This review contains spoilers

Maquia herself is a good protagonist, and the main ideas that the story explores are interesting. Can she raise a child despite the imminent truth that he would die before her? Can she become a proper mother within the harsh conditions she has to face? I could empathize with Maquia’s struggles and thought that aspect was done well. The visuals are also pretty, and it ultimately ends on a successfully emotional note. “Elder. I am glad I was able to love Ariel. I am glad I that I loved” It was definitely a nice conclusion to her story.

That being said, most of the story is executed poorly. The pacing is messy: Various time skips are present throughout, a lot of which are jarring and happen too suddenly, making it needlessly confusing to follow at times. The biggest offender being the one where Ariel runs away during his angsty teen phase to join the army and Maquia gets kidnapped. All of a sudden, several years have passed and apparently she was held captive the whole time, there is a war happening that she heads into, while Ariel got married and had a baby with that one girl who bullied him as a kid. Which is weird to me because, why does Ariel even care about her now? At first, I had thought they had made up over the past stuff, but it wasn’t even until after the child was born that Dita apologized over calling him weird for loving his mom. Come on bruh. Her re-insertion into the story just felt forced and unnecessary. Maquia simply knowing how to make Dita give birth when she was never shown to have any medical experience prior was straight up plot convenience.

The subplot with Leilia was dumb. She spends a great amount of her screentime wanting to meet her daughter, only to abandon her in the end and fly away with Maquia, when she finally gets that chance. What was the point then? There was that one guy who said he wanted to atone for killing Iorphs, but then the story never does anything with that plot point. This one might be just me, but I also didn’t get what her “I can fly” thing was supposed to mean, since it was said multiple times and it turned out to be false. Can't say I was a fan of her overall. With Maquia, you get to see her being characterized in multiple ways, both in happy times and sad. But Leilia just felt like a "tragedy for the sake of tragedy" type of character. The red eye thing that makes Renatos go berserk is never explained. I guess it could be argued that whether or not this issue gets resolved doesn’t affect the main plot much, but eh. I didn’t care for Krim at all. Not only is his character poorly written, it’s also just shown in an odd way and had me confused as to what he was even trying to do half the time.

This movie does a few things well and I appreciated those parts. But it tries to do way too much in its runtime without putting proper care into it. And thus, ends up being mediocre.