Kara no Kyoukai Movie 8: Shuushou

It's been a while since I truly felt overwhelmed after I finished something, this left an indelible mark on my soul, it's about learning to embrace yourself, imperfections and all, about discovering yourself, facing the voids within us, the contradictions that make us human, but still, it's much more then that, it reminds us to cherish the ephemerality of life, life is short so spread your wings, fly.

It's a deeply personal creation born from a young Nasu's pursuit of his own beliefs, this story is Nasu's essence, reaching for his own truth, it's heavy but it also brims with meaning because of Nasu's obstinate. ... Thank You.

So here’s the thing, if you watched all 7 movies of Kara no Kyoukai , you’re going to watch this epilogue regardless of what I say, so I’m not going to talk anyone out of seeing it. But I would if I could. The thing is, it doesn’t add as much to the story as it could have, and actually ended up leaving me confused and irritated.

So what exactly is wrong with this epilogue?

Where to begin...
The epilogue is meant to expand on some of the ‘behind the scenes’ goings ons in Shiki’s head. It’s basically supposed to clarify the how’s and why’s of her multiple ... personalities and explain the SHIKI versus Shiki dichotomy. The real issue with the epilogue is how they chose to do it.

It’s one giant speech…
Kokutou meets Shiki on the same bridge where they first met all those years ago, and they talk and talk and talk …. and talk. The thing is, by the time Shiki’s done explaining everything, you will have way more questions than answers. Which is kind of funny...

The 7th movie for Kara no Kyoukai, provides a pitch perfect ending. This epilogue does everything it can to disturb that. Now this might not have been done intentionally, but the more I thought about the epilogue, the more I found my focus less drawn to what Shiki was saying as much as the situation we find herself and Kokutou in during the epilogue. Why are they on the bridge? What was she doing there by herself? Why does Kokutou arrive to talk to her there? … in other words, what the hell is going on with those two??? And if you’re waiting for answer, you’re not going to get one, which feels positively awful.

Also, there’s the issue of how confusing the epilogue is. Truth is, unless you’re a metaphysics ninja, you will probably need to watch this twice to understand half of what’s going on. But I found that after sitting through this the first time, I just did not want to. There was too much that was ‘different’ about the epilogue, and not nearly enough continuity between the series and this add on. Even Shiki looks different, and by different I mean more generic. I’m not sure if it’s the result of different artists or what, but that trademark character design, especially her eyes, is noticeably different, and I did not care for it.

Personally, I found the entire thing a tad forced, too heavy and melodramatic. And you could almost have swapped out Shiki for Touko, and achieved a more realistic feel, or at least one that didn’t leave you with so many damn questions.

I can telly you that this epilogue will ask some serious questions about what we assumed happened after the end of the 7th movie. This is not a good thing. You do not need this to be your last episode of Kara no Kyoukai. It takes a perfectly good ending from the series and changes it just slightly enough to put you off. You’re much better off stopping this series after the 7th. But since you’ve probably already watched it as you read this, I’m sure you already knew that.

A dumb epilogue animating the main duo's lip-flappings of the author's pseudointellectual ramblings of self-contradictory dialogue writ large. Worse, I could take every line of this and stack all the rephrased repeats and it would just repeat each a dozen times as it goes through conveying nothing of value for 30 minutes. It takes a very special person to think this juvenile attempt at philosophizing is deep. It adds nothing, literally, a pointless 3rd personality who may as well have just been SHIKI anyway because the 2 fill the exact same role of contrasting Shiki (who is already barely contrasted because it just headasses excuses ... for everything to make her murderous too filling the exact same role as SHIKI because in reality the multiple-non-multiple personalities of Shiki never actually mattered in the 1st place).

God this series is dumb and didn't even have the balls to kill the MC let alone write an actual scene where he survives through any actual justification.

The dialogue is nearly 100% filler/exposition in addition to frequent poor translation/nonsense dialogue.

Despite being ostensibly 'dark fantasy', while it deals with dark/mature themes this isn't horror, just 20% violence/gore between 80% filler. Rather than horror it's mature action, and whatever attempts it makes to be dark come across as laughably edgy and usually conveyed through idiotic shonen villain monologuing (think Angels of Death taking itself completely seriously).

The MC is a noncharacter simp with almost no backstory and hardly any relevance to the series. most everyone else actually goes out and does stuff while he kinda just shows up to talk and occasionally participate by simping for girls almost certainly because he's been written as a generic MC self-insert for a VN nonromance harem builder with all the hentai scenes left out. He's a pencil-pushing desk warmer the girls immediately fall for who has been written out of the story with dumb excuses like being comatose and going off for weeks to learn to drive and the story taking place elsewhere only to briefly call him up on the phone to say hello. Let alone making a different character MC, you know your story is bad when your MC of all people would be better off cut from the entire series.

1/10 (where 5/10 is average)