I will start with the few positives I can think about reflecting back on the show. By far the best characters in the show are Mordred and Sisigou. They aren't great characters, their screen time is limited, and are underdeveloped. However, they are the only characters that had any chemistry and personality. Every time these characters were on screen, this soulless show would show some signs of life and show glimpses of what it could have been. On the technical side: the music is very good albeit overused, there is some decent sound design, visuals can sometimes look nice when its not nighttime and despite some awfully edited and directed action sequences there are moments of good animation. Aside from that... Shakespeare is in this show???
Everything else in this show doesn't work at all. The cast is horribly mismanaged and are so dull and forgettable that I probably forgot some of them writing this review. The protagonist Sieg is the most uninteresting and dull character I have seen in recent memory. He has no backstory, no personality, no desires, infinite plot armor, no chemistry with the characters and feels completely pointless in this train wreck of a story. This has to be one of the worst written characters I have ever seen. The side characters don't fare much better either, the majority of them don't even want anything from the grail which can grant any wish... almost all of these stupid servants either say "I have no wish I want granted" or "All I wanted was to die a hero!!!" Which just makes me wonder the whole time: why should I care about any of them winning?! If you build characters around a wish granting premise, why give them zero desire to want a wish fulfilled??? Some of these characters are laughably bad, anyone who is a fan of the Atlanta legend or Jack The Ripper... I am so sorry for the way these characters were butchered/treated. The cast is so huge as well that no time is given to develop them. Its just a bunch of pointless explosions with no personal conflict or characters to care about most of the time, and even the action is so poorly directed that its hard to even enjoy the spectacle on its own. The action in this show is handled poorly. I can barely make out whats going on because there are so many quick cuts and characters move so fast without any real choreography. In a show full of swords, arrows and magic, there is definitely something wrong when my favorite fight in the whole show is a fist fight.
I think the thing about this show that puzzles me the most is that I don't know what its going for. The story was such a mess that I don't even know what themes it was trying to convey. The ideas were uninteresting for the most part or they were horribly executed. The action is poor and it seems to be the driving force of this show. Its not character driven. Visually there isn't anything that interesting I can recall. Its so exposition heavy and badly paced that I find it hard to enjoy it as simple entertainment. Its very talky and complicated, but isn't thought provoking or smart enough to justify it. The rules of the war and mechanics of how magic and servants work are either utterly broken or completely incomprehensible. MAYBE its explained in the light novel its based on, but there were multiple times where I had to go online to understand some of the random bullshit that happens in this show... and this is coming from someone who read the Fate Stay Night visual novel, watched Fate zero, Deen's Stay Night and the Ufotable's unlimited blade works! Rarely do I see a big popular show come out and fail to at least see the appeal in it.
I don't recommend this show to anybody. There are better action fantasy anime out there and it doesn't hold a candle to the Ufotable adaptations. Fans deserve better than this and I really hope this is just the lowest point of this mostly enjoyable franchise.
