I came to this show after my 3rd rewatch of the main series, I had consumed all the specials, movies, picture shows and any content the original series had to offer and I was hungry for more. I hoped this would quench my thirst for the high-quality storytelling in the original show and I was woefully disappointed, please allow to elaborate.
The biggest downfall of this movie was its length, it was simply too short for the vision the writer had intended. We are thrown into this new unexplored part of the lore with brand new characters that we need to care about before the end. And this show fails in so many ways, the introduction was fine, but compared to how Lelouch was introduced this is an utter failure. The main character's key character traits were never highlighted, you have no sense of who these characters are. What they care about and in turn you cant care about what is happening. The only key character traits displayed were very generic, like the general who cares about her subordinates despite their social standings. And the edgy emo boy who has a secret no one knows about. Almost all of the characters share this problem, the show never gives time to show interesting character traits and just opting for the most uninteresting options.
This show tries to introduce you to so many characters that are useless to the plot of this movie that it makes the length problem even worse, it also doesn't help that the story jumps from group to group out of the blue. Making it even more boring as you are forced to watch some random dude do stuff you don't even care about.
The world-building is probably the best part of this movie, it was organic and interesting. But it feels like the movie definitely focused on this a bit too much, they tried to flush out the world as much as possible as if this was the whole reason this show existed. Useless details are expositioned to us in dialogue scenes when it wouldn't matter if it was never mentioned, this makes the aforementioned problems even worse, as time is spent on things that are definitely interesting but they do not contribute much to the story.
And the compilation of these problems makes the ending the most boring ending ever, the main story never was given enough time to properly develop so you don't even know why you should care or what's going on, you don't care about the characters and what happens to them, making this the most mediocre anime I've seen in a while.
In short, if you want to experience the great storytelling of the original this is not for you, but if you simply want to see more of the world and fill in the gaps in the lore the original series did not explore this is the only place you can go.
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