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Fate is an anime. At this point I'd usually give some detail about the main story, or characters, but it's a bit difficult to given what I saw. The first episode was 45 minutes in length, which I've got no objections to, GTO comes to mind as another anime with a long first episode, and one that was executed quite well to establish the main character and basis for the story. Fate's opening episode was about as disconnected from the notion of being enjoyable as possible. 45 minutes of consecutive exposition, just one character explaining to another how the story worked. This isn't me trying to be hyperbolic or witty, that's exactly what it was, and to top it all off, I barely even managed to take in most the information, and was extremely confused, perhaps because I was so bored out of my mind. From what I did gather, there is a Holy Grail which grants people immortality, and so 12th century historical figures have been "summoned" to fight over it, and also magic and swordfighting and everything else you expect exists in this universe, but it takes place in the modern day, but these people still have their medieval castles and palaces and the rest of it. The lore was extremely convoluted, a combination of the story's own, real-life ancient history, as well as mythical ancient history (Zeus and all that shit). It would have been less convoluted if they actually got the history right, though, we've got one character, named Iskandar, who mentions he's from Ionia, yet 2 episodes later, he sees a book on Alexander The Great (or as he's also known, Alexander of Macedon, which is not the same place as Ionia), and comments on the fact that someone wrote a book about himself, I'm not going to expect absolute historical accuracy in something like this, but getting your character's names and birthplaces right is as basic as it gets.
The characters were just boring. Plain and simple. Too many of them, I can't remember the names of any except King Arthur, and the aforementioned Iskandar, who I'd probably forget if not for the error. Too many characters, not enough details, and I just don't care about any of them. Who am I supposed to root for? What are everyone's motivations? It's just so poorly thought out, it's like the script was never refined, and it's a natural byproduct of having so many characters, you can't really flesh out any of them. Doesn't help half the characters are extremely fucking edgy, I wouldn't mind so much if it was a black and white good versus evil, but those don't usually work so well when you're changing protagonists every other episode.
I thought maybe I'd grown a bit tired of having the plot explained to me for so long, maybe once the action started, and it began to pick up the pace, then finally I would be on board. Can't really say that's the case, it was just uninteresting. The physical clashing of swords didn't interest me much, and when they were utilising invisible ones and healing magic and a bunch of other shit, that just made it even worse. They even went with the anime cliche of having our characters explain their thought processes, moves, and how they were going to circumvent those of their adversaries, but it still didn't make much sense to me.
Animation was nothing to speak of, can't give any details about the OST, so it couldn't have been that great. All in all Fate's a bit of a convoluted mess: too many characters, too many ideas, too much everything. In regards to fighting, to quote Hammering Heinz "You hit somebody with your fist and not with your fingers spread."
