Ranked #2417

Fate/stay night TV Reproduction

Wow. Just wow. Jamming such a story as vast as Fate/Stay Night into two hours is not a good idea. It definitely isn't. Fate/Stay Night TV Reproduction is basically a summary of the 2006 series. While it includes most of the important bits, so much of the much needed dialogue and scenes were just missing. This is not meant to be seen before the TV series.

Story [6]: Not good. While it does somewhat convey the overall storyline, it still leaves many things unanswered. So many plot points have been removed that it just doesn't feel like the story was really engaging at any point. Scenes will just jump around and you will be left wondering how this or that happened. For example, Shirou and Saber are recovering from a battle and then in the next scene, they're fully healed and already in a completely different location fighting another battle. What happened in between? How did they get there? Why are they suddenly healed so quickly? These are questions viewers who has not seen FSN yet would ask.

All the fight scenes have been shortened as well. Fights that were suppose to be at least half an episode's length has been reduced to nothing but a few short minutes. This is truly an extremely condensed version of the story.

Art [8]: The animation is pretty much remastered footage from the anime. It's still crisp and clear and it conveys the what is supposed to be colorful characters in the anime. The various noble phantasms are still excellent quality but unfortunately, cut short so many times.

Sound [8]: The OP to this work features a new version of the original anime's "disillusion" by Tainaka Sachi. The music from the VN and the anime are still here. A nice blend of mellow tunes that kind of fits into the shortened disjointed scenes but lacks to really draw us back in to the world of Fate/Stay Night.

Character [6]: This is where this two part summary really falls. So much of the dialogue between the characters and their developments were removed for the sake of time. Barely any characters had any development whatsoever. The only characters to even get a sliver of development were Shirou and Saber but even that was just nearly non-existant. The dialogue between all of the characters was what made them great but alas, without it, we don't really care much about them at all.

Enjoyment/Overall [7/6]: While I enjoyed immersing myself into the world of FSN once again, the disjointed and heavily cut direction really distracted me from keeping up with the story. The scenes were just jumping around so fast that they don't let you absorb what had actually transpired then. This is a poorly made summary recap of the original FSN. While it will remind you of most of the important things that happen, it doesn't really pull you back in the world of FSN. If they really wanted to do a summary, DEEN should've at least made an effort to reedit the script and change the animation enough to have it flow better instead of just cutting and pasting a bunch of the same footage together. This is definitely not made to be a standalone work. You'll need prior knowledge of FSN to really understand what actually transpired in the recap.

And where the fuck was my "People die when they are killed" line? Terrible. Just terrible. read more

Take the anime adaptation of Fate/stay night, upscale it, cut out scenes at random until it's two hours long, tack on a new OP and ED, and you've got Fate/stay night TV Reproduction.

If you haven't read Fate/stay night or seen DEEN's first anime adaptation, don't bother watching this; it will make absolutely no sense to you. Read the novel instead. It's significantly better than either of these anime.
If you have seen the Fate/stay night anime, don't bother watching this, either; the only new material is the OP+ED, and although I'm a fan of Tainaka Sachi, this new remix of disillusion wasn't great.

I watched this because I spotted [Doki]'s fansubs and thought it might be worth a re-watch. I guess I was hoping in vain that these OVAs would be an improvement on the original anime. They're not. If I weren't nerdy enough to remember the plot of F/sn in its entirety two years after reading it, I'm sure I would not have been able to follow the story of TV Reproduction. Many scenes are skipped entirely. Others appear as minute-long clips with one or two lines, thrown in with absolutely no transitions or explanations or anything. DEEN didn't do such a bad job the first time around when it came to keeping crucial plot points (aside from Bondage Sakura and some other tidbits), but in TV Reproduction they're waved aside under the assumption that the viewer already knows what's going on and doesn't really care.

Story:
TV Reproduction follows the same story as the anime it's based on. There are no new scenes. There are, however, so many cuts that if you didn't know the story to begin with, there's no chance you'd figure out what was going on.
Fate/stay night does have an excellent story, though. Go read it.

Art:
Better quality than the original anime's, but far from beautiful. I watched in 720p. 1080p upscales aren't really my cup of tea.
A lot of the animation seems to be very lazy. Standard DEEN fare, I suppose. Fate/stay night is something you read/watch for the story, so this isn't that important.

Sound:
The highlights of TV Reproduction are the all-new OP and ED themes sung by Tainaka Sachi. The soundtrack has otherwise been copied directly from the original anime, which sounds great in theory but ends up being quite disappointing in practice. You'll hear a momentary snatch of a track from the TV series' OST at a dramatic point, but it will play for a minute and fade away as the next character's theme turns on due to the extremely rushed nature of the OVAs.

Character:
There is little to no characterization in TV Reproduction. Given the amount of material that DEEN had to cram into two hours, this makes a lot of sense: we never have time to look into the characters' heads or watch them chat with one another. It's still disappointing, though.

Overall, I scored this 6 out of 10, which is probably more than it deserves. The Nasu fan in me won't let me do otherwise.
Would not recommend. read more