Review of No Game, No Life: Zero
tl;dr: A film that is quite distant from the main series both in terms of plot and atmosphere, but manages to still feel familiar to fans due to good use of characters while also simply being an incredibly well made film. No Game No Life Zero is a distant prequel to the No Game No Life franchise. The world of No Game No Life is one of various races competing, but where everything is resolved through games. A short legend is provided in the original series that explains how that came about, and this film greatly expands upon that. As this film is an explanation forhow such a happy and whimsical world came about, the world of this film is anything but, being incredibly bleak. Hence, the atmosphere of this film is pretty much the complete opposite of the main series, wherein while there is still some of the satisfaction of watching a clever protagonist putting their plans in motion, for the most part it is a lot deeper emotionally with a lot of moments simply being heart rending. How strongly it contrasts with the main series, and how it completely defied my expectations may have been a large part of that, but ultimately it ended up being incredibly impactful.
The core plot is pretty well written, though there are some issues with the middle half where the main plan is initiated feeling kind of rushed, but ultimately what really carries the film are the characters. The main duo of this film, Riku and Schwi, are in what was a clearly a completely intentional choice, very similar in both appearance and personality to the main duo of the main series, Sora and Shiro. There are major differences though, with the ones in appearance being obvious enough, but the ones in personality also being important to highlight as resulting from differences in backgrounds and roles they've been given, even if the absolute core of each of them feels the same, which ends up feeling like looking at characters that are new and hence invoking a sense of curiosity but still automatically feeling attachment to them due to their resemblance to characters already invested in. Another important difference to highlight is that while the main duo in the main series were siblings, here the two are lovers. As such, the core of this film is the intense character arcs and accompanying relationship arc of Riku and Schwi, all of which was incredibly fast paced but handled incredibly well.
In addition, there are a number of side characters that are based on the cast of the main series, wherein there are very few characters that are actually present from the main series, there are a number of characters that are ancestors to those from the main series that seem to have been made to intentionally look close to the characters they correspond to from the main series, thereby invoking further feelings of familiarity and to an extent nostalgia which further pulls viewers familiar with the main series in. Ultimately, all of this combined resulted in a film that I wasn't expecting at all and that made me feel things I really did not see myself feeling as a result of No Game No Life, but that ultimately left me while not exactly happy, very satisfied with the film overall.
The art and animation were incredibly well done and made good use of having a lot of different art styles as a result of the different races. It also had a lot of good imagery and such in the form of shots involving chess and such. The soundtrack was also very good and the ED also worked incredibly well.