Fate/Zero 2nd Season

For a show that heavily relies on dialogue, it sure was lacking in the quality of dialogue. I often found myself bored with whatever they were talking about, mainly because the plot was boring and all the characters had many unappealing traits which made me not care about them.

If you want to watch a show with very dull dialogue and irrational people fighting over a fairy tale relic, this show is definitely for you. Only good part in fate/zero was its action sequences, but that alone isnt enough to make show interesting.

For the love of Holy Grail, if you have never watched anything from Fate/Stay Night franchise under any circumstances DO NOT watch Fate/Zero first! I'll hold an even stronger statement - don't watch it at all. I've just made this grievous mistake, because I had listened to advice given on youtube by several self-proclaimed anime gurus. And now how pissed I am! Sheesh! Firstly, it ruined much of the experience of Fate/Stay Night. And secondly, I strongly believe Fate/Zero is crap.

I am aware this warning and review will probably fall on deaf ears, because of the way unfavorable reviews are treated by MAL users. But ... I'll be content if I am able to save at least one soul from the disaster this anime is.

Let me elaborate on my background - when I started to watch this series I knew only that Fate/Zero is prequel, supposedly much superior to its successor. And that it was written by the same guy who wrote Madoka Magica. I knew nothing about characters, basic premises and how this story ends. So it will be easier for creators to impress me, immerse me in their fantastical world and make me care for what happens. Or so I thought. Oh boy, how I was wrong.

This anime has massive flaws in its narrative. And it is not even the main story itself - it's of course ridiculous but it would eventually do. However the pacing of it is atrocious. The anime disguises itself as interesting in its first 5 episodes, there is some introduction, then almost right off the bat we hop into a duel between characters. And then... then almost nothing happens for the next 8 episodes. The entire first season should be actually called Fate/Zero Action or, equally accurately, Fate/All Talk. Ok, maybe I'm somewhat unfair, there were some skirmishes, though utterly insignificant. Then around second half something indeed started to happen - but it was still interrupted by All Talk episodes (I still get shivers remembering an episode containing conversation between certain priest and Gilgamesh). And, don't you have wrong impression - I'm not some action junkie. I was annoyed simply because discussion and character development episodes were just criminally uninteresting. It's beyond describable how one doesn't care for virtually any of the characters in this story. Given how much time the anime spends on exposing their back-stories and motivations it is fail of epic proportions. It is partially because this whole exposition is handled very poorly. After the whole show I still don't understand e. g. what is the actual cause of intense rivalry between main protagonist and main antagonist. Additionally narrative is prone to raise some significantly-looking issue (or character) and then to drop it for long or even forever. And there is this most important issue, which even one character in the story (Gilgamesh I suppose) noticed - how abysmally dull are most of these characters' motivations. It makes you automatically yawn at the mere sight of them. There are some events which simulate plot twists, but there are all so boring and the reasons for them so contrived they are not something to speak of. In other words - it's impossible for a viewer to care if character X treacherously kills character Y, when you couldn't care less neither for X nor for Y.

Ok, so maybe at least fight scenes redeem the show? No! Most of them are astonishingly anti-climactic, including two of the three final ones. BTW not only fights are anti-climactic. So is the ending, concluded thanks to idiotic Diabolus ex Machina.

And after having watched this I saw juvenile shounen-like Fate/Stay Night anime series from 2006. It's almost beyond my belief that MAL users (as of early 2015) rate Fate/Zero so well and F/SN so badly. Yes, 2006 anime is cliched. Its stereotypical high-school protagonist whines too much. There is a generic romance plot. Hell, the whole coming-of-mage plot is ultra generic. And yes, it's more light-hearted. But still I liked it more, even though I was spoiled by prequel. The creators of F/Zero failed to notice that it's not enough to be "darker and edgier" to have a good plot and interesting characters. The art part of the anime is only thing in which creators didn't fail. But it annoys me that more, when I watch skillfully sound-tracked, brilliantly animated boring fights between inexplicably boring characters.

[warning: bad puns ahead] I strongly advice all of you to stay in the dark night when it comes to Fate/Zero. Although the story deserves clear zero points, animation, sound and the fact that Saber is always fully-clothed wind up the total score to 4/10 (or 3/10 for first season alone).

Alternatively: It's possible that my above rant is the result of watching this show prematurely. The writers of the series from my perspective put emphasis on such weird places of their story that it makes plausible that I'm seriously missing something. Conclusion, once again, DO NOT WATCH IT BEFORE FATE/STAY NIGHT.

Fate/Zero was entertaining at times, with several very good fight sequences and the nice animation, but it doesn't make up for the real lack of any sort of coherent story or character development. Fate/Zero has simple plot hiding behind rhetoric and long-winded speeches from rooftops just to look cool. The dialogue was uninspired at best and often times so dull that I felt that I could walk away to make a cup of coffee and come back knowing I missed absolutely nothing that contributed to the story.

The biggest problem is that none of the characters other than Waver and Rider were ever really developed, leaving ... no emotional impact on their deaths. In fact, when it came to a lot of the seemingly important events, I just didn't care. Pointless monologues and exposition, bad pacing (nothing happened in S1, while characters were dropping like flies in the second season), irrelevant story arcs, topped with shallow characters; Fate Zero puts a good effort at feigning depth and puts forth some interesting ideas, but is ultimately a train wreck of poor narrative with a plot that lacks any real complexity or substance.

This review covers both seasons because they're both parts of the same story and reviewing them individually is stupid.

Fate/zero is yet another badly written anime by the shitty writer gen urobuchi and this review explains why.

I'll talk about the good aspects of fate/zero and then the majority of the review will be the bad aspects (because there are too many) the mediocre aspects are anything that i don't end up mentioning

The Good:-
1- Great Visuals that make the scenes and the backgrounds in the anime look great, but the anime doesn't have alot of animation in it.
2- high quality instruments and sound effects, but the soundtrack ... itself is not that amazing in fact most of it is forgettable.

The Bad:-
1- the grail war in this anime never had any clear rules at all.
No rules were mentioned at the beginning, instead the writer inserted any rules he wanted as the anime went on, even the basis of how magic works were unclear and he wrote them as he went on and made magic adjust to any given situation, which shows how badly written this anime is. An example of this is Kirei blocking Kiritsugu's origin bullets using command spells which doesn't make any sense.

2- Character problems:-

The masters
Kiritsugu Emiya: used to live happily in an island and after like five minutes it turns into hell with zombie infection, so cheesy and unrealistic, then he kills his father who raised him because he was only partly and indirectly responsible for the zombie infection and it was only by accident, it seems like the writer doesn't even know how people normally behave.

Kotomine Kirei: starts as a normal guy who works with tokiomi but after archer tells him that he seems intrested in kariya's tragedy he gets rewritten into a one-dimensional villan by instantly betraying tokiomi and seeking the grail that will help him understand himself, which is dumb since an individual normally understands himself more than anyone else, like i said earlier, the writer doesn't even know how people normally behave.

Matou Kariya: who suffers to join the war so he can save sakura, but fails to do so and suffers even more, the only reason he exists is because the writer is obsessed with tragedy, kariya's story has no point, no meaning, it's a complete waste of time.

El-Melloi Archibald Kayneth: an uninteresting and boring asshole.

The servants
Saber (king arthur): ripping a character straight from historical books into your anime without bothering to include her background which is necessary to understand her unremarkable struggles in the anime, it seems like the writer has achieved new levels of bad storytelling.

Berserker (Sir Lancelot):same problem as saber.

Caster & his master(Gilles de Rais & Ryuunosuke): both of them don't even care about the grail, they simply spend their time killing kids and talking about how they enjoy killing kids, they're too delusional to even see the possible consequences of their actions like being the first ones killed in the grail war, which actually happens, but why are these characters in the anime anyways? oh yeah because they need SHOCKING scenes in it to attract viewers who only care about SHOCK FACTOR.

Archer (gilgamesh): an egoistical asshole with hax god powers (which he used to kill rider) he doesn't have to worry about anything thanks to his hax powers, which lets him remain as an egoistical asshole with zero character development till the end, he could have also won the war straight from the beginning but he doesn't care about the war, why is he in this anime again? You can remove him from the anime without any changes.

3- Shoehorned philosophy & themes.
The writer adds unnecessary philosophy & themes to the anime with a very bad handling of them.

- the anime wasted time by having rider and archer talk about how they think saber was not a good king, her life as a king was not shown in the anime and wasn't even part of the anime story in the first place, so why are they discussing it? It makes no sense, even if it made sense it still wouldn't matter because it doesn't affect the anime story, and why are they referring to her as king? she's a woman which makes her a queen.

- after lancer's death saber complains about Kiritsugu's evil actions in the grail war, out of stupidity she forgets that he will use the grail to end war.
then Kiritsugu claims that honor and valor are the cause of war and bloodshed, yet any one with half a brain can tell how stupid that claim is, the people who got honor from war did it by not commiting war crimes against anyone during war and did what it takes to reduce the losses and hatered of war after it was over, the war itself was not caused or started by them ,The people who cause or start a war usually do it for other reasons without bothering to think of the consequences, they can't do it because of honor since it has no way of starting a war by itself, there is always another reason behind it, if the writer knows of significant bloodshed caused by honor he should mention and explain it, otherwise it comes of as pretentious and stupid, another fact is almost everybody nowadays knows that war itself is bad and nobody think's that war itself is honorable or anything, yet Kiritsugu acts like he figured out something special, it's as if the writer lives in his own small world and keeps including topics in the anime that he himself doesn't even understand.

4- The ending:-
Which literally ruined the entire story with it's bullshit.
At the beginning everyone talks about how the grail will grant any wish and nobody doubts it at all and they do all it takes to win the grail but then right at the end it's revealed that the grail won't actually grant any wish, more specificly it won't be able to grant the wish of the winner (Kiritsugu) and then it explodes and kills everything around him, this happened because the grail was cursed before fate/zero and that's only known in other parts of the fate franchise which you have to through to understand this because it wasn't mentioned or probably foreshadowed at any part of the fate/zero anime, if fate/zero doesn't even make sense on it's own and has many writing problems then how can it be any better than the rest of the fate (porn game) franchise? even if the grail got cursed, then why didn't any of the characters know about the curse or doubt the grail? it makes no sense either.
and this ending basically makes the entire anime feel like a pointless waste of time.

Kiritsugu, after bad writing destroyed everything he was doing without any explained reason is still happy because he saved and adopted shirou at the end which ties this with fate/stay night, yay i don't care.

Fate Zero doesn't really deserve the acclaim people give it and here are a few reason why,

Story- people rank this anime as one of the best series out there but from my view it shows barley any and it only gets truly pumping when the second season arrives. But even in season 2 fails very badly at satifying me because of it's slow pacing drawn out thriller scenes that makes this anime lose potential. The authors style of writing was easy to expect as he really loves to make people feel despair and watching many of his works, I know that Gen Urobuchi is far ... from making me impressed and always fails because he relys too much on a repeated and vulgar writing style. Finally the whole point of the series is for the protagonist is to save the world, but what is he really saving the world from, that is because the world never needed saving to begin with. He thinks the world needs saving and he only makes worse for everyone, thanks a lot Kiritsugu Emiya ya big jerkoff and that is the one small plothole which drained the story's greatness and turned it into a cesspool of crap.

As for everything else the characters were dry, the sound was mediocre and the only redeeming factor was the animation which was excellent but is not able to rescue Fate Zero from my critical wrath.
Another blunder was that my favourite character Berserker didn't get all the screentime he deserved and made a few more appearances in the final episodes only to be killed by Saber the heroine of the fate series (as expected).
The biggest fault of all was the ending and we all know that Gen's endings are super confusing, weird, or cliffhangers which I totally hate from the bottom of my heart. I suppose it was needed for that to happen and let all the more popular characters appear in Fate Stay/night and fill the events in to make sense of what happened in the past but it doesn't I gotta like it one bit.

For my conclusion I say that Fate Zero was so bad it made Naruto look good and lost all its great potential because of one tiny plot hole because the author was absent minded or he wanted to play a sick prank on us for fun, it like they say nobody makes us feel despair and misery like Gen Urobuchi

This anime fits for two categories horrible and atrocities and like everybody on this website they all love the underdogs and despise the big 3 shounen anime. Everyone's got their opinion and I'll respect that but for me I like the stuff that isn't recommended by anime critics and ranked on a tedious scale of how people like one anime and hate another. I am a one man critic island and I am proud of what I like and what I review.

Catch you later dudes and dudettes of my anime list and good day to you

** Summary **
Narrative: Behold The Holy Grail™, our legendary plot device, possessing infinite unlimited power, granting any miracle you can desire.

Holy Grail™: LMAO, actually, I just a cup :3

Main Character: *goes insane* I KILL U

** Story **
In contrast to Season 1, Season 2 is where characters actually die. The execution (ooo wee a pun) was utterly juvenile. The story was an amateurishly woven grimdark train wreck.

... Let's take Kiritsugu's plane wreck backstory. An entire episode is built around his mother figure mentor being trapped on a plane with parasitic mind controlling wasps.

Rational resolution: Nuke the plane with Spectracide™ Wasp and Hornet Killer Aerosol. Result: mentor lives, 100% wasps dead.

Forced Grimdark resolution: Nuke the plane with a heat seeking anti-aircraft missile. Result: mentor dead, 70% wasps dead.

I'll let you guess which one Fate/Zero decides on.

Story rating: 1/10

** Art/Aesthetics **
As a Tsukihime fan, I absolutely love the character aesthetics.

Art: 8/10

** Animation **
Animation is completely different from aesthetics. The fluidly and detail in each sequence was lacking. The fight scenes had cinematic shots (3 point perspective wide angle launches, landscape shots, extreme close ups, slow motion, etc) which would awe an inexperienced viewer. Seeing through all that, all that's left are lazily choreographed fights.

Let's take Saber for instance. Saber is suppose to be the strongest hero, specializing in god tier sword fighting. Yet her swordplay is restricted to 2 moves: swipe and jab. She performs no meaningful parry/counters, feints, etc. Why is her repertoire less interesting than an 8-bit NES sprite? Because it's so much easier to animate, and make up the deficiency with cinematic details (i.e. wind rushing during attacks, ground cracking after taking blows, electrical discharge, etc). Those are all cheap tricks in the literal sense: they're cheap to animate and take little imagination.

Animation: 4/10

** Sound **
I'm a big fan of Yuki Kajiura. With that said, the soundtrack was bland and unmemorable. Nothing compared to Noir or Madoka Magica.

Sound: 3/10

** Character **
Initially, characters showed strong potential for realistic development and depth. The first episode did an excellent job of establishing clear and real motivations. However, they all devolve into one-dimensional dark tropes.

Let's take Saber for instance. She's suppose to be a strong female lead, with experience leading an entire nation as a King. As the series progresses, it turns out she's an emotionally distraught insecure 15 yo girl. The authors devolve her into the vulnerable female trope for ecchi reasons (i.e. helpless girl needs a real man for emotional support), and it just blasphemous to her character.

Character: 3/10

** Enjoyment **
Despite all the flaws, I enjoyed the show enough to finish it. I'm fond of strong female characters, and I kept on watching for Saber's shining moment - unfortunately that never comes.

Enjoyment: 6/10

** Overall **
This is not a series I would recommend to an adult - it's just not worth the time. With that said, I can see why it appeals to teens and newcomers of the genre.

Overall: 4/10

I really, really wanted to like this show, but I just couldn't. I wouldn't say I hate it either, I just felt bored most of the time, the show seems to be completely lacking in the very concept of context, and without that, I couldn't bring myself to care about anything.

For starters, how does literally anything in this world work? Pretty much all the magic in this universe just happens with no explanation whatsoever, a character can just do something and you just have to accept it. Like, what the heck is "the root"? Why do some characters want it? Why does the church want ... to help Tohsaka get it? Why do some characters not want it anymore? Why have I clearly thought about this more than the writers of this show? It's even worse when they actually try to explain it though, for instance, at one point a character can outperform another character going at three times his normal speed simply by adjusting for where he's going to be or something like that. At the end, the show basically admits nothing makes sense, they just pull stuff out of nowhere, but they don't seem to understand that this is a massive problem that destroys immersion when noticed.

Now, the world and magic system would have been relatively minor complaints if they were simply tools to set up ideological conflicts, the problem is those were utter nonsense as well.

There were plenty of characters that were at least good conceptually, like Saber for instance. She slowly comes to terms with the mistakes of her past but remains determined to follow her ideals and fight for her future. The only problem is that thing I mentioned earlier; context. What exactly were her mistakes? Something about serving her people instead of leading them, but at the end, Lancelot explicitly states he and all the Knights that served her believed her to be the greatest King to ever live and admits it's his own shortcomings, not hers, that led him down the path she wishes to save him from. It's implied she somehow failed to save Britain from being conquered, but did no one tell her Britain eventually goes on to become the greatest superpower in the world and even in this universe is the central power in the magical world? I can't tell what she has to feel guilty about.

Then there's Kiritsugu, who at first I thought was a guy so devoted to saving the world he's willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish it, including some less honorable things, which got me really excited because in particular, that's a really interesting thing to put next to Saber who's all about honor. The problem is that juxtaposition felt forced as hell, he seems to go out of his way to make Saber see him do the sleeziest thing he does when he successfully hid all his other tactics from her up to this point, Saber says something about him not having honor, and it's never brought up again. That's like fumbling the ball at the one yard line, all the set up was there, you just messed up when it came time to make it all matter. Kiritsugu did salvage himself to some extent at the end with a decent take on the trolley problem, but it could have been so much better.

And Rider. I think I actually liked Rider, but I can't actually tell what they were trying to say with him. Analyzing his actions, I got the impression he was someone who behaved the way he did for the thrill of it, and this kind of character would have been brilliant to include in order to contrast with the single minded goal oriented characters around him. The problem is his words contradict that, he claims he does have a goal, it's just unobtainable. In the end, I wish I could just ignore all of that because it's completely meaningless and I like the first interpretation way better, but then they go on and try to make it seem inspiring by having Waver make it his new purpose in life or something. Don't even get me started on Waver, he successfully grows out of being the annoying twit he is at the beginning, but he grows into a generic copy of Rider, but who lacks everything that made Rider interesting and cool.

Besides those 3 characters, I can't even begin to understand what everyone else was supposed to be about. Take Kotomine for instance, the big reveal is that he was apparently born a psychopath and only just realized it. What? What am I supposed to take from that? Seriously, what? I want to call this stupid, but even that feels wrong. I feel like I have to have been missing something, like at one point Gilgamesh asks him if he wish he would have murdered his father, and had to rewind because I never at any point felt like they were hinting that. If I'm missing something, I'm sorry, but besides the three I talked about, I feel like every single character in this show is broken at a conceptual level and couldn't bring myself to care about them at all.

I have to reiterate of course, I don't hate this show, I just found it boring. It tries to be deep and I applaud that, but it fails at almost every turn