The pilot episode took off quite slowly, and frankly I'm surprised I even made it the first time around. I must give credit to the high quality artwork, voicing, and animation- It looked beautiful. Beserker, archer's flying throne thingy and the blood overflowing from the grail however, simply did not fit the rest of the anime in their style. (mostly likely different rendering technique?)
The story was pretty basic. In hindsight it was probably just there to justify the blood. However, The host of unique characters with extended, mysterious, or shrouded backgrounds and their interactions largely made up for this. Though I would not say that the characters were realistic, they certainly were colourful and came from different extremities of the personality spectrum. However the main plot itself was very straight forward, with a few rather unimpressive twists.
Yuki Kajiura is a very skilled composer who continues to impress us with her contributions to this series. They really transferred the energy of the fights, and indeed the G-force felt by the characters to the viewer. Which is the other highlight of this series- the fights. The animation and sound quality of the anime does not falter and has created some of the most impressive fighting scenes I have seen in an anime.
The Fate/Zero series is a very high quality one with a fair amount of blood, violence, darkness, and plenty of colourful characters. But one whose overarching story lacks depth and twists.
