First the art: The tentacle demon pillars looked pretty good actually, but they were effectively just cg backgrounds and the 7 Pillars you fight in the game don't ever even do anything besides get introduced, and then just wilt over off screen. Some of the animation was pretty good, but it felt wasted and like it was just trying to cover up the fact that even the director didn't know what was going on in the movie.
Now, to talk about the pacing and characters. There are a couple elephants in the room so to speak about this: first ever since the Unlimited Blade Works movie pre-Ufotable, the Fate series has always been trying to cram like 10+ hours of content into 90 minute movies, which is just never a good idea. Second, this arc in the game was supposed to be the player's big triumphant moment after a year long journey both in the game and in real time, with all of the characters you met and grew to love or hate coming to your aid, but the catch is that they only animated 2.66 out of 8 arcs, and even the characters you are supposed to be reminiscing about barely get screen time, so if you've never played the game you don't know who the heck any of these people are, and even if you know them only a handful actually get a chance to do something.
I also have complaints about the way that the story was not explained at all. I have played FGO since it came out on JP, played pretty much every Fate thing, and even read some of the novels, so I think it's fair to say that I have better understanding than the average viewer of what the story and concepts are about, but the utter lack of explanation on what was going on made me question if I was remember the story correctly. The pivotal moment of the entire first storyline of FGO didn't really get explained: like why a character walking up and sacrificing themselves actually accomplished anything, there were no visual or dialogue cues to suggest that it actually did anything and even the characters were like "cool, moving on". The movie also had this terrible habit of undercutting any tension or dramatic moment they were trying to build. I remember laughing hysterically because Ritsuka and the villain were having a dramatic argument on a static shot of them just standing there, the camera pans away suddenly, and then pans back to the same shot except there is a shield stabbed into the villain's stomach, and then it just lingers on that shot for like 5 more seconds. The final fisticuffs fight between Ritsuka and the villain which the entire fandom was kind of wondering how that even worked in the first place ended up being really lame, so that was another disappointment.
In conclusion, trying to tell multiple hours worth of story about 7 other stories in 90 minutes is a bad idea, but Fate keeps doing it anyways. This is movie is basically only for people who have completed Part 1 of the FGO story, anything less and you should probably save your time by skipping this. I at least wanted to see Ritsuka go full JoJo at the end but it seems like that wish will never be granted.
