Fate/stay night

[KLSymph]

Fate/stay night the anime is the twenty-four episode TV adaptation of the hentai visual novel by TYPE-MOON.  As adaptations go, the series is quite faithful and doesn't add much new; it follows the Fate scenario of the game while merging in elements from the other two (Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel) since Fate alone probably doesn't have enough material to carry a full twenty-four episodes.  As one might expect, the explicit sex was removed from the TV series, although much more of the hinting is there than, say, Tsukihime (also by TYPE-MOON).

Fate is the story of Emiya Shirou, a kind-hearted boy devoted to helping others, and how he is mixed up in a recurring war between mages who fight to possess a magical artifact of extraordinary power.  Because the whole premise is complicated, and information on the game and the series is readily available, and because I don't feel like writing one, I'm going to skip the synopsis and go straight to the review.

Artwork: I'd call it mediocre.  Good, but nothing incredibly special about it, and more significantly, the game's artwork is noticably sharper and of higher quality.  To be frank, I would've rather the animation was slightly more like the opening movies in the game.  At least Tsukihime's adapation, which had a similarly not-so-sharp art style, had a story where the protagonist was more in a haze.  Fate is a good deal more lucid and triumphant a story.

Music: The music is appropriate to the scenes, but nothing to write home about themselves.  The opening theme, Disillusion, is nice to listen to, and a good variation of the original piece, This Illusion.  The music accompanying Archer's Unlimited Blade Works was at least memorable.  The other songs weren't great, though the other songs in the game weren't much either.  Fate/stay night isn't .hack//Sign in terms of musical achievement, I'm afraid.  Also, I thought that Archer's ending song was nowhere near melancholic enough for the way the ending was shown or Archer's unexplained-in-the-series significance.

Voice acting: pretty decent.  I liked it, and the voices matched the characters, I think.  I commend Archer's voice actor for doing pretty well with investing dramatic weight into the lines of the I Am the Bone of My Sword speech, although his English pronounciations weren't very smooth.  The inclusion of a pause in the middle of the line I have created / over a thousand blades makes that line much better.  On the other hand, the line Yet, those hands will never hold anything, which is the worst written line in the entire speech in terms of rhythm, becomes a hundred times worse when actually spoken aloud.  Yikes.

I recommend the series, since it has a good story and interesting characters.  That being said, I have a few... big issues, shall we say, with how the series went.  Spoiler warning, of course.

I've already talked about this elsewhere, but a lot of the appeal of seeing the animated series over the still images of the game was to see how the special effects of the battles go.  More than Enûma Elish being visually underwhelming, most of the battles just weren't presented with enough showmanship in the series.  The biggest attacks, like Excaliber, were just bright flashes of light.  Yes, that's what they looked like in the game, but what works for still images (with a boatload of image transition effects) doesn't work in animation.  This is a problem for things like Tsubame Gaeshi, which could've looked a lot more impressive than three blue curves on a black background given all the time spent on talking about how good it was (they could've said that the first one was too fast to see but the final one should've been made to look cool).  Gáe Bolg, as well.  You just don't get the dramatic impression from the animation.  Gate of Babylon the first time Gilgamesh revealed himself--the King's Treasury fully open, the entire armory's store of blades revealed---was appropriately awe-inspiring, but the animation of the attack itself is absolutely pathetic.  Of the battles, Rider versus Caster was good, but I demand that whoever thought of taking Archer's twin swords and changing their shapes into feathered wings, and then having Archer posing with them in midair, be taken out and shot immediately.  I'd want to fight to the death too if I were seen in public in that corny pose.  Too bad I don't have the episode on hand at the moment so I can post it a screenshot.

I can sort of understand why the two Archers, with their endless reservoir of ammunition and fighting styles, are of "Archer" class, even though their both obviously more swordsmen than bowmen.  Why the heck is Assassin, a swordsman who fights with a swordsman's code of honor and spends his entire time guarding the gate, an "Assassin"?  Makes you wonder how the classes are supposed to work at all.

Why does Caster have pointy elf ears?  She's human.  She doesn't have them in the game art.  This change just struck me as really odd.

Why was Nakata Jouji, the voice of Alucard from Hellsing, casted as Kotomine?  The first time I heard his rather distinctive voice coming from another tall man in a trenchcoat booming inside an empty church in the first episode (for Hellsing, and the first preview for Fate), I had to check whether I was watching the right series.  Not that he doesn't have an impressive voice or that it's inappropriate for Kotomine, but all the way to the end of the series I was wondering why Kotomine doesn't just sprout a giant black eight-eyed dog from his side and eat everybody.  Seemed like less hassle to me.

Was Fate the right scenario to focus on?  While it is probably the most "canon" of the scenarios, I think there's more dramatic mileage in focusing on Unlimited Blade Works.  Heaven's Feel probably requires too much out-of-context knowledge of the other scenarios to work well.  So, start and end with Shirou, the conflict between his past and future self, and the validity of his dreams of being a hero.  Although you might not be able to get twenty-four episodes from it, I think that would be a lot stronger cohesively than beginning and ending the story with Saber versus Gilgamesh, make Shirou's dreams of being a hero just a part of his character, bringing up Emiya versus Kotomine at the climax, and then after everything is settled, watching Saber die.

That's pretty much all of my thoughts on Fate/stay night at the moment.  I think I'll stop talking now.

In the future I must investigate myself a better way to organize these reviews than "write whatever comes to mind".

[KLSymph]

Music: The music is appropriate to the scenes, but nothing to write home about themselves. The opening theme, Disillusion, is nice to listen to, and a good variation of the original piece, This Illusion. The music accompanying Archer's Unlimited Blade Works was at least memorable. The other songs weren't great, though the other songs in the game weren't much either. Fate/stay night isn't .hack//Sign in terms of musical achievement, I'm afraid. Also, I thought that Archer's ending song was nowhere near melancholic enough for the way the ending was shown or Archer's unexplained-in-the-series significance.

I'd like to take a moment and revise this part of my review. After downloading the series OST and listening to it apart from watching the anime, I discovered that the songs are actually quite good and would recommend them to others on their own merits. I'm not entirely sure why they were so forgettable for me when watching the actual series, but the fact that I did find them forgettable bothers me. Since I don't remember ever making this kind of mistake before (and music is highly important to my enjoyment of an anime or game), after thinking about it I concluded that the series didn't use the music to its full extent to capture my first impression, though in fairness I can't confirm that without watching the series again and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

Anyhow, I was bored, so I made this.



I think I was supposed to finish that commentary on the speech over in the discussion forum... but I think I'd have to watch the series for that too.