I think I'm going to have to disagree with takenoko here. I felt both movies were bad in their own ways. Granted, both were better than the summer movie, but that is admittedly setting the bar about as low as it can go.
Zangetsu: As someone else already pointed out, Takatora was criminally underutilized in the series. So giving him his own movie is great. We get to find out that there's more of a burden he carries than just saving the world - what with his father being a figurative monster and all (man, Terror Dopant is getting
old) - and that's something the character needed. However it feels like the Gaim series writers gave someone the major plot points and let them go wild filling in the rest.
Ignoring the out-of-nowhere Rider for the moment, large parts are just sort of half-baked. Amagi had a child maid even though such a thing would be massively illegal, all so that Takatora could have a love interest without having to spend the time building the relationship. And even then Touka is a poor composite of the female love interest and the assassin with a chip on their shoulder, as it's obvious early on that the mysterious assassin is the one new character to the story.
Having her fight Youko is ironic in a sense. Youko was still a somewhat shallow character thanks to how Toku handles women, but compared to Touka she was at least a real character. I'm sure the fight was for the purposes of having a cat fight, but it just illustrates how far the movie slides compared to the series in how women are handled. Not that I'm trying to be on a soap box here, only that such poor characters make it harder to enjoy the movie since you can't help but cringe at the use of such a cookie cutter character.
Baron: I'm glad to see Kobayashi Yutaka has range and won't have to spend his whole career acting gruff. On the other hand it doesn't change the fact that Kobayashi Yutaka acting wacky is not all that entertaining in this context. He may have range, but he's damn good playing Kaito, as evidenced by the series and every moment he's playing Kaito in this movie.
Also, dirt bikes. A minute and a half of dirt bikes. Are we sure they weren't advertising a toy there? Because there was no fighting; that was a short motocross exhibition.
On the plus side, Ryoma remains a magnificent bastard, through and through. I don't care if Yggdrasil made him that way in the first place, either way he's the knife in everyone's back that keeps things interesting.
takenoko wrote:
I'm disappointed that Minami Tsukui wasn't the suit actor for Idunn, but you can't have everything.
You and me both. At the very least getting her to play Touka in her cat suit would have made a ton of sense; the guy doing the work was lanky and was very obviously not the same person.