Review of No Game, No Life: Zero
[SPOILER WARNING!] I just watched this movie. Four years after it's making, sixish years after watching the anime season. The only thing I remember was the general plot and a few events, but nothing that was supposed to help me understand this movie, so it might be just me, but I felt very confused throughout the movie. The races, their relationships with each other, gods, they all fell into this mishmash of characters I couldn’t tell apart. I don’t know if this is the movie’s or my fault though, as I was watching it with someone, for the most part, and was distracted at certain pointsin the beginning. On the other hand, it might be a problem with the movies pacing, which I’ve heard multiple people complaining about and have noticed it myself.
I feel like the whole romance part was very poorly paced. That’s not the only problem I have with it, but I will get to that later. The characters meet, in a very…interesting way to say the least and after a few months, which is what you think at least, they get married. Why I phrased it like that is because one of the reviews I’ve read mention that multiple sources say there was a time skip, of roughly a year and a half, somewhere between their first encounter and the proposal. What happened in this year and a half is never mentioned.
Characters and their lack of common sense
The main characters were very frustrating. I don’t consider Couronne as one of them, because of how little of an impact in the story she had, and how little character development she went through (not that the other two were much better in that aspect), but she’s still somehow listed as a main character on MAL. Now, the story made me hate these characters pretty fast, because of their irrational decisions. Let’s start with Schwi.
Schwi
We meet her in a rather interesting manner. She greets the mc with the demand of making her a woman, a.k.a having sex with her, her reason being, to understand the human heart. This would’ve been justified if later, she didn’t admit she can’t have sex. So why did she approach the mc saying that then? Also, why does she want to know about the human heart? From what I understood at the end, that was her mission, but from who? Why? She also had no character development. Actually, the pinnacle of her character development was the personality switch she did at the start of the movie. She goes from 1 to 100 for the mc in the first few minutes, so I can’t really call their bond getting greater, character development.
One other problem I have with their relationship is the lack of scenes showing their relationship improving in any way. We have roughly 2 years of their relationship shown in a few chess games, where we witness the main character bitch about not being able to win, even though he knew that from the start. I don’t like that we were presented with two characters, with great potential, who we see getting married in a flash, without even witnessing them interact.
Riku
Riku is yet another character that lacks common sense, but we don’t see that as early on as with Schwi. So for the most part, he’s pretty decent. We meet him during his expedition where he sacrifices one of his men for the rest of the team’s survival (aka him and one of his other men). It was heartbreaking seeing Nonna cheerfully run to greet her father who has just been used as a plot device. We can see her harsh words, targeted towards Riku, greatly impact him as he has a mental breakdown a scene after. Rightfully so. All of that, as well as being forced to take Schwi in, makes us feel sorry for him. That feeling doesn’t last long though, after he refuses to kill her. What impacts this scene is another scene, later down the line, when Schwi confesses that she is the one who destroyed his village. Just a single line from Riku infuriated me so much, and it is him telling her he knew. So to summarize it all up. You’ve got a man that was forced to take one of his biggest enemies in, an enemy which destroyed everything he once had. A man who refuses to kill that enemy, for no reason. And a man who later marries that enemy, ignoring everything she had previously done. One last thing about him is the lack of his past. We see him left in ruins, all alone, as a child, and we don’t get the smallest bit of explanation of how he managed to survive that time.
Now, I don’t hate EVERYTHING about this movie, a large part, but not everything. I think the music was very good, an easy 10/10. I also loved the fight scene between Schwi and Jibril. Everything about it was great. Seeing Schwi get tossed around made me feel sad for this poor excuse of a character. Her trying her best to survive for the one she loved. Even though I hate their relationship this scene just made me so touched. The animation was also very well done, a 9/10. What prevents it from being a 10/10 was the CGI they used. It was very off-putting, but it didn’t last long, thankfully.
Story: 4
Art: 9
Sound: 10
Characters: 2