I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia fails on every single level of story telling. Allow me to explain why.
First, let's talk about the plot. Saying that this animated adaptation of the Babylonia singularity of the popular "Fate/Grand Order" gacha game has a plot is like saying that a piece of white bread has flavor. Technically, by the literal definition of the word - yes. It's true. Fate/Grand Order - Demonic Front: Babylonia consists of an endless series of inane events that make me question if anyone working on the project gave a singular planck length of a shit about it. I anticipate this review will be quite lengthy, so I will not bore you with the details. The entirety of the story can essentially be summed up in one sentence. "3-5 bland protagonists fight a gigantic, oversexualized female villain with gargantuan breasts." I shit you not, about 90% of this series fits this exact sentence. The other 10% is filler. This filler consists of
{figure 1}
• People walking
• People talking
• People walking while talking
• Female sidekicks blushing while talking to the male protagonist
That's pretty much it. You could watch the 21 + 1 episodes of this, or you could read the above summary and understand the entirety of the program.
Now that we've got that out of the way, I'd like [like is a strong word, prefer would probably be more appropriate for this context] to talk about the dialogue. This should be a rather brief talking point. Pretty much every piece of dialogue in this god-forsaken script fits in one of three boxes.
{figure 2}
[1] Refer to bullet point 4 of {figure 1}
[2] Characters saying a load of garbled nonsense while fighting each other
[3] Characters saying a load of garbled nonsense while not engaged in any particular fight
I can't stress enough how insufferable the dialogue of this adaptation is. To be fair, this is probably an accurate representation of the experience one endures while reading the dialogue of a virtual novel gacha game written by developers that know that >99% of players will not read a single line of dialogue - and those who do are already spending hoards of money- I mean virtual currency that holds no tangible value on the game. In most Fate anime adaptations, there's a standard amount of weird anime dialogue that sounds kind of cool and meaningful but is really just fluff when you think about it for a few seconds. In this, it's the whole thing. No line in this entire 11+ hour slog holds any significance, whatsoever.
Author's note: The length of that section was unfortunate.
Let's take a brief detour to discuss the world building. Luckily for the writers, this takes place in a pseudo-historical setting! Looks like the work's been done for them. Unfortunately, this is not quite the case. While even the most amateur of writers could utilize a historical setting with a modicum of competency, the writers of this anime defy the odds, and fail to do so. I wouldn't even know that this was set in Babylonia if it weren't for the title of the series, in addition to the slew of historical names and locations they drop in. There is essentially no tangible trace of the fascinating history of this period of human history, or the geographical details of this specific story's setting. >90% of the scenes take place in generic dirt fields, or inside buildings that vaguely conjure an image of ancient civilization. Would it really have been that hard to throw in a famous monument here or there? Not to mention the historical figures, which are as stock standard as they come. The utter incompetence of the writing team is baffling in this department. Pseudo-historical ancient civilization is one of the easiest tricks in the book. Yet they bungled it.
Originality? It's Fate/Grand Order. Come on now.
Before we get into what is regrettably the longest section of this review, I'd like to briefly touch on the animation. In the handful of reviews I've read for this series online, I've seen several claims that this is some of the best animation that the Fate series has to offer. Reading these reviews genuinely made me question my sanity. It's hard to convey with words how fundamentally incompetent and incohesive the animation is. There are moments [however brief], which are genuinely good looking. However, these moments of beauty are overshadowed by the gargantuan mountain of canine manure that is everything else. It's important to understand that there are essentially three different styles of animation, all of which occur [for the most part] simultaneously throughout the course of this adaptation.
{figure 3}
[1] Normal animation. I won't pretend to know how anime is made, but if you watch any anime from the last decade, you know what I'm talking about. This style is reserved only for the protagonists [with a few exceptions] and looks the best.
[2] Static backgrounds. As far as I know, Static backgrounds are a fairly standard implementation in modern anime. However, the backgrounds of this series are reminiscent of the kind you would see in a mid-2000s children's show, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters or GX. This art style is utterly incohesive with the first, and sharply detracts from the experience. The colors are much less vibrant, and the details less specific than the style used in [1].
[3] 3-D models. These are god awful. Most of the swarmy demon enemies are animated with this method, and holy fucking shit is it distracting. The first style of animation looks like it's somewhere around the 24 frames per second range, which is completely normal for an action anime. This style looks like interpolation on steroids. It is impossible not to notice it. Every time you see something that is animated like this, it draws your attention away, as your eyes are attracted to areas of the screen with higher frame rates. This is incredibly distracting, as I don't want to be looking at the swarm of enemy demon tigers while the protagonists are supposed to be the subject of a given scene. This style is also often used in tandem with even more vibrant colors, along with a sort of shimmer.
While this description is not nearly sufficient to relate the visual experience of this series, I hope that it provides the reader with some sense of how incompetent the animation was.
Alright - one more thing I'd like to touch on before getting into the long part. The fucking sound design. Every single sound effect just sounds like someone took a fart and boosted the base and reverb. It adds to the unending list of things that take you out of any semblance of an experience that the show possessed, and reminds you that you are watching an anime based off of a gacha game based off an erotic visual novel that is old enough to engage in consensual intercourse.
Ok. fine. I'll talk about the characters. My entire review for this was initially just going to be a paragraph on each of the characters [more specifically, why they suck], but I decided to lengthen the review to include a few other topics after the excruciating experience I had to sit through. If you don't want to read about each of the individual characters, I suggest that you scroll down to my summary. I promise this is the last section.
Ristuka Fujimaru - The most bland and uninteresting protagonist to ever grace the world of anime. And yes, that includes Shirou Emiya of Fate/Stay Night [Studio Deen adaptaion]. Holy fucking shit is this guy boring. I don't even have anything to say about him because there literally isn't anything. His only personality trait is that every girl wants to fuck him. I guess it does well at catering to the male incel weeb target audience. Every lonely weeb with no personality loves these sort of characters.
Mash Kyrilight - Do I really need to say anything? Play Fate/Grand Order for 2 minutes and you'll know the entirety of her character. The most interesting thing she does for the first 9 episodes is flash her panties during her fight scenes, but after that point she doesn't even do that. She shields the other characters from getting zapped a couple times, and gives weird uWu looks at Fujimaru, but other than that she's pretty useless. Her boobs also look like water balloons which is pretty funny. I like her crotch window too, super cool costume design.
Ana - Proxy Illiya loli bait. Looks 8 years old and ties people up while wearing a leotard that says "stare at my crotch you horny incel." I liked it when she died.
Archer [Ishtar] - She's literally just Rin in lingerie without a personality. Out of all the main cast, she probably does the most cool stuff during fights [kind of like being the fastest snail], so that's cool I guess. Oh, did I mention she's wearing lingerie? It's a really cool character trait. I like the parts where she hits on Fujimaru and shows her panties to the screen. Super interesting and original. Breaking new ground for the Fate franchise. One of the main antagonists is her alter ego except by the point that they introduced that plot point I had literally 0 investment in the show so I can't say I payed all that much attention to whatever the fuck was going on.
Avenger [medusa?] - My favorite character. Her tits are funnier than a Chris Rock comedy special. She's literally just an 800 foot tall tentacle serpent lady with absolutely GARGANTUAN boobs. Like it's not possible to describe how gigantic and funny they look. I think her scenes were supposed to make me horny but all they made me do was laugh. She also dies like 3 times.
Caster [Gilgamesh] - Never in all my life have I seen a more beta version of Gilgamesh. He only uses his weapon wall thing like twice and it looks like shit both times. He gets merc'd by exhaustion somehow by Ishtar's alter ego shithead, which is fucking pathetic. His mongrel count is shockingly low - I don't think any other adaptation of him has said it this few times. He has absolutely no presence and is a disgrace to the Gilgamesh name. Even the Deen adaptation did a better job than this.
Enkidu - I have no fucking clue what was going on with this character. They had some sort of plotline with Gilgamesh and being a fake or something but I honestly couldn't give less of a shit. Their fight scenes were all really lame and their dialogue was flatter than my chest.
Fou -
Lancer [Ishtar alter ego] - She shows up a couple times before her fight scene when Ishtar switches to her. I think I was supposed to be intrigued by it but I was just mildly confused. During her fight scene she's a cgi skeleton for some reason. Looked kinda cool in the opening shot but after that was dinky as all hell. When they defeat her she returns as her normal self and every time they do an Ishtar pantie shot they also do one of her, which is also in addition to mash, and Ana - that episode was like 90% panty shots.
Leonardo Da Vinci - Big forehead. Is just kinda... there [during the scenes with Roman]
Merlin - He's kind of cool and surprisingly not very horny, even though he's an incubus. Looks pretty neat and isn't oversexualized. 5/10 character.
Wetzel Pretzel [Rider] - Another horny girl with no clothes on. Shocking. She looks like a clown because of her costume design, and her voice actor is mind mindbogglingly annoying. Every scene she appeared in made me want to peel my eyes out and my ears off.
Romani - The best character in the entirety of the Grand Order universe by far. Has some cool lines and doesn't annoy me. Looks neat. 6/10.
Tiamat - Literally looks like a Pokemon. I don't know how they animated her this poorly. Basically just a more cgi looking version of Avenger. Big tits, not interesting, funny as fuck. Her horns are kind of cool. Maybe would be a cool Yu-Gi-Oh! card.
Welp, that's it. That's my review of Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia. In summary? Don't watch this. If you're horny, just watch some hentai. This is that weird in between where its only appeal is horny stuff, but it isn't hentai so why bother if that's what you're looking for. It also perpetuates anime stereotypes of submissive women that are only viewed as sex objects because that's what the target audience wants. 0/10.
