Somehow made worse than the previous anime series, quite an achievement.

Kouhai best girl.

Written by QvnsQ

Oh boy, lots of polarizing opinions here. Oh dang it, now I have to pick a side. OR NOT.

Obviously everyone's entitled to their own opinions. There can be a lot of reasons why someone won't be able to enjoy this. Perhaps they don't understand the culture, perhaps they find the art style to be not of their liking, perhaps they thought the story was stagnant, etc. I could probably list 100 reasons here but since I'm not a mind reader and I'm a lazy bastard, I won't.

Honestly it doesn't matter what everyone else's opinion is. This isn't a game on steam where you ... read tons of reviews to determine whether it's a good game or not. For anime, ONLY YOUR OPINIONS MATTER! And I really hope everyone remembers that. So go ahead and watch the show, and don't be afraid of going in face first into a potential pile of shit because that's just part of the experience.

And this is my OPINION. Oh and btw, the show was pretty bad but I enjoyed it.
It has become one of my guilty pleasures. Thanks for wasting your time reading.

Dou po Cang Qiong, or Fights Break Sphere, is part of an old but re-emerged genre which I'd like to call Eastern or Oriental Fantasy. In this genre exist several important and distinctive conventions, including a very specific power ranking system, a strong-willed protagonist, and themes relating to ancient Chinese culture and mythologies, etc. Many authors tend to tie their works very closely to these conventions and the original author of the novel was of no exception. Although the world he created flourished along with his imagination, while I was reading the novel I cannot help but feel slightly disappointed at the hackneyed parts of ... the plot.

However, when I stumbled upon the manhua adaptation of the novel, I was genuinely surprised at its amazing quality.

The art was fantastic, not only because it is drawn in full color(pretty much all Chinese manhua are drawn in full color), but also because of the brilliant depictions of the dynamic elements of its battle scenes, as it coincided with my own intake of these scenes in the novel.

The characters are portrayed just like their counterparts in the novel, including their good and bad qualities. But I do personally feel that Xiao Yan, like most other protagonists of the same genre, does not possess enough flaws to make him look like a realistic character.

The thing that surprised me the most about this manga, was the extremely well timed insertion of comedic moments. The original novel had a very dark and serious undertone with negligible humor. However the manhua introduced tons of comedic moments between the serious scenes, some even relating to the modern Chinese culture (reminded me a bit of the humor style of Gintama). These scenes gave me a fresh feeling to loosen up the tension, which I really appreciated.

Overall this manhua is worth recommending to others so I wanted to share my thoughts on it with others. I hope it helps.