✪ Genre: action (swordplay), contemporary fantasy, drama, magic (metamorphosis, magic weapons), seinen, superpower (emotions awaken superpowers) with elements of a parallel world
✔Positive Aspects✔
◧ Animation: adequately distinct characters, based on colors of moderate to low saturation/medium to high lumination, with the urban environment and the urban landscapes being a little more muted in comparison. A good addition was the limited 'light' and 'spark' effects during the action sequences, where the main character is fighting against the various antagonists.
◧ Character development: the movie does a decent job building up the relationship between its protagonistic characters, explaining some of their beliefs, intentions, thought processes, and, more importantly, personal histories. This last part is conspicuously lacking in the F/K Ilya series.
◧ Plot: this movie provides very crucial information regarding the personal history, motivations, and thought processes of one of the protagonists, while also filling up some major plot holes of the main series.
✘Negative Aspects✘
◧ Action scenes: incredibly unsatisfying action sequences that are escalating and de-escalating very quickly. Not only are they very brief in runtime, but they feel very rushed, even in the grander scheme of things, where the action itself is not the point in this movie. Stylistically, instead of playing around with different levels of the third-person perspective (as it does with the 1st Ilya season), Silver Link tries to emulate Ufotable in UBW by incorporating various camera angles (first-person, second-person, third-person), different 'camera' heights and quick zoom-ins/outs. Unfortunately, it does not succeed in its goal since the end result appears quite unstylish and obscure. On a final note, most of the early fights seem to suffer from incredibly low display contrast at times, making the sequences somewhat incomprehensible.
◧ Soundtrack: various pieces of music are used, ranging from j-pop and electronic music to new age piano and orchestral works, that are virtually unimpactful and unengaging.
Overall: Even though this movie does not offer much in terms of enjoyment or production values, it serves its purpose as a prequel by providing necessary information that is noticeably absent from the main series.
P.S. 1) In my view, for anyone looking to get into these spin-offs, starting with this movie, instead of the main series, might be the most prudent course of action.
2) For further reviews of the Fate franchise, please take a look at my profile.
