Fate/Zero occupies a curious position within its own franchise. It is not a position which was intended by its creators, I believe, but came about as result of its own popularity. This position is that despite being a prequel to the flagship title Fate/Stay Night, it has become widely popular outside Type-Moon's dedicated fanbase and has even served as the induction into the Fate franchise for many new fans.
So I guess this is a review for those new fans whose first taste of Fate (or Type-Moon in general) is Fate/Zero, mainly because I've been noticing more and more people picking up the Fate series in anticipation of Ufotable's remake of Fate/Stay Night later this year. Mainly I'm just going to talk about Fate/Zero in relation to Fate/Stay Night without trying to spoil anything in particular.
The first thing I should get out of the way is that Fate/Zero is not typical for the Fate series. It is far grittier, far gloomier, and far more serious in tone than Fate/Stay Night. For all of F/SN's grim parts, it's still at heart the adaptation of an eroge and is full of romcom shenanigans. If Fate/Zero is your only exposure to the Fate franchise, you are going to get the wrong idea about the rest of the franchise. If you go into F/SN expecting something as serious as Fate/Zero, you will be disappointed. That disappointment won't just be whiplash from the tone, it's pretty much guaranteed because of all the spoilers.
The next major thing is that Fate/Zero spoils a lot of the content of Fate/Stay Night. Now, F/SN is a pretty old story at this point and its sheer popularity has caused people who haven't seen it to gain knowledge of some of the more famous twists just through cultural osmosis, but Fate/Zero spoils things for new fans that they aren't even aware are spoilers. This means people introduced to Fate through F/Z are pretty much guaranteed not to like F/SN very much. The change in tone is cause enough for many people to reject it, but the story will be less compelling as well because all the twists and secrets were spoiled in the prequel. This is because F/Z was written as a prequel to F/SN rather than F/SN being a sequel to F/Z. In other words: F/Z was made for people who've already read F/SN while still being accessible to people who haven't.
A lot of effort was put into making F/Z accessible to people as its own story, and I think that's a good thing, but it's also had the unintended effect of making F/SN less accessible. There's a tendency for people to compare the two series with F/SN being seen as the lesser, and I think it's just depressing. Fate/Zero is a good series, I enjoyed watching it and I feel like it does credit to the Fate franchise, but I think it also makes for a poor introduction to the franchise despite all that. Being more serious and gritty than F/SN doesn't make it better, focusing on action and drama instead of romance doesn't make it better. For all its grit and tragedy, it's still only a prequel series to F/SN, so I can only ever think of it as F/SN's popular kid brother.
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I felt the story of F/Z was paced a bit awkwardly, which is nothing new for the Fate franchise. A huge clusterfuck battle early on and then things drag out into cat and mouse shenanigans.
As for art, I'm not a fan of the filters and CGI, but the animation was gloriously fluid. Overall a very pretty anime to look at.
Outstanding OST and voice acting.
