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I usually don't feel compelled to review animes. I watched the entire "Garden of sinners" series of films and would give all of them a collective grade of 8 if I was forced to. But after watching the seventh film, seeing nothing but rave reviews all over the web saying this is the best of the bunch, I felt I had to say something.

*slight spoilers ahead*

This film had some good points (the art for example, which has been a consistent highlight throughout all of the films) but it's heavily outweighed by the low points in the execution of the movie's story.

For one, ... it ran an hour too long. The film is a bulky two hours I felt was mostly filler, and definitely could of been condensed. It seemed like the director and writer made this film way too long to make up for the long wait but it was completely unnecessary.

That being said, I did enjoy the first part of the film. It's starts off very promising with a suspenseful murder-mystery sort of vibe that's been prevalent with all the films. Shiki's back story is finally fleshed out a little more which was nice, though you have to have a good memory to catch everything. (Lots of references to the past films, to be expected.)

Where the movie really lost points for me was the main theme of the film; the idea that Shiki has always had this latent desire to kill and Kokuto's argument that murder is never justified. I agreed with Kokuto and the movie argues very well throughout that killing means killing a part of yourself too. This was a recurrent theme throughout the films and they had me believing it, which was why the ending was such a supreme disappointment for me. The film seemed to contradict and ignore it's own argument for the sake of a "happy" ending and I felt a little cheated by it. Where are the consequences of murder they kept talking about? the loss?

So, if you liked the other films then you'll get a lot of the same. The tone, characters and artwork are all familiar and are certainly worth a look if only to know how the series ends. But this film is a prime example of a story that was structured with a very clear ideal in mind, only to chuck it out the window for no reason at all. If your a fan of good, consistent writing like me, you'll be disappointed.