Boy was I wrong.
Fate/kaleid tells the tale of Ilya. Unlike in the original Fate, Ilya has lived a perfectly normal life so far and is just your typical girl. One day however, a magical girl staff comes crashing through her window when she's taking a bath and forces Ilya to become a magical girl. You see,Cards are messing up the lay lines or something like that, and originally the magic association sent two girls, Rin and Luvia, to capture these cards. However, Rin and Luvia hate each other and argued all the time, so the staffs ran away and picked new partners. And so, Ilya must fight the Heroic Spirits defending these cards alongside fellow magical girl Miyu, with Rin and Luvia helping the both of them out a bit.
Listen. Just because Fate/kaleid stars a bunch of fluffy magical girls does not mean it's all light and fun here. Fate/kaleid is more of a drama than a comedy. I'll even call it a deconstruction of the genre. Ilya and friends get hurt often and nearly die more than once. Ilya is forced to face exactly why she wants to become a magical girl and she realizes that's it's not all fluffy like shows on TV. And it deconstructs it perfectly, compared to another magical girl deconstruction (cough) Puella. The drama Ilya goes through feels real, expect one plot point I'll discuss later.
And listen. Just because Fate/kaleid stars a bunch of magical girls does not mean that it can be freakin' badass when it wants to be. These battles are just a joy to watch, I'll even put them alongside Fate/Zero's battles, and those are amazing. The animation during these scenes get way better, they play a little epic track that's more or less a wannabe Yuki Kaijura that actually works, and the choreography is amazing. Due to the fact the danger is real this show, there's also a sense of suspension. Sure you know no one's going to die (dark one or not, this is still a magical girl spinoff), but it is still awesome.
However, there's the category of the characters. My Rin's still Rin (I always forget how much I love her until I see her in action), and the two new characters, Luvia and Miyu, far nicely. Sure Luvia can be a little annoying at times and Miyu your typical mysterious emotionless transfer student who's perfect at everything but yet has problems making friends, but they're still fine. But Ilya? … Now, when creating spinoffs, an important factor is to keep your characters the same as they were before. Sure they're obviously going to be slightly different, but they still need to have a resemblance of the original in them. This Ilya is no way like the original Ilya however. While it does make sense as without her dark past, Ilya has no reason to become the half-insane “Bah-sah-kah, kill them!” girl we all know and love, I still want a little of that girl in there. However, this Ilya is just your typical magical girl heroine. Nice, a little shy, everyone loves her despite her mistakes... Aka, dull.
And then comes the second problem with Fate/kaleid. It can get too dark. Now, I love darkness with a burning passion, but there is a difference between drama and forced drama. You all know the type of episode where the team splits up due to some trivial argument and gets back together at the end? Yeah. Well, Fate/kaleid has a whole arc of that. And it is so badly written. To put it simply, everything just goes bad for Ilya and she more or less loses her confidence she's gained as a magical girl due to the fact one of the characters decides to says she hates her, for a reason that does make sense but is originally done in such a terrible way. She then spends the episodes until the arc is over moping around and being so sad, I almost felt like crying. I mean, if you're going to make Ilya your typical girl, then give her a happy life. Let us see the normal Ilya. However, with the whole darkness of the show, I began to wonder, isn't there just one timeline where Ilya can be happy? This whole arc is horribly done and is pulled out in a way that makes no sense and is ended so easily (hey, at least we get to see a cameo from a Zero character), it almost made me want the happy-go-lucky magical girl spinoff I was expecting over some dark Puella ripoff (okay, the manga did come before Puella, but still).
Now, the animation... I hate it. The animation is fine, but these have to be some of the ugliest character designs I have ever seen. It looks terrible. They were obviously trying to go for the overly cute and moe look, but I just cannot look at it. The lips are animated weirdly, all of the colors are so light, the hair and skin seems to glow, the eyes are weird, it just looks terrible. Some of the characters barely look like their original role. While things do look a little better in the gloriously animated action scenes, in the non-action scenes, it's just not pretty. The music, like I mentioned above, is rather awesome, with really epic tunes playing during the battle scenes and more relaxing, happy tunes playing during the non-battle scenes. The voice acting is also nice too. Expected though, considering most of these seiyuu have previous experience in their characters.
Despite its flaws however, I just couldn't help but really enjoy Fate/kaleid. It was neat to see all of the characters I love in a new setting. And you don't even have to have any previous experience in the Fate franchise to enjoy this. You'll just miss some of the in-jokes. Fate/kaleid is a fun show, and I give it 8 out of 10 stars, though if it wasn't for the Fate name on it it would probably be 7. TYPE-MOON's plan worked apparently. I recommend this to any TYPE-MOON and magical girl fan. There's also going to be a season 2 coming out this winter, and I am looking forward to it.
