Overlord Movie 3: Sei Oukoku-hen

Is the story unique?
Absolutely. Overlord takes the familiar “trapped in a game” trope and flips it on its head by putting us in the perspective of the final boss—a powerful, undead overlord. The narrative is full of world-building, complex politics, and morally grey decisions. Even when certain events seem predictable, the execution keeps you hooked because of how rich and immersive the setting is. If you love dark fantasy or strategy-based storytelling, you’ll find Overlord completely captivating.

Do you think the art style is fitting for the story?
Yes, the art style fits perfectly. The designs of the characters—especially Ainz and the Floor Guardians—are distinct and memorable, ... enhancing the unique identity of the show. The dark color palette and eerie lighting match the serious tone and mysterious atmosphere. While some animation quality may dip occasionally, the overall visual style strongly s the story.

Were the characters well-rounded?
Yes. The characters are one of the highlights of Overlord. Ainz is an incredibly powerful being, but he constantly questions how to act like a proper ruler and leader. Each Floor Guardian has a distinct personality, background, and way of thinking. They are loyal, intelligent, and sometimes terrifying, but never one-dimensional. Even ing characters from the outside world are given depth and motivations that make them feel real.

Did the characters react to situations and events in a realistic way?
For the most part, yes—and that’s what makes the show so engaging. Ainz’s decisions are calculated, sometimes morally questionable, but always logical from his perspective. The NPCs who now have wills of their own act according to their personalities and values. Even humans in the world react realistically to power, fear, and survival. There’s a strong internal consistency in how everyone behaves.

Do you think others will enjoy/dislike this series, even if you didn’t? Why?
Definitely. Even if someone isn’t typically a fan of dark fantasy, Overlord stands out because of its unique perspective, compelling characters, and deep lore. It offers something different from the usual hero’s journey, and that alone makes it worth watching. Fans of complex plots, morally ambiguous characters, and world-building will especially love it.

This movie is capitalism manifest. Made in a hurry, it skips over like 70% of the two light novels it is supposed to visualize and only serves to suck money from normie fans. This thing is over 2 hours long and somehow manages to speedrun volume 12 within the first 30 minutes. Another major point is the brutality that occurs in these volumes. The movie either rushes and "censors" the brutal parts or skips them completely. In summary, this movie is a major disappointment for anyone that read the light novel and I would not recommend watching it unless you don't really care about all ... that and just want to see Neia animated. For anime only watchers it should be an alright experience. Also, the author has to be some kind of retard, like the movie came out in september or so in Japan and after half a year of waiting I had to watch it on some obscure chinese streaming site with AI generated subtitles. This movie was only made to milk the franchise one last time before maruyama puts down the pen for good. In the end, as a devout fan of Overlord, I can't give the movie less than 5 stars.

I don't care about paragraphs, to hell with all the wannabe intellectuals!

I know how much effort it takes to make animated movie or series, I'm artist myself making music and doing oil paintings, I also made animations and games in the past. But I will have to be honest here and I'm sorry if it hurts some of the workers on this, I'm sure that you did your best with time/budget allocated to you. I'm here to rate the result, not your effort.

This movie is so bad at everything:
0. It has 2 hours 12 minutes while skipping anything that could be enjoyable, why does not it have 1 hour but without the skips of important ... scenes? Story board for this movie had to be terrible. And you had to stretch the budget to over 2 hours of animation, which made you skip the fight scenes completely and the pacing is a mess. Instead of 1 golden hour we got 2 dirt hours. This could be justified in some story-heavy arc but this arc is all about fighting and making MC look good there is little to no story to tell.
1. Predictable story with no plot-twists, annoying one dimensional characters that do not ever change(also known as no character development) It is impressive how in 2 hours every character we meet in first minute is the same in last minute.
2. Most important(by important i mean potentially fun) scenes are skipped, it made me think "did i get my mind wiped by men in black?" but no, they really just skip the fun scenes like for example MC killing the enemy King, or the argument in the castle. We get "Tell do not show" everywhere. Fights that are not completely skipped are still so badly done it is like if i made them myself in ms paint, in one you even see black screen because you are "blinded" bruh... None of the fights involving main characters were visible, did they even happen? We can not actually know because none of them were shown. The only fight we see are side characters at the beginning defending the city. Then we see half of second defense where MC comes in middle of it, we see him kill like 18 level1 enemies with lightning and power word kill and rest of them is shown dead on the ground with the fight missing. We are to assume that the plague dogs got them offsceen, which is really visually unimpressive but not the worst we get to see(or do not get to see) in this movie.
3. Stakes do not exist (this is plague of all overlord anime to date) Novels supposedly have dangerous pvp characters, but none of the series or movies presented danger to the MC at any point. In this movie all enemies are level 1 with main enemy being like 80level which is 5.4 trillion power levels under MC's summons and it can not damage MC even if he wears no armor. There is also obvious spoiler to this making it even worse, i will not type it but it is not much of spoiler even if i did, because it is so obvious, especially if you watched or read anything from overlord universe before watching this.
4. Story is extremely anticlimactic, lets ignore that there was no effort to make at least one cool fight and the 3d cg was 2012 anime lower budget series level at best... the whole story itself is about MC making himself look good and fooling little innocent girl in to worshipping him.(This makes MC unlikable at every level in this movie) This is the whole story, there is no other actual plot in this movie. He fools little girl in to liking him, she in turn leads cult worshipping him. And people shout stuff like "Hurray you are so great just and powerful beautiful innocent genius chess master cute..." I really hope that the author does not consider it to be self-insert, because this is so lame it made me sigh and roll my eyes multiple times.
5. Sounds effects and music. The music is ok, it is not the worst thing i've ever heard just a bit generic and safe, so it will not offend anyone's ears but also is not memorable. But the sounds effects are so very unimpressive especially when this is supposed to be movie, many series like fate from ufotable had better ones even back in 2011 and even comedy animes like eminence in the shadow have many times better sound design and those are not even movies. Fate movies have just infinitely better sound design and animation and i can forgive the animation because it might be budget issue, sound is cheap tho and even amateurs from fiverr would do it better. Now do not get me wrong, it was not like 1/10 kind of deal, more of 3 or 4/10. Sound is my expertise and again I mean no offense to the workers, I assume the director had no vision for it.

I like to say at least one nice thing about things I did not enjoy, in this movie it was the princess scenes that were few but cute and likeable. I'm big ryona fan. And I also really liked the design of Baraja Neia, she was supposed to be creepy but i think it ended up looking really cute and I also liked how the look was connected to her ancestor and her abilities too.

Final words: I'm not biggest fan of overlord series in the world but they were much more fun to watch than this. They share many problems with this movie and have some additional ones but they actually were not ever this anticlimatic. We see MC duel the dude in season 2, we see MC in the arena fights fighting in season 4, we see him attack city in season 3, we see him to pretend to be adventurer in season 1... In this movie we do not see much at all, and story holds no interest because there are no twists no turns no cliffhangers no stakes, no character growth...