Fate/Grand Order: Zettai Majuu Sensen Babylonia

I feel like I should write a review because I kept hearing that this arc was going to be really good but now I feel like the recommendations were biased from FGO players since I watched this as someone who only enjoyed the Fate Zero adaptation, and the FSN VN and adaptation and never touched FGO.

I guess this is an unpopular opinion but I really liked the cocky Gilgamesh from FZ so I was excited that he got his own anime, but was disappointed that this Gilgamesh is completely different. He still has hints of cockiness but it's definitely dialed back a ton, which I'm ... not a fan of.

The story is really weirdly paced, and also weirdly spread. I'm not sure how the FGO game works but the story feels like an adaptation of various quests in the game that partially complete themselves as the plot goes on, in addition to continuing from other quests that were already finished in the game. It's spread across a lot of different plot points which definitely feel like they all eventually reach the same place but as an anime-only it's really boring to watch everything progress at a snail's pace and only getting bits of each plotline.

The sound design was pretty good until they started showing off some of the more powerful moves in recent episodes, then they try using more impactful sound effects but it just turns into earrape which is really unpleasant to listen to.

Visuals are great, not Ufotable quality but still better than most anime I see. There's way too much fanservice though, it's really annoying having a fight scene focus so much on girls' butts, even if it is just for a few seconds each fight, it's definitely distracting and meant to pander to waifu enthusiasts despite being a bad angle for the camera to be at and taking away from the action of the fight.

Fanservice in general is kind of the problem I had with this show. I feel like it's way too moe compared to what I was expecting with FZ and FSN, and I'm probably missing or straight up disliking a lot of in-jokes with the FGO community. It's just that as someone who was expecting some serious plotline, it got annoying with all the fanservice, the turning point for me giving this show a chance to actively disliking it was one of the main antagonists just being an FSN side character in a onesie.

Maybe it is a good adaptation like everyone else says, IDK, but if you're coming in expecting a good show that stands on its own like FSN or Fate Zero, I think you'll be really disappointed. However it did kind of give me the same vibe as Apocrypha so if you enjoyed that I think you'd probably enjoy this show too.

Looking at the review section, I decide to try out writing a review as well.
Well, this is my first anime review, and I feel like I’m already handling a strange case, but okay.

(TL;DR at the bottom.)

I can’t help but feel that the general ratings for FGO: Babylonia is incredibly inflated. Many ratings of 9 or 10 are given, but they’re from fans of the game. And the reviews given are either full guidelines of how newcomers should enjoy the anime, or fanboying praises that upon closer look still don’t warrant an 8+ score. So I decide to give a lower score in the hopes ... of making it balanced as all things should be. I had played FGO since the server opened, and dropped it when the game entered mid-part 2, where I realized my time and money were meaninglessly taken away. In some ways, I do have the warrant to talk about this.

To begin with, FGO: Babylonia (originally chapter 7 of the game) was written to expand on Gilgamesh’s lore: it was supposed to show the time he lived in, how he was when he was still managing his kingdom, and expand Fate series’ lore about the Age of Gods. To elaborate, Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero relied heavily on Hollywood history, alternate historic interpretations, and metaphysics. This wasn’t a problem when you were doing a modern age survival game, but when FGO comes talking about saving humanity from fucked-up histories it become a problem: they had to heavily modify the world’s history to make the characters’ stories make sense, and for the rule of cool as well. This essential means they are going to set up their own history, myths and rules. Some people already feel like the history is getting butchered at this point, but this is still not a serious problem.
The problem is the way they did it. The story spends tons of dialogues building rules out of cheap philosophical ideals that sounds cool on paper, while not trying to have accurate reflections or correspondences to the history we know of. This essentially makes it feel like a generic isekai world, complete with magic, waifus, monsters and a “normal person” type protagonist. That is still okay, but then they slap “in the ancient times of human history, the protagonist fights alongside heroes and legendary figures to save humanity” on it. That tag line feels nothing but a bait now, and history fans walking into the series are going to be disappointed, big time.
Since I just said it feels like a generic isekai world, let’s talk about the protagonist, Fujimaru Ritsuka. Oh boy, the protagonist is full of issues. Nicknamed Gudao (Gudako for the female version) by the game’s fandom, Ritsuka is designed to be a player insert — he’s your camera in the game. In fact, he is essentially supposed to be you, since you can even change his name, gender, and choose all his dialogues. This direction determined that:
1. He’s going to be a normal person, supposedly. He’s not going to be good at fighting or have some sharp character traits. He’s just going to have things that run well on every player insert: kind, caring, determined, and a generally good person. Basically the bog-standard for every generic isekai. Since FGO had multiple writers, some did try to give him a personality, but the personality they decided on Ritsuka were different, so in the end it’s still a jumbled mess that you can’t tell any personality from. I’d even say Riyo’s Gudako is a better character than Ritsuka in the actual story. For people who don’t know what Riyo Gudako is, she’s Ritsuka from a parody manga of FGO, and she molests Mashu for fun.(It was played for laughs in Riyo’s manga, so maybe it actually wasn’t that bad.)
2. He’s going to have good popularity. In fact this is taken to absurd levels considering what kind of people he’s dealing with: legendary warriors, heroes, witches, kings, elders, gods, goddesses, demons, evil spirits, killers, monks, psychopaths. They have completely different ideologies, beliefs and minds, and sometimes the heroic spirits are sworn enemies with each other, yet they all fall in love with Ritsuka at the same, and they all get along because of Ritsuka, a Japanese teenager who was unemployed before coming to Chaldea. There’s nothing “normal” about this. Maybe Ritsuka secretly has the superpower of supernatural popularity. Or wait, it’s just power of harem protagonist.
FGO likes to talk big to justify this. It likes to say that because Ritsuka is the last Master in the world, and because he is just any average human, he represents humanity itself, and falling in love with Ritsuka is a symbol of love for humanity. And regardless of the ideologies held by those heroes and gods, they all still love humanity somehow. I don’t know why but if you are playing FGO right now you would believe in this justification, but the moment you drop the game you’ll find out how much of a bullshit it is.

By this time the fans of the game might already feel like I’m somewhat biased against the game. I mean, I was disappointed in it and stopped playing, so it makes sense that the story might be just ever so slightly better than I’m describing it as. But Hey, I’m probably not more biased than the reviews that give the story a 10 and spends the entire review telling people not to hate the story for this and that. MAL is not an objective rating site for animes by any stretch, but I think countering biases towards the anime using biases against it makes for better overall objectivity.

Back to the topic, Ritsuka is a character made to be you, who’s not really a character. Basically a wish-fulfillment machine. When adapted into an anime, you get a main character who has no special trait, who will be loved by everyone in-universe but loved by no one outside it.
You might ask: what about Mashu? Well I’m just going to tell you that she gets no character development whatsoever in this part of the story, period. She’s just going to be a generic Kohai type character for any anime audience. That said, i’m still not sure on how much development she got in the entire game.

What about other characters? Well, in the original FGO game, every chapter has a character quota that the writers need to fill. It basically means you want a certain amount of characters to show up and participate in the story, so that the players have incentives to spend their sweet money rolling for all of them.
Oh, about rolling for characters, some people say that FGO, along with other gacha games, are glorified online casinos. Although FGO is indeed one of the most cash-grabbing of gacha games, I personally don’t think it’s that bad. I mean, in a real casino you can try to use deception and game theory to take money away from others, and since it’s real money lucky people get their money back. In FGO you just throw your money in until your shiny golden waifu pops out. You don’t take money from others, only that money is taken from you to give you some (perhaps disproportionately cheap) entertainment .

Back to characters. The problem of the quota is that there are a lot of characters who will appear, but won’t get developments and won’t do much to the story, like Leonidas and Ushiwakamaru. For the players of the game, they subconsciously knew the existence of this quota, therefore they don’t expect characters to do a lot, and it’s a pleasant surprise to them when actual character developments are going on. This runs contrary to the expectations of an anime-only: every hero and legendary figure that appears is supposed to have a significance, like they do in FZ and FSN. If one just dies several episodes after they get introduced, with very little display of character, people aren’t going to get sad, they get disappointed. Because why do you introduce the character if they are just a lot of nothing? A more important problem is joke or reference characters that simply aren’t funny when they are adapted to anime.(like Juguar Man, and the decision to make Ishtar and another goddess partially Rin)

Now let’s talk to the story. One of the strengths of stories in Nasuverse is worldbuilding, but that totally fell flat in FGO: Babylonia. In FSN and FZ, you get Mystics, Functional Magic, Magic Association, Church, True Magic, Executor, Holy Grail, Alchemy, etc. In Kara no Kyokai, you get Alaya, Death, Root, Origin, and other lores relating to some interesting philosophical aspects. The worldbuilding felt deep and infinite, and helped make the characters and fantastic battles in the story feel real. But what do you get in Babylonia? You get the lone city of Uruk, and some woolly-wobbly about Mesopotamian mythos. The fact that Uruk is still an agricultural city using only basic tools while Gilgamesh, who’s not a servant yet, has golden weapons in his Gate of Babylon (remember how FSN said the servants’ noble phantasms were manifestations of beliefs accumulated from the passing down of legends?) and has built massive cannons on a fortress wall hundreds of kilometers wide, shows how little consideration was put into the worldbuilding. And according to side materials, he’s still got that Indian spaceship from FZ in his treasury. How are you supposed to say Gilgamesh is a wise king with a straight face?
The players of the game can’t notice the worldbuilding problems, because they had Chaldea lores and previous chapters, but for anime-onlys this only serve to make the setting more like that of a generic isekai.

Then there’s the pacing. The pacing is incredibly dull for two reasons. The first one is due to Nasu’s tendency to constantly spew out expositions. When the worldbuilding is good, like in other works of Nasuverse, those expositions are okay. But as the worldbuilding is almost nonexistent in this show, you still get expositions that are just plain intolerable. This combined with the slow start the FGO players are comfortable with (because they still have gameplay) just makes it incredibly hard to watch more than 2 episodes before falling asleep.
Another reason is that because CloverWorks had a lot of budget (from the money players threw into the game, of course), they want to replicate every detail, and keep all the slow parts there. What they don’t realize, and what many people who give this show a 9 or 10 don’t realize, is that less is more. The attention to pointless details and the overly flashy battle can’t make the world appear more real, because they lack the subtle connection to the story or characters. They simply make the story lose focus.
FGO:Babylonia might be better if it was only 12 episodes long, the useless characters got removed and the pacing was tighter, but the Fate fandom is especially rabid about keeping the story same as original. What the rabid fandom doesn’t realize is that it was just a mediocre story at best in the original game, and it’s only going to get worse if adapted to anime unchanged. But as a change in the script in episode 10 resulted in strong backlash from fandom, they’d probably not risk it again, and it’s too late anyways.

I’m quite confident that I’m a pretty chill guy, and since it’s been a while since I dropped the game, I though I would not be too harsh on this. But on the course of writing this, I got angrier and angrier as the frustrations all came back to me. FGO had moments of awesomeness, but those are few and far between, and you had to go through a lot of crap to get there. Worse off, after a few times you realize they’ve been reusing the same formula over and over again. The worst part is when you found out you were part of the religiously mad fandom who blindly praised FGO to Heaven. You realized you had attacked and hurt someone because they disagreed with your faith that Nasu wrote the best stories in the universe. You realized that you kept harassing your friend to play/watch FGO and when they actually watched/played and made a bad comment about it you said “if you hate it don’t play it, stop whining.” When I quitted playing FGO, I made these discoveries and cringed for myself. I got even more cringed watching the 10 rating comments of this, so I wrote this review.

TL;DR

Story: 2.
Worldbuilding, convoluted character relationships, attention to every servant, conflicting philosophies. What you get in Fate/Zero, Fate/Stay Night and Kara no Kyokai simply aren’t there. Worse off, the pacing is terrible. Maybe not as low as a 2 but it’s getting there.
Art: 8.
Not much to say. Character art was what enabled FGO as a cash grabber.
Unfortunately it’s all the more sad considering the better animes get less budget.
Sound: 6.
Some say it’s good. Some say it’s bad. It’s just there and it honestly doesn’t matter.
Character: 2.
This is just going to be plain disappointment for people that came straight from FSN and FZ. Majority of the characters that show up aren’t going to matter. You can compare it to a glorified isekai story, complete with a protagonist that has no personality and gets affection from all characters. The fact this is about actual historic gods and heroes and the protagonist is representing the entire humanity actually makes it worse.
Enjoyment: 2.
If you watched and think “it’s not my cup of tea,” don’t worry. You are not the person with bad taste. This anime is not enjoyable for anime-onlys.
Overall: 2.
There are four kinds of people who praise FGO’s story. Actually there are many kinds, but most fit into these four:
1. Mad believers of Nasuverse
2. Casual people who haven’t actually watched many good animes.
3. People who are following the claims of mad believers, or just don’t bother disagreeing.
4. Poor, poor old fans of Nasuverse desperately trying not to give up on Fate series. Seriously, drop that game. It’s what’s standing in the way of Tsukihime Remake.

I tried watching FGO over my own great interest in the original fate series. Without any warning nor any proper precaution I jumped right into this and found myself drowned, suffocated by it's intense waves of cringes and bad writings.
This anime is what happens when you try to take the core gimmick and characters of another good story, and then plastered some cringe, fanservice, genderbender fetish, odd camera angles, and bad writings all over it. It is so bad that the act of watching it is a punishment on it's own.

Story 1/10
It is a decent enough story in a context of a money ... grabbing online casino disguised as a "game". It is enough to make this fake casino to be considered "fate enough" to continue on making cash out of middle aged men with gambling problems. However as for an adaptation into anime or any kind of artistic medium, it is pathetic. The nerve of them thinking that it is decent enough to enter any kind of art form other than online casino is insulting. It is as if they are thinking that any kind of pathetic story, covered with enough fanservice and otaku-esque "comedic" writings would be enough to be called as "decent" anime. Well, looking at the reviews here, they might be right.

Art 8/10
What immediately sets my hype up and high for this anime is the art. It just looks good. Very good. But if only that's enough...

Sound 7/10
Likewise with the art, they pay a little bit of extra attention to the music and it's good enough.

Character 2/10
They are NOT believable. None of the characters form any kind of resemblance to any kind of person you'd believe to exists. These characters exists in a marketing form like "hey, I'm your typical marketable tsundere, make sure you get me in the next overpriced full of scam gacha" to bait you off spending extra to get them and imagine that kind of character saying this and that. Those people who made those bait sure knows how otaku think. It is dreadful watching these characters act. Credits to the seiyuu for being able to pull the voice off these fake, over the top, unbelievable character.

Enjoyment 1/10
I am not enjoying this at all. The fact that I am watching once a week really helps. I can't imagine myself binge watching something like this. I am currently watching just for the sake of finishing it and making a proper unbiased review. But it seems like even that would be too much for me.

Overall 2/10
The fact that it bears "fate" title on it just makes me want to puke. I wonder how many of the FSN fans truly love it from the narrative aspect of it and not just from the cool aspect of it summoning heroic spirits. Looking at how much good reviews this is getting, I'm truly in doubt now. If you love FSN and want to watch this because of that, I warn you to look at yourself fist, do you consider yourself a normal human, or a full blown otaku, exists just to be a fodder to the predatory nature of present day anime. If you consider yourself the former, stay away from this both in anime form, and it's original "game" (glorified online casino) form.

What makes an anime good? Well, we can answer this by asking what makes a story good. There are many aspects to a story. Characters, dialogue, world building, originality - the list goes on. There are also many aspects of a story that are only present in visual media - specifically animation. While it is hard to pinpoint what makes animation good, "you know it when you see it" is a pretty good rule of thumb.

I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia fails on every single level of story telling. Allow me to explain why.

First, ... let's talk about the plot. Saying that this animated adaptation of the Babylonia singularity of the popular "Fate/Grand Order" gacha game has a plot is like saying that a piece of white bread has flavor. Technically, by the literal definition of the word - yes. It's true. Fate/Grand Order - Demonic Front: Babylonia consists of an endless series of inane events that make me question if anyone working on the project gave a singular planck length of a shit about it. I anticipate this review will be quite lengthy, so I will not bore you with the details. The entirety of the story can essentially be summed up in one sentence. "3-5 bland protagonists fight a gigantic, oversexualized female villain with gargantuan breasts." I shit you not, about 90% of this series fits this exact sentence. The other 10% is filler. This filler consists of

{figure 1}

• People walking
• People talking
• People walking while talking
• Female sidekicks blushing while talking to the male protagonist

That's pretty much it. You could watch the 21 + 1 episodes of this, or you could read the above summary and understand the entirety of the program.

Now that we've got that out of the way, I'd like [like is a strong word, prefer would probably be more appropriate for this context] to talk about the dialogue. This should be a rather brief talking point. Pretty much every piece of dialogue in this god-forsaken script fits in one of three boxes.

{figure 2}

[1] Refer to bullet point 4 of {figure 1}
[2] Characters saying a load of garbled nonsense while fighting each other
[3] Characters saying a load of garbled nonsense while not engaged in any particular fight

I can't stress enough how insufferable the dialogue of this adaptation is. To be fair, this is probably an accurate representation of the experience one endures while reading the dialogue of a virtual novel gacha game written by developers that know that >99% of players will not read a single line of dialogue - and those who do are already spending hoards of money- I mean virtual currency that holds no tangible value on the game. In most Fate anime adaptations, there's a standard amount of weird anime dialogue that sounds kind of cool and meaningful but is really just fluff when you think about it for a few seconds. In this, it's the whole thing. No line in this entire 11+ hour slog holds any significance, whatsoever.

Author's note: The length of that section was unfortunate.

Let's take a brief detour to discuss the world building. Luckily for the writers, this takes place in a pseudo-historical setting! Looks like the work's been done for them. Unfortunately, this is not quite the case. While even the most amateur of writers could utilize a historical setting with a modicum of competency, the writers of this anime defy the odds, and fail to do so. I wouldn't even know that this was set in Babylonia if it weren't for the title of the series, in addition to the slew of historical names and locations they drop in. There is essentially no tangible trace of the fascinating history of this period of human history, or the geographical details of this specific story's setting. >90% of the scenes take place in generic dirt fields, or inside buildings that vaguely conjure an image of ancient civilization. Would it really have been that hard to throw in a famous monument here or there? Not to mention the historical figures, which are as stock standard as they come. The utter incompetence of the writing team is baffling in this department. Pseudo-historical ancient civilization is one of the easiest tricks in the book. Yet they bungled it.

Originality? It's Fate/Grand Order. Come on now.

Before we get into what is regrettably the longest section of this review, I'd like to briefly touch on the animation. In the handful of reviews I've read for this series online, I've seen several claims that this is some of the best animation that the Fate series has to offer. Reading these reviews genuinely made me question my sanity. It's hard to convey with words how fundamentally incompetent and incohesive the animation is. There are moments [however brief], which are genuinely good looking. However, these moments of beauty are overshadowed by the gargantuan mountain of canine manure that is everything else. It's important to understand that there are essentially three different styles of animation, all of which occur [for the most part] simultaneously throughout the course of this adaptation.

{figure 3}

[1] Normal animation. I won't pretend to know how anime is made, but if you watch any anime from the last decade, you know what I'm talking about. This style is reserved only for the protagonists [with a few exceptions] and looks the best.
[2] Static backgrounds. As far as I know, Static backgrounds are a fairly standard implementation in modern anime. However, the backgrounds of this series are reminiscent of the kind you would see in a mid-2000s children's show, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters or GX. This art style is utterly incohesive with the first, and sharply detracts from the experience. The colors are much less vibrant, and the details less specific than the style used in [1].
[3] 3-D models. These are god awful. Most of the swarmy demon enemies are animated with this method, and holy fucking shit is it distracting. The first style of animation looks like it's somewhere around the 24 frames per second range, which is completely normal for an action anime. This style looks like interpolation on steroids. It is impossible not to notice it. Every time you see something that is animated like this, it draws your attention away, as your eyes are attracted to areas of the screen with higher frame rates. This is incredibly distracting, as I don't want to be looking at the swarm of enemy demon tigers while the protagonists are supposed to be the subject of a given scene. This style is also often used in tandem with even more vibrant colors, along with a sort of shimmer.

While this description is not nearly sufficient to relate the visual experience of this series, I hope that it provides the reader with some sense of how incompetent the animation was.

Alright - one more thing I'd like to touch on before getting into the long part. The fucking sound design. Every single sound effect just sounds like someone took a fart and boosted the base and reverb. It adds to the unending list of things that take you out of any semblance of an experience that the show possessed, and reminds you that you are watching an anime based off of a gacha game based off an erotic visual novel that is old enough to engage in consensual intercourse.

Ok. fine. I'll talk about the characters. My entire review for this was initially just going to be a paragraph on each of the characters [more specifically, why they suck], but I decided to lengthen the review to include a few other topics after the excruciating experience I had to sit through. If you don't want to read about each of the individual characters, I suggest that you scroll down to my summary. I promise this is the last section.

Ristuka Fujimaru - The most bland and uninteresting protagonist to ever grace the world of anime. And yes, that includes Shirou Emiya of Fate/Stay Night [Studio Deen adaptaion]. Holy fucking shit is this guy boring. I don't even have anything to say about him because there literally isn't anything. His only personality trait is that every girl wants to fuck him. I guess it does well at catering to the male incel weeb target audience. Every lonely weeb with no personality loves these sort of characters.

Mash Kyrilight - Do I really need to say anything? Play Fate/Grand Order for 2 minutes and you'll know the entirety of her character. The most interesting thing she does for the first 9 episodes is flash her panties during her fight scenes, but after that point she doesn't even do that. She shields the other characters from getting zapped a couple times, and gives weird uWu looks at Fujimaru, but other than that she's pretty useless. Her boobs also look like water balloons which is pretty funny. I like her crotch window too, super cool costume design.

Ana - Proxy Illiya loli bait. Looks 8 years old and ties people up while wearing a leotard that says "stare at my crotch you horny incel." I liked it when she died.

Archer [Ishtar] - She's literally just Rin in lingerie without a personality. Out of all the main cast, she probably does the most cool stuff during fights [kind of like being the fastest snail], so that's cool I guess. Oh, did I mention she's wearing lingerie? It's a really cool character trait. I like the parts where she hits on Fujimaru and shows her panties to the screen. Super interesting and original. Breaking new ground for the Fate franchise. One of the main antagonists is her alter ego except by the point that they introduced that plot point I had literally 0 investment in the show so I can't say I payed all that much attention to whatever the fuck was going on.

Avenger [medusa?] - My favorite character. Her tits are funnier than a Chris Rock comedy special. She's literally just an 800 foot tall tentacle serpent lady with absolutely GARGANTUAN boobs. Like it's not possible to describe how gigantic and funny they look. I think her scenes were supposed to make me horny but all they made me do was laugh. She also dies like 3 times.

Caster [Gilgamesh] - Never in all my life have I seen a more beta version of Gilgamesh. He only uses his weapon wall thing like twice and it looks like shit both times. He gets merc'd by exhaustion somehow by Ishtar's alter ego shithead, which is fucking pathetic. His mongrel count is shockingly low - I don't think any other adaptation of him has said it this few times. He has absolutely no presence and is a disgrace to the Gilgamesh name. Even the Deen adaptation did a better job than this.

Enkidu - I have no fucking clue what was going on with this character. They had some sort of plotline with Gilgamesh and being a fake or something but I honestly couldn't give less of a shit. Their fight scenes were all really lame and their dialogue was flatter than my chest.

Fou -

Lancer [Ishtar alter ego] - She shows up a couple times before her fight scene when Ishtar switches to her. I think I was supposed to be intrigued by it but I was just mildly confused. During her fight scene she's a cgi skeleton for some reason. Looked kinda cool in the opening shot but after that was dinky as all hell. When they defeat her she returns as her normal self and every time they do an Ishtar pantie shot they also do one of her, which is also in addition to mash, and Ana - that episode was like 90% panty shots.

Leonardo Da Vinci - Big forehead. Is just kinda... there [during the scenes with Roman]

Merlin - He's kind of cool and surprisingly not very horny, even though he's an incubus. Looks pretty neat and isn't oversexualized. 5/10 character.

Wetzel Pretzel [Rider] - Another horny girl with no clothes on. Shocking. She looks like a clown because of her costume design, and her voice actor is mind mindbogglingly annoying. Every scene she appeared in made me want to peel my eyes out and my ears off.

Romani - The best character in the entirety of the Grand Order universe by far. Has some cool lines and doesn't annoy me. Looks neat. 6/10.

Tiamat - Literally looks like a Pokemon. I don't know how they animated her this poorly. Basically just a more cgi looking version of Avenger. Big tits, not interesting, funny as fuck. Her horns are kind of cool. Maybe would be a cool Yu-Gi-Oh! card.

Welp, that's it. That's my review of Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia. In summary? Don't watch this. If you're horny, just watch some hentai. This is that weird in between where its only appeal is horny stuff, but it isn't hentai so why bother if that's what you're looking for. It also perpetuates anime stereotypes of submissive women that are only viewed as sex objects because that's what the target audience wants. 0/10.

I have watched every fate series. This fate series is so overrated by those fans. I don't think it worth the hype. If you can't accept other's opinions, don't read reviews.

Story 1/10
The story of this series is covered with a lot of fan services. Man, we don't need fan services on this series. The pace of the story is soooo separated and slow and also full of meaningless conversations, it is so boring to watch. So, there will be few episodes that are doing nothing.

Art 1/10
It was OK at the start but when it comes to the battle part... The CG of this series is ... so bad. Are they that poor to make a better CG?

Sound 4/10
Well, the OP and ED 1 are the only good things of this series. The sound effects are so annoying especially when Kingu is using his skills. Maybe they are trying to make it epic and cool but obviously they failed.

Character 1/10
- Fujimaru is the most boring main character ever. He is just a machine with 0 personality.

Enjoyment 1/10
It is so difficult for me to enjoy this series. Just a word to describe: BORING. It is even worse than the time that I was watching fate apocrypha.

Overall 1/10
Bad story and poor-quality art are enough to give this series 1/10 marks. I can't believe it has 7.84 on this website. Not trying to be rude, the 2006 FSN and even Fate Apocrypha are better than this. Overrated. That's all.

If you want something to hate watch, this could be for you. If you want to know how not to draw the faces of your main cast, this is for you. If you want ammo to hate on the Fate universe, this is for you. I am saddened that this has above a 5 for a rating. I'm am doubly saddened that people would rate this the same as Fate/Zero and/or Fate/stay night. I feel that it is a great disservice to those series being compared to this one.
I don't like to drop anime that I'm watching and am apparently a masochist considering I somehow ... finished this series. After I watched an episode of this I found myself being super thankful about anything I watched afterwards. I was more thankful of art, character development, and the stories of other anime than I ever was.
I rate this anime so poorly because this anime is a mess. Townspeople have better drawn faces than the main characters most of the time. The story is filled with deus ex machinas and overrated characters. The main protagonist, Fujimaru, is one of the most useless characters I've ever seen. The dialogue in this show makes everyone seem flat or at best whimsical.
The only partially saving grace of the entire show is the sakuga. There are some decently animated fight scenes where you can actually tell what is going on and the hype is real, but other than that the fights are just flashy lights and false hype.
I can only hope that I don't unwittingly see something worse than this.

this anime in short is how to ruin a great story with an adaptation.

The story was simplified, a more then half of dialogues from the original material were cut, just to add more scenes with self insert fujimaru, thus a 4.

the "art" is not comparable to any other fate anime, not even fucking apocrypha had such a bad case of same face syndrome + horrible cgi + random ass shots for no reason every 2 seconds, thus a 1.

the sound was so anonymous that i cant remember any music from this anime despite having watched it not long ago.
also the opening is as generic as ... it can get, thus a 1.

with the cut of dialogues, the characters were butchered too, making half of the anime just fujimaru having a pseudo harem of godesses.
what remained of the characters wasnt the worst thing of this adaptation, but its not good either thus a 5.

enjoyment 1 because honestly the only things i was looking for was a good adaptation of a great arc in the game, and my expectation were not met.
the only stuff i can call good about it are how Leonidas' death is portrayed, and Saori Hayami's voice acting of Ushiwakamaru, especially towards the end.
but these are overshadowed by whatever the fuck they did with King Hassan, by making the Gate of Babylon look generic, by actually using that horrible cgi for Gorgon Tiamat and Tiamat, and much more shit

EDIT: ah and i almost forgot a thing: fanservice on ana is the most disgusting thing they could have done, and they still did it for some reasons

DROP:

I tried, I really tried, but there is nothing to give it with. :(
I have been wanting to be able to enjoy and appreciate a good FATE series for quite some time, since I consider that it has a huge world to explore and easily appealing to any viewer, but that since "UBW" and previously "FSN" never convince me. so I always fall for the same "main characters". Since we lost the Shirou duo (even with its uselessness, it is more any other) and Saber I can't get hooked, I just see them as mere spectators to the "Masters" and I'm not asking them to ... throw "planets by the fists", but simply They do not contribute anything relative, nor in the conversations or relationships that occur during their respective series broadcasts. On the one hand, I understand that the posture is that the "MC" is, after all, an avatar of the game, but having a Protagonist duo that consumes more minutes than all on screen and its contribution is merely a waste of time and exhausting for the viewer at less from my perspective that I had no chance to play any of his saga ...
So when you put all your expectations into making an anime alone, or mostly for a specific sector (fate fans or players in your GAME) and don't cut back on the unnecessary, it ends up being a tiresome adaptation for "casual" people trying to get inside. in the show.
I hope no one is offended, it is only a position of someone appreciates that they make these adaptations to Anime, but they only seek the appreciation and understanding of a minority.


Version en Español:


DROP:

Lo intente, de verdad que lo intente pero no hay con que darle. :(
Llevo queriendo poder disfrutar e apreciar de una buena serie de FATE hace bastante tiempo, ya que considero que tiene un mundo enorme por explorar y fácilmente llamativo para cualquier espectador, pero que sin embargo desde "UBW" y anteriormente "FSN" nunca terminan de convencerme por lo que siempre re caigo en los mismo "Personajes principales". Desde que perdimos el dúo Shirou (aun con su inutilidad, es mas cualquier otro) y Saber no puedo engancharme, simplemente los veo como meros espectadores a los "Master" y no estoy pidiendo que tiren "planetas por los puños", sino que sencillamente no aportan en nada relativo, ni en las conversaciones o relaciones que se dan durante sus respectivas emisiones como serie. Por un lado entiendo que la postura es que el "MC" al fin y al cabo es un avatar del juego pero tener un dúo Protagonista que consume mas minutos que todos en pantalla y su contribuyo es meramente perdida de tiempo y agotador para el espectador al menos desde mi perspectiva que no tuve posibilidad de Jugar nada de su saga...
Entonces cuando pones todo las expectativas en hacer un Anime solo, o en su mayoría para un sector en especifico (fanes de fate o jugadores de su GAME) y no recortas lo innecesario termina siendo una adaptación cansina para la gente "casual" que intenta adentrarse en el espectáculo.
Espero no se ofenda nadie, solo es una postura de alguien aprecia que hagan estas adaptaciones a Anime, pero solo buscan la apreciación y entendimiento de una minoría.

My review for FGO: boobies and bums!

The positive! The animation generally looks very good, definitely above average. Many fight scenes are amazing and well choreographed. The scenery is usually also fair, sometimes a bit too realistic even!

The sound was generally satisfactory, with some nice themes here and there. Only at the end do they rely a bit too much on raspy bass noises that destroy your speakers and your ears for big attacks. Be sure to lower your volume at the point they are clearly telegraphed!

The bad: kinda everything else... ^^

I was hoping to see Gilgamesh' and Isthar's story. Instead, we get a totally new ... story after the written events. That's not bad on itself, except...

- It's not a stand-alone anime. In order to have the vaguest clue of what's going on, I'm assuming you must have played the game.

- The character's motivations are hard to follow at best. They are ludicrously evil one moment, then best friends the next after protagonist-kun winks at them, then useless quivering anime school girls the rest of their screentime.

- Many characters are hard, if impossible, to take seriously. Rin is here, somehow, even though it's not really her, and she has a pallet swap. There is literally a woman from the future in a jaguar onesie making cat puns.

- The main characters couldn't be more bland if they tried. In addition, they hardly (if ever) contribute anything. They're just kinda there, and watch. The writers desperately try and include them by having characters say how amazing the protagonists are, despite all evidence to the contrary.

- Characters just kinda do stuff as the plot demands it, appearing, disappearing, dying, reviving, start flying, regaining mana, just anything the plot demands them to.

- Most character designs are questionable, wearing only the bare minimum of clothing, and of course boob physics. Atop that, many fights devolve into butt-, boobie, and pantieshots.

- The ending is super abrupt and unsatisfactory.

- Why did they start with the 7th singularity?! :<

- Loads of ridiculous scenes and reveals just to be cool and edgy.

So.. If you've played the game, you'll probably maybe love this? Otherwise, if you're looking for a standalone anime, or anything that resembles F/Zero or FSN/UBW, hard pass!