Having watched it all, I think I'd give it a B+. The pacing is less terrible than Eternal, but still suggests that whoever's running things still doesn't get the story enough to understand the emotional moments and how to let a scene land. The animation is better than all previous attempts in Crystal, but it's frustratingly funny how the off-model work sometimes ends up looking better than the attempts to stay on Tadano's style. The animation is noticeably poorer for the second film, compared to the first for long stretches. Animation errors persist, even though this is the Blu-Ray and hypercritical fans have likely pointed out every animation error known of so far for almost half a year, so Toei should have been well aware of them by the release date. Bad artwork also persists, which is at least one sense of consistency across the entire Crystal project.
But the colors felt better, the alteration of the line art to look like pencil made things look better, and seeing some of these scenes animated is still exciting, even if they end up disappointing compared to the sense of action or grandeur in the manga. The music was good (when it was playing...the long silent part during the fight with the revived Sailor Guardians was noticeable.)
Pacing-wise, that isn't the fault of the manga. The job of someone adapting something from a static visual medium over to an animated one is to figure out how to make it work for animation, not just 1 for 1. That includes determining when things need to have more time to sit for the viewer, compared to how a reader may be drawn to sit with a static visual. It is entirely a failure of the studio and its creatives if they choose not to step up to the task at hand, which Toei has opted to shirk for almost the entire Crystal/Eternal/Cosmos project. So we have no big surprises that those problems persist. Nor should we claim that it's just because it's a 1 for 1 attempt, when clear deviations (some of them good--like Sailor Moon's extended fight with Galaxia) happen throughout the film. Toei had the ability to make it work, it just chooses not to.
But for what it's worth, it's over. We got a little bit of clarity, along with some changes that ultimately didn't make a lot of sense, and it is what it is. Considering how Sailor Moon Crystal and Eternal turned out, things could have been much much worse in Toei's hands.
it looks so bland compared to the previous seasons and the manga. sometimes it can look really good but most of the time it looks boring
