Anime: Gekijouban Sengoku Basara: The Last Party

Title: Shows Over… Wait, How About A Resurrection!!
Own, Online Viewing, or Evade
This movie is pretty much worth Owning.

Overall Rating 4/5
The show was roughly about the historical territorial lords, daimyos, from the Sengoku period of Japan and their chief warriors. This was a period of samurai and a not yet united Japan.

Nobunaga Oda and Hideyoshi Toyotomi were defeated. This movie actually surpasses the rigid history the shows focused too much on. The movie follows a Toyotomi subordinate seeking revenge. This ends with a huge battle with most of the main warriors… And a resurrection of a previous villain… Oh geez… It was a pretty good battle though. I liked this movie better than the preceding seasons as it walks its own path better without excessive narration.

Theme Songs 5/5
The movie had GREAT opening and ending songs. They fit the movie very well.

Ending 4/5
NO spoilers, the ending was…. pretty good. There’s also a 3rd season now (2018).

Sengoku Basara the Movie: The Last Party -- 'Last'? Remains to be seen. The 'party' part too, come to that.

So, it's finally going to be over. After two anime seasons of slightly varying quality, The Last Party, a feature-length film, is the proverbial cherry on top of the animated adaptation of Capcom's Sengoku Basara series about the Japanese Warring States period on steroids. Released in the fall of 2011, the film aims to appease the fans who have appeared since the release of the game series' third game (which happened after the second anime season) and thus add a finishing touch to a story that's already ended twice by tacking another 90 minutes and some new characters onto the end of a series that's already had 26 20-minute episodes to build its own little world and accustom us to its already prodigious character cast.

Well, let's put our guns on and get this thing quantified for completionism's sake. Keep in mind that I will be using my reviews of season one and season two as something of a reference point, and will be somewhat liberal on the spoilers. Just so you're fairly warned here.

Animation and Visuals: 7/10 -– Really, you get the budget for a full evening feature and you end up toning it *down*?

Production I.G. are still handling the visuals of the Sengoku Basara series, and with their experience as an animation house and with animating this series and its characters this show still shows a fair amount of graphical clout. The characters are mostly on-model, the fight effects are toned down slightly but still somewhat impressive, and the animation flows fine and without issues. That said, this film actually looks worse than the series that spawned it, for a few reasons: The backgrounds are rather sparse, several locales seem recycled from the actual series, and actual battles appear in much lower density because so much of the film is expositions instead of explosions.

The fights that do show up are disappointingly short by the series' standards and seems to use a lot of time obfuscating what's going on, as if the most impressive moves will kill what this film has left of a budget. The lack of big troop movements also lets itself show, slightly, and I end up wondering if this thing just had the budget of your average 20 minute episode, or if the producers just felt like being niggardly. The most impressive part of it all is, I would say, the final credits (despite just being a call-back to the first season's opening credits).

Sound: 7/10 -- Oh, a metal remix of the villain theme. How nice. Got anything else actually original down in that bag of tricks?

The sound of The Last Party is about on the level of the second season, and generally high for the genre in general. The voices are many and varied, and my favourite villain duo comes back (although neither have much to say, and I must say I'm actually sort of disappointed at Wakamoto's performance; he's too high-strung to seem actually menacing this time around). Amongst the new voices, Tomokazu Seki voices the... Villain? Ishida Mitsunari, and gets to use his famous shouty voice in the service of evil. He is supported by Fumihiko Takichi as Otani Yoshitsugu, in a sort of raspy, low-down sinister voice of some person who sadly only gets four lines and really doesn't leave too much of an impression.

As for the music, the music appears to be mostly remixes of songs from earlier. By now most of them have probably grown on the fan to the degree that you can pretty much predict in advance what tracks will show up, and when. It's still not on the level of the first season when this was all fresh, but on the counter-side it's not notably worse than the second season either.

Story: 5/10 -- A story perhaps best summed up as "less talk, *less* fight".

The Last Party isn't really much of a 'last party' when you get down to it. If you went into this film expecting a climactic ending to the Warring States period with most of the cast dead, defeated or vassaled... I would probably have tried to sell you a few landmarks. In essence, this film is a condensed third season: We get introduced to all our lovable main characters fighting for their usual (lack of) reasons, a new villain emerges, the people fight some more, there's a big meeting up with the villain and the guys all team up and the villain gets defeated by a sudden one-hit-kill attack: The only real twist being that it isn't Masamune who gets to make the kill this time around. All the main characters survive and go back to trying to beat each other up: Fun times with weapons all around, while peasants undoubtedly die by the score around them for their lords' ambitions.

Due to the release of Sengoku Basara 3 (the game), the story was probably supposed to tie into the game, with Ieyasu's rise to power and Sekigahara and whatnot being the centre. This, of course, turns out to be a slight enhancement of the truth (read: Bald-faced lie), as Masamune and (to a lesser degree) Yukimura are really more centre stage. Mitsunari and Ieyasu (the main characters of the game) are more side characters whose struggles are sort of incidental to the plot itself, and Sekigahara is just some random dustbowl they all meet in for arbitrary reasons. I find it somewhat disappointing, given that the game probably caused the introduction of all these new plot points/plot holes, that the film can't even seem to make use of its new elements and just shoe-horn them in awkwardly. Aside from that; pacing is somewhat lacking, plot holes are abound (and not in a way that can be covered up with "wow, how cool is that?!") and a lot of plot and the story in general seems superfluous. Then again the whole film seems sort of superfluous so I guess it's sort of appropriate that way.

Characters: 5/10 -- "More crazy? I thought we were all full up."

Ok, I'm just going to go into broken record mode for this particular section: The second season was sort of loose with resurrecting characters left and right, and this film really shows further problems with this. Not only does even *more* characters come back from the dead alongside the new characters introduced due to Sengoku Basara 3, the film can't even make proper use of its old cast which makes me wonder why they didn't just kill off more of them in the first place to streamline the plot. As for the new characters: Mitsunari is sort of entertaining in his completely one-dimensional obsessiveness and it's sort of a pity he doesn't get more screen time, and Yoshitsugu and Hideyaki get like four lines each and are of no real consequence despite seemingly being the driving force of the plot.

Most damningly is Ieyasu, who was apparently resurrected just so he could play second banana to the plot *again* and doesn't really get to do much of note besides flying around and spurring Yukimura into action with his talk of unification: At least this incarnation seems slightly less hypocritical as he didn't (like in the game) personally kill Hideyoshi and re-fragment the country by himself. It's a good thing this film *has* so much show to build on, because at least that way we can see the old guard as an extension of their character arcs in the show. Well, some of them at least. Yukimura gets a sort of half-decent closure in climbing out of Shingen's shadow and taking over the Takeda clan, and most of them are somewhat decent if we ignore that they'd be completely flat *without* the show to base themselves on.

As for the main villain, Mitsunari does a good doing but is just to awkward to make a proper villain and the eventual conflict is with Oda Nobunaga back from the dead, who does little but stand around and laugh maniacally while performing no real villainy of note before being unceremoniously killed again like some afterthought, seemingly overpoweringly powerful but no realistic threat to anyone. The lack of a driving antagonist like Hideyoshi was in the second season really harms this show. I don't even know what Mitsuhide's deal was either: After coming back from being burned alive with no explanation he didn't even get to do much except move the plot along a little before dying meaninglessly.

But really, there's one final elephant in the living room I must now address after these three outings of this series, and that elephant is Date Masamune. This film could pretty much be renamed to "Masamune Steals the Spotlight" and this show would instantly get points for honesty. I know he probably sells more game copies than the rest of the cast combined, but by this point any attempt the show makes at selling this as a "multiple protagonist" story sort of falls flat. I'm sure Masamune comes off as the epitome of 'cool' to the show's target audience, but really: At this point Masamune has no development or characterization left to unveil, making him static and dull, he never loses, always has to steal the spotlight in pretty much ever scene, and by and large kills any chance this show has of introducing proper drama with his constant half-assed bravado. Ugh. I hate going on character assassination tangents, especially when there's so much else I could possibly highlight instead, but there you have it.

Value: 4/10 -- Why did they feel like making this film again? Oh, right, stacks of cash, forget I asked.

The 'value' of this film could really depend on asking this: Did this film resolve anything in regards to the story, character arcs, or anything from the anime's progression, or was it simply a standalone 90 minute fight-and-talk-o-rama that extended the "adventure goes on" ending of the second season? The answer is a resounding "the latter". People who haven't seen the show will gain nothing from seeing this film, and people who have seen the show gain nothing *except* some more screen time for their favourite sengoku caricature and some fight scenes. There was really no reason for this film to be made from an artistic point of view -- it feels almost entirely commercial. As value goes it's fairly subpar.

Enjoyment: 5/10 -- That's enough now, please. Really, I'm starting to feel -- no, you know what? I *am* sort of bored now.

Enjoyment is... Okayish I suppose. Some of the antics are still enjoyable, but the fights aren't as amusing any more, they've ran out of decent villains, and by this time the lack of energy compared to the first season's freshness is really start to wear me down. I was able to finish this and don't really regret it (and could probably watch more, if only for the curiosity value), but my 'enjoyment' of this setting has begun to take a drop for real by now.

Total: 5.5/10 -- Less of a drop in quality since season 2. A drop in quality nonetheless.

Really, summarizing this film seems, at this point, somewhat redundant. The Last Party is an additional 90 minutes of fight of the exact same calibre as the two seasons of the anime, but with even less of the things that made season 1 such an enjoyable fresh of air to me. If season 2's problem was a lack of playfulness and an increased amount of things generally 'going stale', this film has the exact same problem taken even further. The lack of direction renders it little more than a pretty 90 minute spectacle, but instead of realizing how inherently ridiculous its own premise is this film actually seems to try to make a coherent drama of it, and fails rather badly. Ultimately I wouldn't go so far as to call this film *completely* pointless, but it is *rather* pointless. It's not really a 'grand finale', just an 'overtime fight extension' of the second season.

Had it only *been* a grand finale I would have welcomed this film as the series' swan song into the foray of anime, but as it stand this just ended up becoming some stunted root with rot at the end.