I contemplated on how best to summarize this review for what seems like an exceedingly long time. It falls somewhere between the "Fate of anticlimactic ends", "Deus ex machina all day everyday" and the "Fate with the writer who dropped out of a literature degree after learning one literary mechanism - the anti-climax". It's Fate/Stay Night's less popular mass market cousin (twice removed).
I mean rarely have I seen an anime with untapped potential with so many characters, so gratuitously running them all off a cliff. Fate/Apocrypha should NOT be a fan's introduction to the Fate series. Fate/Stay Night was not the best anime ever created neither then nor now, but it made you care for the small crop of core characters, filled you with a sense of dread when they faced danger and when it dropped the big plot bombs it made you scream with glee and a certain sense of "dear god, they didn't just suggest that did they..." And when the characters died, it was without a shadow of a doubt, important and it made us care. Not Fate/Apocrypha. No.
Fate/Apocrypha is a mess of (and I repeat) questionable plot points (I cannot truly call them holes, since I myself could have misunderstood them), anti-climatic endings to characters - backgrounds for which sometime show flashes of brilliance but never explore anything beyond some rushed development or a few initial scenes, needless fan-service and ofcourse the deus ex machina,
Let's quickly go over my favorite ones:
*Spoiler Warning!*
1) The Ruler character is the only one richly developed along the lines of Saber or Shirou from Fate/Stay Night. However, she also falls victim to the anti-climax of just fighting and eventually dying. I mean everyone just seems to have a fight (and if the writer felt like it on that day, reflect a little bit) and just die. No real importance to any death, it just... happens. Case in point, Vlad Tepes, uses his Noble Phantasm (which has a pretty great motivation about why he wouldn't willingly use it, and just, dies after 10 mins of him being untouchable and is discarded like an after thought). It's nearly the same with everyone else.
2) Poorly developed backgrounds for the heroes galore. Siegfried, few lines about him and he dies. Mordred (he's FSN Saber's (woman's) daughter with another woman - I mean I understand poetic authority but really, come one) and wants...something. To be king or to ease his/her father/mother's burden - why the change of heart? What brought this on? Karna, what is his motivation? What does he want? Shakespeare. What exactly is his power with his writing. Why is he writing if he cannot make events come true? Why is Shirou afraid of him writing a tragedy? If he could've materialized his writing he could have influenced nearly everything in the story? So why the writing? WHY does Sieg have command spells?
3) And let's come to the anti-climaxes. Frakenstein's monster dies trying to kill Mordred a few scenes after she's humanized a bit. Mordred goes into a big fight and simply dies at the end. Siegfried, the original one, all of a sudden, simply dies trying to save Sieg. Vlad Tepes just dies a few scenes after he became a near unstoppable monster. Aviceborn is simply shot - although he does state that he simply wanted to create the golem and nothing more, but still the all important golem dies a few scenes later. It's just filled with gems like this.
4) The people who don't die and Deus-Ex machina. Sieg is special. But WHY? He has command spells, Great. He saves Astolfo who is self admittedly a weak character. He fights and kills Karna (seemingly a very powerful character) on the second attempt after being wiped on the first attempt. What did he simply try harder the second time? He loses Siegfried's power and immediately gains Frankenstein's Monster's power because he was hit by her Noble Phantasm - Great but why does this happen? And apparently someone who killed Vlad Tepes in his Phantasm form as well as fought Frankenstein's Monster originally now is killed by Sieg wielding the same power? Great. Okay so Blasted Tree killed her when she used it but Sieg survives when he uses it. Why? Ugh.. I just couldn't keep suspending my disbelief after a point.
5) The catering to otakus. Jack the Rippers backstory is refreshingly sensible however why is her character a loli? It kills the whole seriousness of the character and is unnecessary. Why is Astolfo suddenly a pink haired shota? Who is sexually abused by a dominatrix/tsundere master who seems to have been miscast from a Hentai?
I'm sure there are other issues that I'm forgetting but overall Fate/Apocrypha seems to be a mass market anime masquerading as something greater than it is - a lot of potential which unfortunately never goes anywhere. It seems like an example of a studio rushing an anime out and try to be mass market by appealing to a larger fanbase by going all Charles Dickens with the number and variety of characters and the breadth of the story - thing is Charles Dickens wrote better and wove a better story. Hell maybe they could've outsourced the story to Shakespeare - I mean he WAS in the anime and did keep writing all the time - which was again, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - just like the anime.
