Never read/played the games so I have no idea how this route winds up, but loving it so far.

I'd like to see more of Archer's time as a Counter-Guardian, either Fanfiction or official, would make for an interesting story.

 

Some of the dialogue in this show is so fucking cringe.

 

This episode would have had a better impact if there weren't a three-month break between episodes. As it was, I felt like it was just getting back into things when the betrayal happened.

Saber's helplessness also would have had more of an impact on me if it hadn't been so long since the previous episode.

Same with the Shirou/Rin relationship stuff.

These aren't slights against the episode itself, though. I"ll probably enjoy this episode quite a bit when I re-watch the series.

 

Agreed; this episode is the actual end of the first season.

I'm so glad they didn't make Caster's abuse of Saber explicit.

 

Don't spoil yourself if you don't somehow know this already. To be frank though, I'd be shocked if you didn't know by the time they literally explain it. I mean, come on - pay attention to the details regarding everything... It basically explains itself.

I don't think this could work - being a counter guardian means you've got a pretty depressing story that's hard not to make overly bleak. I'd prefer a series where we see his transcendence to becoming a guardian. And I'd only find this interesting if Archer weren't the focus and was a side character, since we already know how his story ends; it'd be more interesting if the story focused on the fate of someone else he frequently works with.

As a counter guardian, the stakes aren't very high. Whether you win or lose, you get nothing out of it but short-lived satisfaction or shame. As Archer says, his end came and went; he's basically a spectre, trapped as an actor for somebody's violent play. Or maybe a better analogy...is warrior-janitor. You just clean up the messes of ungrateful and unknowing others.

 

Ilya... :<

 

Surprised they actually went through with

Spoiler

Ilya getting killed off this route.

 

Uh why would you be surprised? It's pretty important scene from the VN.

 

I wasn't suprised but it did pull my heart string better than VN.

 

This show is shiny and pretty. It's also utterly devoid of any real emotion. There's just a total lack of subtlety in every important moment. The show just hits you in the face with a hammer labeled 'THIS IS SAD' or 'THIS IS IMPORTANT'. Frankly, I get nothing from most of the moments that are supposed to have an emotional pay-off because the legwork hasn't been done correctly to get me invested in the characters at all - in fact I've somehow become less invested in characters I already cared about before the show started. It's disappoining from ufotable because I really liked Kara no Kyoukai and Fate/Zero. They're just directing scenes with such a lack of grace - key examples being Ilya's death scene last episode and the Shirou/Rin discussion this episode by Ilya's grave.

I'll keep watching now just because I want to see cool fight scenes but the character work has been very frustrating. Hope they up the quality for the home stretch.

It's not all bad though. Lancer >>>>>>>>

 

Ya well you're missing half the boring shit they went though in the first route to establish the characters and their motivations.

 

You want to know why?

Because you're watching a VN adaption

You are missing literally everything about the show because the VN was not meant to be adapted into mainstream anime.

Fate/Zero was Gen's fanfic that got the go ahead by Nasu because they became friends over table top games. Fate/Zero anime didn't capture half the conflicts and internal struggles of each characters but that's fine because Gen's a market pro, he knew the moment he was writing it that it was going to be adapted eventually, so he made is as 'cool' and 'showy' as possible. He also made most of the characters easy to understand and to be honest? Kinda shallow. The character interactions and relations were what defined it. The battles were feats and theatrics was there to make you go 'wow'. FSN was a bit more subtle with the action. Just a bit.

On the other hand, FSN was never planned to be an anime. In fact Nasu never expected it to blow up like it did. It became a cult classic because it was simply a VN ahead of its time, taking off from the fame of Tsukihime and then some.

FSN got as popular as it did because it tried things that weren't done in a VN before, where the protag wasn't actually just a tag along as you learn the stories of your heroines, and that as you progressed in the VN you learn more about the protag and how he relates to each of the heroines rather than the protag being a complete blank and just going along the flow of the heroines storyline.

Tsukihime did the same, but what it did wrong was how blank and utterly OP Shiki was, and the batshit insanity that he had to deal with wasn't as appealing as the subtlety of Shirou's batshit insanity. Tsukihime was still an above average VN for its time though, hence it became popular and paved way to FSN.

I absolutely agree that it's not as good as it's supposed to, but ufotable is doing it's best to actually make a really loooooooooong story condensed into this anime. You are watching a route where the characters are already supposed to be developed and where you're already supposed to know why they do what they do, and that's really bad. Even then, you don't understand the MC half as well as you should because you're not reading his internal monologues, where you explore him as a character and how he perceives everything around him.

Again, they are packing this thing in a 24/25 episode format anime, and it's hard to get into the character perspectives better in just that length of time. Honestly, I would have gone with an adaption that's mostly UBW but with added creative scenarios taken from other routes. But DEEN already did that and look at how that turned out.

Well, actually the DEEN anime isn't as bad as it's made out to be, it just did not age well and the presentation was not as good as it should have been. If the DEEN anime was all bad after all, FSN wouldn't have been half as popular as it is.

 

It's not just the length, it's that the director is adamantly against showing internal thoughts or monologues, even those that would still work fine in a visual medium like anime.

So basically you're getting half the story because the director is dumb.

 

More to point Shiro is the type of person who hides his tought behind social conventions.

An example. At some point in VN/Fate route Shirou likes Saber and doesn't want her to get hurt. SO he blurts out that women shouldn't be on battlefield.

Now if you didn't know why he said that you would think he was being chauvinist. Actuall it was just him wanting to protect someone he likes which is more understandable.

 

Deadsirnait is right - I've said it before, and I'm glad someone else is saying it too - read the VN to fully enjoy FSN.

I disagree about FZ's characters shallow though. Their motivations are strong and clear, and not at all one-dimension - Kiritsugu for instance is incredibly human, as his backstory and the climactic Grail arc showed.

 

Well there's a reason for that. Shirou's seiyuu is actually famous in the VA industry (He's played a lot of prominent characters like Sasuke, Uryuu, and characters alike.). He's thus very expensive to deal with. Each line he says cost more than the usual VA and more monologue means they'd need to dish out more money.

Not to mention that the VA cast for FSN are all highly rated and expensive to deal with, Saber is voiced by Ayako Kawasumi, a freaking legend in the VA industry and Gilgamesh is voiced by the ever amazing Tomokazu Seki, Archer is voiced by Junichi Suwabe the multilingual man with the smooth fucking voice and goddamn Shinji is voiced by Hiroshi fucking Kamiya.

Do you know how expensive it is to deal with fucking Kamiya? Anyone he fucking voices becomes an instafave simply because he voices it. SHAFT is the only studio crazy enough to let him go wild with the monologues, because the Monogatari series makes that much money.

So yeah, unless they wanna run out of budget, long winded inner monologues are a big no no. Hence why I've been a bit forgiving about the monologues part

 

Weird that they'd waste someone so expensive on an awful little fuck like Shinji.

That's some interesting information, actually, thanks for that.

 

Those are my favorite anime episodes, especially the second part where he worked under Natalia.

As for the series, I've been missing the ideological clashes like Kiritsugu vs Sabre but I'm assuming that

Spoiler

Archer vs Shirou

Will have that in abundance.

 

Er, that's great and all but that's not what I'm talking about. Miura doesn't like having internal thoughts at all and thinks everything can be shown as body language. Which would be an okay position to hold if you were making movies with real people. And had written your own original story with that in mind. But he's not doing either of those things.

Also he ruined Oblivion Recorder and turned into a jumbled weak mess. He's kind of just a dumb asshole and also the worst director they really could have chosen for this. It's amazing it's even turned out as well as it has.

 

Thing about that is Hiroshi wasn't quite as famous, I think, back in 2006 when he got the role of Shinji. The DEEN anime and the new anime have the same VA cast. Kamiya was simply recasted as Shinji.

Well yeah, part of it is that too. I was honestly surprised they didn't have the director and music director from F/Z do this. I guess they were conserving budget for animation instead of everything else. Which is very bad.