heath-jeffrey

At the outset I thought this was going to easily be my next big favourite game. A beautiful and mysterious world - maybe a bit much desert for me, but also filled with weird tech buildings and machines. A compelling start to a mysterious fantasy sci-fi story set in the remnants of a dystopia. Smooth controls and solid graphics. And a really net double-jump plus horizontal burst element to the characters movement that felt flat out awesome while also increasing mobility for both exploration and battle.

There's a simple colour based combat system, in that you only really damage enemies if you're using the right colour of weapon. It's more gimmicky than unique or clever, and quickly gets just annoying. But, that's not too big a deal, and there are several other cool and genuinely unique aspects to the combat involving companions and a kind of robot-soul-hook-catching thingy.

But, it lost me immediately when it turned out it was heavily based on platform jumping. That fun double-jump boost mobility I initially joined ended up being the bane of the game, because it's all about whether you can time and space your jump combos perfectly as you bounce between scores of platforms. And every time you miss once, you fall all the way to the ground and have to repeat it all over again. Just plain boring.

Such a shame, and some will love it if they can get past that aspect. But definitely not for me.

I love anime, especially when it involves some unusual, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, or otherwise surreal world. P3 has that.

I love turn-based combat, especially when it feels fluid and responsive. P3 has that.

I love many procedurally generated games (especially rogue-likes and rogue-lites, but any game where the dungeons are replayable because they're different every time). P3 partially has that.

I love games that place a heavy emphasis on story, allow for some exploration without going full-on open-world. P3 partially has that.

Yet, this was probably still the most boring game that I've ever pushed myself to actually complete.

The combat is uninteresting - none of the special abilities have any real meaning aside from 'find the weakness, hit that, and you win'. The few marginally interesting effects that are there, only normally work on low level enemies you can defeat outright anyway. So, it's pretty dull from that perspective.

The procedurally generated parts are of extremely generic and repetitive rooms, with no secret areas and nothing you can really interact with. So, there's no real need to bother trying to explore; and the surroundings get dull very quickly.

More importantly, there are 260+ floors, with 6 variants in style but effectively identical within each style. And, while that would be plenty if that was the a whole game, it's not. Instead, you have to replay half of them again and again and again before the game finishes.

And, worst of all, the more day-to-day school drama of the story, is dragged out by fixing it to a calendar that ticks away one day at a time. The stories are interesting enough and help develop the characters, although some are a bit stereotypical and shallow anyway. But, you don't progress through the story by playing. You progress by moving through the calendar. If you get things done quickly, too bad, you'll just have to click through extra meaningless days to get to the next important plot point some 15-30 days later.

Finally, the one thing that keeps the game feeling addictive despite it all, is the card collecting. It's that little dopamine hit from gradually unlocking more and more summon cards as you go. But even that has no real values. The actual abilities are essentially the same stock set of about 20 not very different ones, named differently as their power level increases to seem like there are more, and they're effectively interchangeable. Any card you collect can have pretty much any ability. So, it's not like you're ever unlocking one that feels special - i they're just different skins.

To be fair, I was able to play it right through - it's not a terrible game. It's just far more dull and repetitive than it should be given all it's got going for it.

In short: What seems an interesting, potentially meaningful story, with fun characters and a dash of humour, gets lost behind the lengthy, overdone animated effects.

Positives Nezha's appearance, actions, facial expressions, and the voice acting are perfect for the character. Nezha comes across as authentic, yet funny, and prone to angry outbursts, yet cute and caring. He makes for a great main protagonist, especially in a kids/family movie.

A number of support characters, both heroes and villains, are developed well enough (given that so much run time is dedicated to action rather than - see negatives below). And some of the comic relief characters are fun.

When driven by and used to support the story, the special effects are often beautiful.

The story is clever. The plot is a little more complex than it seems it first; the ending is satisfying; and there's a decent moral to the story. (Maybe even a bit risky in the current political climate in China, depending on how it's interpreted.)

Negatives None of the above is exceptional in any way. The characters and plot are well done, but not amazing. The comedy is good, but limited in amount, and very typical for a kids movie. It certainly doesn't have anything really unique the way movies like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, or The Banquet do. Nor does it have the non-stop laughs and of movies like The Great Bicycle Race, Shaolin Soccer, or Detective Chinatown. Nothing very special, plus a major, major flaw...

Only about half the movie has the positives, because the rest of the movie is an almost endless, drawn out, over-the-top fight scene - a final battle that goes on and on and on.

It feels like at some point the story-teller lost influence with the director, and the animation team took over, jamming in as many effects as they could. Smaller moments throughout the movie are also examples of this. It often starts with just the right animation to show something magical happening. But then doesn't stop until another one, or two, or multiple, effects are unnecessarily thrown into the mix. The tiring end battle is where it really takes over, though and it's hard to express just how overdone it is. It really does detract from what seems a solid family cartoon at its core.

With so much of the movie being that non-stop, violent, CGI-heavy final battle, it also seems unclear who the movie is for. There's too much of that for a fun family flick, yet that's clearly what the core story was *meant* to be.