As anime go, it was OK. However, if I wasn't already a fan of the Dragon Age franchise, I don't know that I would have made the effort. On the other hand, my mother, who watched it with me and knows only a bit about DA from what I've told her, felt that as a stand-alone movie it did quite well in being self contained and didn't rely on the viewer being a player of the games.
--- Pros ---
I did like the animation style. It kept the feel of its origin as a 3d game, but still had the anime aesthetic.
I watch anime in Japanese with subtitles, voices were great as usual for an anime, but oddly I found that the mouth movements were made for English. I'll have to watch it in the future in English and see the difference. The most swoon-worthy was Gackt as the Knight Commander/villain. As it was pointed out to me while watching it, a good or even great villain
far outweighs any protagonist actor. For non-anime see Ursula (The Little Mermaid) and Scar (The Lion King). Villains FTW!
I enjoyed the touches of similar armor and weapons from the games. In the final scene where we see several thousand pilgrims, they are all wearing the exact same peasant clothing that is from the games, which I found highly amusing. I also
really appreciated that the high dragon, ogres, golems, and pride demon looked
exactly the same as the game. It really brought me in as a player. The pride demon especially looked like they used the exact model render.
Mage robes were done well. I was happy to see the featured the Orsino-style robe, as well as variants with pants.
PLEASE adopt these for the games.
Galyan was
by far my favorite character in the entire movie. He was adorable, but still serious. They didn't go too overboard with him. I could see Anders having turned out similar to him had his life been different.
Being a passive observer of goings on in Thedas was interesting.
Oh and... OMG she has the book at the end!!
--- Cons ---
Unfortunately, my very first experience with this movie was bad. This set comes with 2 discs: disc 1 has the English movie and special features, disc 2 has the Japanese movie. There is a brief intro giving the background of the Chantry and mages. On the
Japanese version this was
in English, then switched to the Japanese for the rest of the film. It was very irritating, smacked of laziness, and initially caused me to worry that something had gone wrong and I got a dud dvd with 2 English versions or something. Did this play in the Japanese theaters like that? I doubt it.
I found Cassandra to be
too angry and rash for the first half of the movie. This caused her to make stupid mistakes that got her mentor killed, and later nearly killing herself. This certainly isn't an anime flaw, but a gimmick that seems to be popular in tv/movies of all sorts. Teenagers are often depicted this way, and it gets quite old. There is no reason for being so angry
all the time. And
for once, I would like to have some anti-mage behavior that is not related to a person's personal history.
An annoying addition I felt were the massive mob of ogres and golems whose appearance makes no sense with the structure of things as we know them. Other than Wilhelm, who was a special case, mages do not use golems, nor do they use ogres (darkspawn!).
Finally, I was dismayed by the poor showing of mage magic use throughout the anime. Galyan made his excuse by explaining that he was poor with battle magic, but did use it sparingly when the need arose. I found it
absolutely ridiculous that I saw mages hitting templars with staffs in the end rescue scene. If the reason for that is supposed to be explained by the templar abilities, it's a poor excuse, since the abilities of templars were never explained or demonstrated. For all intents and purposes, they were just your typical soldiers in armor, and these just happened to be associated with the Chantry. I understand time constraints in a movie and I'm not requiring a full explanation of templar abilities, only one or two lines telling us that templars are needed because they specifically train to fight mages. That's all it would have taken. And the final fights would be have been far more entertaining for it.
All in all, it wasn't abysmal and I'll watch it again. But it wasn't the best movie spinoff I've seen either (that goes to the X movie).
Modifié par nightscrawl, 05 juin 2012 - 11:51 .
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