天下制覇

Interesting how much it changes without them.

Impressions:

Ah yes. What perfect timing right on the heels of ranting about being tired of rehashing things. This thing does clock in at two and a half hours, which is practically half the series to begin with, and once you cut out the cat girls and an entire fight, you’re practically down to your time limit right there.

Anyway, I think that they did a worse job this time around and cut some stuff they shouldn’t have while leaving way too much of other things. The lack of Tuxedo Mask helping fill out the Book of Darkness evil CG snaketopus really did a number on how things progressed in the middle, especially the lack of the fight where the Volks started getting really desperate and needed Zechs Merquise to save them. That and the book just eating them because it’s evilly evil instead of the Phantom of the Opera ganking them. This version doesn’t do a particularly good job selling either their desperation or the tension of what was going on through the middle. Likewise, a lot of the pseudo-brutality of early events was lessened by Nanoha (and Fate) simply getting beat in rather pedestrian fashion instead of the big jarring visceral hand through the gut when she’s just about to come through and save the day. That, uh… frames things quite a bit differently.

At the same time as that was all compressed though, the ending fight against Big-Rein was far too stretched out, especially the Fate/Priecia portions. They were silly enough to begin with, and certainly not something that needed to be I think actually lengthened in digest movie form. The epilogue was also a bit much. When they hit the climax and were about to start with all the fireworks, there were still bloody 35 minutes left. Not that this incarnation of "giant evil random thing" did anything even vaguely menacing here either while they all took turns hitting it, but hey! I guess that’s just as silly as the original. Regardless, all that time afterward spent on Chrono’s cougar harem, montaging, and expositioning could have been better spent in the middle building things up. Or on cat girls rubbing things on other things. You know. Whichever.

It’s not bad by any means, but the original series was quite excellent in a number of ways and a movie budget didn’t really benefit it that much. At least it did have a movie budget and some actual action animation, something I’m not sure I’ve seen from anime much lately, although I guess with the movie delays, it probably doesn’t count. While the first movie did a good job cutting out a whole whole lot of the chaff from the first series, this did a much worse job of that and it overall suffered quite a bit for it.

Preview:

If you’re reading this, it means that I forgot to change the template.