User blog comment:Derax-Pagani/Fairy Tail: Dragon Cry Movie Review/@comment-2214433-20171126131911

Ok, I've watched the shitty 480p version with those abyssmal subs. I mean, all the power to the person who slapped some subtitles over the movie as fast as they did, but sometimes, I understood more from the spoken Japanese than what the subs tried to tell me.

That aside. I think the movie was extremely rushed as far as the plot goes. The editing was horrendous. There is no way you wouldn't notice that entire scenes were cut out, scenes that were definitely important. This just shows that Mashima being the one to draft an entire movie didn't end up as working as well as awesome it sounded at the start. I'd compare it to the feeling I had when watching Harry Potter movies and the scene suddenly jumped elsewhere, skipping a chunk of material from the books.

As for the quality of animation and the artstyle, a huge part of the movie wasn't really up to par of what I'd consider a movie quality, unfortunately. There were some really nice scenes or really cool moments where things looked especially great, but that's also why the subpar parts stood out, where the quality of artstyle and/or animation had me scratching my head.

The soundtrack is probably the strongest part of the movie and that's despite the fact that most of the OST are tracks remixed from the first and second series. Which isn't really a bad thing, but hey.

And the inevitable comparison with Phoenix Priestess is here: the characters in the second movie were literally just shadows of first movie's characters, in multiple aspects. This is exactly why Mashima writing all of the movie didn't work out well; he tried to cram what could've been an entire arc into 80 minutes of animation.

Overall: The movie was pretty average, even if you set your expectations down to where shounen anime movies usually reside. Phoenix Priestess was definitely better, in most aspects.