My history with Dragon Quest is...non-existent. I only played some of the GameBoy Color games as a kid, but even then, I never completed them because they were hard. But Dragon Quest is a pretty popular game series in Japan, with the most recent game, Echoes of an Elusive Age, being released on the Switch with glowing critical reception. So when it was announced that a movie was being made, based on what many consider to be the best game in the series, Dragon Quest 5, people were ecstatic...until they saw the very end of the movie, which had a very strange plot twist put in that was so out of place and came out of nowhere that after the fact, reviews poured in that lambasted the movie for it. Even people in Japan hated it, feeling like it was a huge cop-out. As of now, Your Story is on Netflix, and I just finished watching it. What do I think of it? Well...I honestly don't feel it's as bad as people are making it out to be, but even without the twist, the movie still has a lot of problems.

The story focuses on a young man named Luca, who is the son of a famed hero named Pankraz. After his mother is kidnapped by the evil Bishop Ladja, he and his father attempt to save her, but Ladja kills Pankraz and takes Luca and his friend Harry to be slave labor. When he and Harry escape a decade later, Luca decides to return home and find answers. There's a legend about a hero being able to wield a magical sword, and his father left a final message in his diary, thinking that Luca might just be that hero. Armed with this knowledge, and joined by a saber cat and a friendly slime, Luca embarks on a worldwide quest to find the magic sword, stop Ladja from summoning an evil being named Nimzo, save his mother, and by extension, the world.

Overall, if I were to use one word to describe this movie, it would be overstuffed. Being that Your Story is adapted from a video game that can be about 20-30 hours long, it's inevitable that a lot would get lost in the transition from game to movie, since that's plagued video game movies for years. However, Your Story is clearly trying to adapt as much material as possible within a one hour and forty-five minute time frame, but at the expense of pacing. The pacing in this movie is very fast, so you'll never feel bored, as there's always something going on. However, some segments, which should have been more fleshed out in order to make us care about the characters, such as Luca and Bianca's entire childhood together, aren't given any focus at all, so when we actually meet those characters, the audience is confused as to why she's so important and why they should even care about her or her relationship with Luca. It doesn't help that the very beginning of the movie just blatantly uses footage from the game to set up said relationship and just glaze over the events that led to the entire plot, which to me is just lazy. Honestly, that part bothered me more than the plot twist, because using game footage in favor of, you know, doing your own interpretation of the beginning of the game with your own fingerprints just makes you seem lazy and insecure. The game footage was completely unnecessary, because the creators could have used that time to show Luca being born into the world and flesh out his character more.

It's especially insulting from an animation standpoint, because in all honesty, the CG animation here is absolutely stunning. Like, practically Pixar-level quality. I've never seen a CG anime movie that looked this amazing before now. This makes Land of the Lustrous look like Rapsittie Street Kids. The textures and overall look of the movie are amazing to look at, with the environments all rendered in exquisite detail. If you didn't know any better, you'd think the environments were live-action. The human characters actually look like people, and not like polygonish-looking humans with weird faces and awkward mouth movements. One other thing people didn't like about the movie was that Akira Toriyama's designs weren't used in the movie. To be honest, I don't really mind, mainly because I figure his style would be really hard to animate, especially in a CGI movie, so I think the animators dodged a bullet on that one. I also really like that the animation doesn't skimp on really small details, like the scars and scratches people get on their bodies when they're fighting monsters, the texture and myriad of strands in someone's hair, or the translucence of a slime's body. Those little things really make the setting and the animation feel much more alive. The actual character motion is just as amazing, and every movement is fluid and smooth, with little to no sluggishness or choppy frames. Seriously, Japan really set a new standard for CG movies, and considering their CG movies tend to have a bad rep, they should really learn from Your Story.

The soundtrack is pretty great too, with big, epic orchestral pieces that really make you feel like you're on an adventure to save the world. From what I've heard, these are redone versions of pieces from the game soundtrack, and I think they've been rendered pretty well here. However, in light of some really disgusting things fans have learned about Koichi Sugiyama and his political views, that's the only thing I'm going to say about the soundtrack. I like the music, but I don't like the composer as a person. But that's neither here nor there, so I won't waste time dwelling on it.

Because of the movie's brisk pacing and its attempts to tell a huge story in a limited format, the characters don't get the development and fleshing out that they deserve. As a result, they all come off as bland archetypes that we've seen in a million other fantasy movies of this caliber before. Luca's the idealistic hero, Bianca is the tomboyish childhood friend, Nera is the friendly princess, Ladja is yet another Saturday morning cartoon villain who is just evil for the sake of it, so on and so forth. I'm sure they got a lot more depth and development in the game, but again, I haven't played the game, so I can only judge them based on how the movie portrays them. Honestly, Ladja was just terrible. He was just a stereotypically evil villain who's there to just laugh all the time and be a dick to the hero. Nimzo was basically a non-entity as a character, and he only appears for a few minutes and that's it.

The story itself isn't really anything special. It's just another sword hero saving the world plot, only he gets married and has a kid later on. That's not a spoiler, by the way. The game does this, too. As for the controversial twist in the movie...well, I agree that it did come out of nowhere and seem lazy in concept, but I don't hate it nearly as much as other people do. Don't get me wrong, I do hate the twist, but considering the movie's other problems, the twist is only a small part of a very flawed product overall. Honestly, I thought the Ni no Kuni movie's final twist was much worse, more out of place, and much more mean spirited. Do I feel like Your Story could have benefitted from leaving this twist out? Absolutely. It would have just been another fantasy movie if it did so, but I'm okay with that. From what I heard, the creators meant for this movie to be a love letter to fans of the franchise, so the twist was put in there to appeal to them specifically. But when you put it like that, you wind up alienating audiences who have never played Dragon Quest, me being one of those people, when the movie could have done just fine without it. Sometimes trying to add in a bunch of out of nowhere twists can hurt a product rather than make it better (Looking at you, Guilty Crown). They say less is more, after all.

Do I think Your Story is bad? Actually, no, I don't. True, there are a ton of other movies that are way better, but for what it is, it's a fairly decent, if very flawed and bumpy fantasy romp. But unless you're a diehard Dragon Quest fan, I doubt it'll appeal to you specifically.