Unfortunately, there is no episode of Tensura this week, but in its stead it looks like the second movie is now available online, so I decided to watch that instead. It gives me something to do on a Saturday after all. Speaking of things to do, I have been hard at work in the past few days to update the look and more importantly the navigation of this blog. You will now find the main menu in the top left of your screen and from there it should be much easier and more clear to navigate to where you want to be. With that out of the way, let’s review this movie. I’ll keep it light on the spoilers so you can decide for yourself if you want to watch it or not after reading this post. And if you’re curious where this movie takes place, it looks like this is just after the founder’s festival so between season 3 and season 4

The setting for the story is simple. Rimuru and his friends are invited by the ruler of Thalion, lady Elmesia, to visit a private resort island. They bring along Eren – of course – and her two adventuring buddies as well as Hinata, Luminus, Milim and Frey. There are a total of three members of Octagram here with two former members along for the ride. While everyone is relaxing at this resort, Gobta gets caught up in a mess with a woman named Yura who stole something called “the dragon fang” from a nearby kingdom. We also learn that Leon’s El Dorado is located in the vicinity of this island and is under constant attack of nuclear-grade magic. I wonder if that’s coming from Jaune or not, since she seemed to be a thorn in Leon’s side before Diablo recruited her. The main conflict of this movie seems to be that Yura stole the dragon fang which lets you summon the water dragon. Obviously she stole it from the bad people trying to abuse it and now it’s up to the gang – mostly Gobta – to solve this issue.

Now I have to be honest with all of you, before I checked out this movie I had already seen that the reviews weren’t particularly positive. Anyone watching a Tensura movie this late into the game is probably pretty heavily invested in the story. You often see this with sequels of mediocre shows, where the later the season, the better the rating because the only people actually rating it are those who are still on board. When a movie this late into a series gets poor reviews, it probably means something. I went into this movie with that bias already in my head. And I kind of understand the comments too. Although it’s not a particularly bad story by any means, I can’t say this movie was better – or even as good – as a regular episode. The direction of it felt all over the place and the animation and art quality weren’t anything to write home about either. It feels very much like an anime movie that’s written because a show is popular and they want to expand profits on it. None of what happens feels like it’s important for the plot of Tensura and even though they sprinkle in some canon moments to make you feel more invested, it can definitely be skipped.

One thing that I did think was really well done in this movie was the music. The song playing during one of the fights was an absolute banger and some of the musical interludes were also great. I also liked the character of Yura quite a bit, and her buddy cop attitude with Gobta was also really fun to watch. It’s almost unfortunate that eventually the actual story started to settle in and we went past the fun and whimsy and into a more serious arc for a country and characters we’re really not all that invested in. One of the big benefits of Tensura’s endless meetings is that you get to really know the characters and feel like you’re invested in what might happen with them. It’s a lot of build-up for a pretty quick pay-off in the end. Contrast that with introducing all the important characters in the span of a short movie and it starts to feel like they just reused an existing story beat and rushed through it. The previous movie had similar issues in my opinion. I suppose this is really a problem that many anime movies have. They can’t have too big of an impact on the main story after all.

All in all, I think this movie was fine and I’m glad it became available online when there wasn’t an episode out, but I’d rather get a weekly episode than this. Regardless, see for yourself if you want to invest 2 hours into watching this movie. You can definitely skip it in its entirety and be fine though. And remember that I’ll be fixing up the page for Tensura content in the next few days, so check back to see what it looks like soon. And as always, thanks for reading!