n the story, there was once a Holy Grail War waged by seven Mages and Heroic Spirits in a town called Fuyuki. However, a certain Mage took advantage of the chaos of World War II to steal a Holy Grail. Several decades have passed, and the Yggdmillennia family, who took upon the Holy Grail as its symbol, defected from the Mages' Association and declared their independence. Furious, the Association sent a force to deal with the Yggdmillennia, but they were defeated by the summoned Servants. With the Holy Grail War system changed, war at an unprecedented scale, with seven versus seven, breaks out. And so, the curtain rises on the epoch-making Great Holy Grail War.

Trailer

 

First episode is out and up on nyaa.si. Went with UTW subs myself.

Impressions: first fight was okay - a lot of sound and fury, that's for certain, but didn't really like it that much. The episode made it seem like Kairi's the protagonist, which he isn't. Pity, really. Flat showing up gives me hope we'll see a Strange Fake adaption eventually, that'd be pretty cool.

Next episode hopefully has the Saber of Black vs Lancer of Red. Really looking forward to that, it'll define how I feel about this adaption.

 

Episode 1 was pretty good.

The opening scene, with what I hear is the MC, was kind of pointless though.

The flash-forward battle was probably just so the first episode wouldn't be entirely exposition, but the scene itself was kind of lackluster. The servant battle between Saber of Red and Saber of Black was bland. They were the least interesting fight in that scene.

The necromancer guy looks like he will be a cool character to watch. He seems like a different kind of mercenary than Kiritsugu.

The summoning scene was pretty bad compared to the epic summoning scenes we got in Fate/Zero and UBW. Almost all of the masters doing the summoning in the same spot made it kind of boring.

Mordred is a character I've only been exposed to in fanfiction, mainly a fic where she is summoned as Ilya's servant in the Grail War. But I liked what I've seen of her in this episode. The armor is cool enough and the character design is alright, but what really sells the character for me is the voice actor. Her cocky tone is great and really differentiates her Arturia.

I'm hoping she and the necromancer will be the main characters.

Here's hoping the annoying dumbass who needed to use his fingers to count to fourteen disappears and is never seen again.

Waver cameo FTW!

Good thing I kept watching after the episode was over to listen to the song or I never would have known about the scene after the credits.

---------- Post automerged 07-03-2017 at 06:42 PM ---------- Previous post was 07-02-2017 at 08:29 PM ----------

Coming to Netflix on Nov. 7th

Netflix usually premieres their anime with dubs included so I'd expect the dub cast to be announced soon.

 

Mordred status: still best character so far, but that fight scene was pretty bad. She's not the fucking Flash.

Astolfo a shit. Like whoa.

Next episode: Karna vs Siegfried. I still stand by that fight making or breaking the adaption for me, but I feel like it'll be more break than make considering the previous fights.

In other news: don't really like the OP. Mostly because of the song, it's pretty bad.

Flat has his own spinoff, Fate/Strange Fake by Narita (yes, the same guy who wrote Durara and Baccano). Translations are actually mostly up to date and I think it's fairly good so far.

 

The OP is terrible. Definitely the worse in the Fate franchise. The song isn't that good and it doesn't pump you up or convey any emotion, imo. Combined with the animation it was just bland. Its a shame when you consider who awesome the Fate/Zero and UBW openings were. Even the DEEN series had good OPs.

I'm cautiously worried about the brown-haired kid being in about 80% of the OP. Please don't suck. Even if you look like a generic MC character, please don't be one.

Mordred and her master are the main thing this show has going for it right now. Their interactions are fun and I like the obvious respect they have for each other. I do wince every time she slaps him on the back though. lol

The other masters and servants don't really stand out to me, other than maybe the wheelchair bound master and Shakespeare.

I"m not sure if I like the fact that they aren't keeping the servants' identities a secret or not. On one had it is doing something different that the other Fate shows, but it was always epic when the other servants revealed their identities to each other in the other shows. I guess it doesn't really matter in this show, since I"m just going to assume every female servant is a gender-bent version of a male hero/legend.

Shirou Kotomine? Really? Since he looks nothing like either Shirou or Kirei I'm guessing this name serves no purpose other than to fuck with the fans. It doesn't help that he's not that interesting. A corrupt church official participating in the Grail War. How original.

I liked the flashback with Jeanne/Ruler, but she still hasn't had much screentime. Given that she's the main character in the ED that should change soon. I think she'll end being my favorite after Mordred and her master.

The fight scenes are a huge disappointment. They're just so bland. So far the DEEN series had better fights.

This show can survive on Mordred's strength of personality alone. But I really hope the rest of the show improves.

---------- Post automerged at 07:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:29 PM ----------

He's the main character in a spin-off? The guy who had to use his fingers to add 7 + 7? How terrifying.

 

He's actually fairly tolerable IMO. Complete, competently translated ebooks of 3/4 of the volumes out at the moment can be found here.

Anyway, new episode. I've been harping on the Siegfried/Karna fight for a while and I'm disappointed as fuck.

Let's leave aside the random fucking flashback in the middle of the fight that had nothing to do with what was actually happening. Let's leave aside how fucking short it was.

The choreography was horrid. In the novels it's a fight of pure skills, here they're fucking flying around.

The sound was utter shit, too. "microphone rammed into a vacuum cleaner" does not good SFX make.

Also: Sieg, main source of the novels' descent into shit, has arrived. Hooray.

 

So far, this has kinda been shit. Story wise it's fine - not on the level of F/SN or F/Z, of course - but with the potential to be a half decent action series. Unfortunately, being a half decent action series requires having some half decent action scenes.

The animation ranges from barely passable to terrible, there are several scenes where I noticed the art work wasn't even complete - see here and here. As BTT mentioned, fight choreography was shit. I think they realized that the animation was flaky as all hell, and tried to make the fight as confusing as possible to disguise it.

The only thing this anime makes me feel is longing for a version of this directed by ufotable. I really they would stop making cheap spin off adaptions of the nasuverse just to shamelessly cash in on Fate's current popularity. If you aren't going to bother to adapt something right, why bother doing it at all?

 

9 episodes in and the best thing I can say about it is it's good. Not great. Merely good.

After watching the first couple of episodes I kind of forgot about it for a while. The episodes weren't good enough to keep me excited and there was no hook compelling me to return.

I ended up binge-ing the next 7 episodes yesterday and I think that's probably the best way to watch this show.Since no episode leaves you begging for the next episode, instead of forgetting about the show after a week or two you can easily digest it in binge-mode on Netflix.

After 9 episodes, I only care about a few characters. Ruler, Mordred & her master, and Frankenstein. I'm shocked I ended up liking Frankenstein, but the reveal of her past won me over. Some of the other characters are kind of cool, like Vlad, Atalanta, Achilles, and Chiron, but I don't really have any emotional attachment to any of them. The master in the wheelchair has potential. The rest either have barely any screen time (wasn't that Darnic guy supposed to be the main villain?) or just suck (Rider's master, Jack the Ripper).

Which brings me to the waste of time that is Sieg. I don't get the point of him other than to have a generic bland character for the male audience to project themselves onto. Sieg takes up to much screentime that could be better spend fleshing out the other servants so I could actually care about them when they fight. It doesn't help that Siegried sacrificed himself for this crap character early into the series.

Ruler is cool. I don't quite get the point of a Ruler class servant, but I really like the character.

Shiro Kotomine is one big eye-roll. And not just because of his name. He has 6 servants and can fight on par with a servant and not be slaughtered. Ugh.

That's another thing. In the other Fate shows one thing you can always look forward to is the interaction between servants and their masters: Rin & Archer, Waver & Iskander, Kiritsugu/Shirou and Saber, etc. But when Shiro Kotomine has six servants and only really interacts with one, it leaves the others out in the cold.

The animation is pretty crappy. Its easily the worst animation I've seen in a Fate property. The fights are still bland and generic. The subpar fights are the reason why having great characters is so essential. If I don't like the fight scene I can at least be invested in the character fighting.

The music isn't awful. But there's nothing particularly memorable. The OP song grew on me, but the OP itself is still bad.

The voice acting is pretty great. Mordred and Ruler specially.

So I'll keep on watching. As long as the characters I like stay alive and are not background characters.

 

QFT, Frankenstein's freak out was legit that only well directed scene in the entire dumpster fire that is this anime. Though I suppose that's an insult to dumpster fires, which at least get rid of trash instead of giving them screen time.

 

UTW has episode 10 up now.

Fuck Sieg. After this episode I'm pretty sure I can guess his story for the rest of the series. I hope Mordred stomps his ass.

Mordred was awesome this episode. I loved how even when they go after her 3-on-1 she's still fine. She and her master have the best Master/Servant relationship in the show. There's a mutual trust there that I haven't seen that often in Fate, and I love that.

 

I meant to wait until this was finished, but I saw too many clips on Youtube, so I couldn't restrain myself anymore. So now I'm caught up to the latest episode, 18.

Compared to previous good Fate anime, Apocrypha is kinda bad. On its own, it's probably decent. I'd give it 7/10 right now.

My biggest problem is the animation. Compared to Ufotable, it's just trash. It looks cheap. I got mostly used to it, but it's still a major complaint. Especially a fight scene I know is supposed to be epic, instead it's just some ridiculous laser beams intertwining.

The sound design is also bad. I guess they were going with fighter plane sound effects or something? It's just zoom and bass and static. Weird as hell.

I hate Sieg. There. He's like 50% of what's wrong with the series narratively. Maybe more. He feels like an empty self-insert that was made way way WAY too special. Also a tool for the boy's journey to be a hero, mirroring Emiya Shirou way too much. He should be dead. Twice over. My favorite moment of the anime thus far was probably Mordred killing him. The story would be much more interesting if it was Red vs. Black. A few times, it feels like the narrative exist just to make him grow up. Saber's heart and Berserker's lightning were pretty much bullshit, but now it's like the entire Assassin of Black arc is just for Sieg to have some character development. I thought it felt like a pointless, boring filler arc in the middle of the war from the beginning... now I know why. And let's not even get into Ruler's ...fascination? Growing crush? On him.

I also feel like the series gets way too preachy with morals, especially when Jeanne (and Shiro) are talking. Yes yes we get it, you don't hate humanity. We're good but also evil. So complex. Humanity fuck yeah.

Despite all the complaining, it's not all bad. Half the the Heroic Spiris are interesting. The war, when it was going on, was pretty epic most of the time. And I am cheering for Shiro. I'm just 99.9% sure he'll fail in the end, probably thanks to Sieg. Mordred and his master are always great, and I'm really looking forward to seeing Karna and Achilles go all out. Vlad was amazing as a king too.

There are just too many little things to complain about (and the bad animation and questionable story) to really recommend this anime though. Watch it if you'd like some extra Fate stuff, just expect lower quality.

 

I forgot about this show (again) after my previous post last year. I guess I just wasn't motivated enough to continue.

However, I came across it in my Netflix queue the other day and thought "why the hell not?" and binge-watched the rest of the series.

I'll just get this out of the way and eat crow regarding my posts on Shirou Kotomine. Him being a servant the whole time justified his power level. I actually really ended up liking his character and goal in the second half of the series and would have liked to see more of his past regarding the 3rd Grail War. I was pissed when Sieg negated his wish. I still think the name and look of the character was a dick move, though.

I still hate Sieg and his mc privilege of always winning just because he's mc. I don't get Ruler's fascination with him. The only time I was really interested in his character is when he saw the depths of human evil in the Jack the Ripper scenes.

Ruler was a pretty solid character that would have been better served not being chained to Sieg and his mc status forcing her to be his love interest. I liked her personality as well as seeing into her past. Her faith in people did come off across as naive, but didn't annoy me as much as I would have expected. She didn't let her naivety get in the way of dealing with Jack the Ripper, which was great. I did think she seemed a little weak if she was supposed to be refereeing the Holy Grail War.

Although he was annoying in the first half of the season, I was surprised at how much I grew to love Astolfo. He even managed to make Sieg bearable at times. I liked how you could see his relationship with Sieg as caring for him as a friend or being in love with him... and both options were equally valid and enjoyable imo. You just know a western show would made that entire character/relationship a political statement or lecture and alienated half the audience. I liked how the show just let Astolfo be Astolfo.

Mordred and her master are still the best Master/Servant pair. I loved all of their interactions. The mutual respect and affection they had for each other always brought a smile to my face. I was really rooting for them to win. Although I liked Mordred's conclusion about her father and being king, it did feel a bit rushed.

Darnic was a waste of time. Seriously.

Achilles and Chiron had some good character interactions.

Atalanta had lots of potential, but could have used a bit more backstory before her breakdown. I did like her motivations for hating Ruler though.

The brother and sister master's ended up being good characters.

Jack the Ripper grew on me by the end, even if the loli pandering was annoying.

The animation in this show took a huge nosedive in final few episodes. In important fights like Ruler/Atalanta. Sieg/Karna, and Achilles/Atalanta... it got bad. Naruto Shippuden "My pain is greater than yours" level bad, only it lasted a lot longer than 5 seconds. It really broke the immersion, and instead of enjoying what should have been epic fights at the end of the series I was just wondering if the animation was going to get better or stay like that for the rest of the series.

All in all, a decent Fate show. Its definitely not the worst Fate series I seen. Although I've only seen the first 5 episodes on Netflix so far, that honor belongs to Fate/Extra Last Encore.