Category: Fate/Zero

Kiritsugu… has generic villain motives. “I am going to end all murder and killing, and in order to do that I’m going to murder and kill!”

Joking aside, with three episodes, it’s evident that the second season of Fate/Zero is already improving a lot. The first season had a lot of build-up, and now that that is over we can finally get down to business, and I love how well the creators made use of this. Kiritsugu’s plans were very well thought up and executed, in addition to being completely ruthless. Although I do wonder how he knew where Kayneth and his fiance were. Does that have to do with these familiars that were mentioned in one of the early episodes of the first season?

I also loved that after all of the focus on Chivalry from Saber’s perspective, this episode yet again comes with the complete opposite of this in order to criticize it. Neither side is right: Chivalry basically means killing with honour, but Kiritsugu’s methods also only give birth to more conflicts. I love how this episode managed to balance that out.

Also, Kotomine Kirei. If I didn’t find out that this guy is the main villain of Fate/Stay Night, I really would not have guessed that. This episode again showed him as this conflicted soul, not sure of what he wants to do. Seeing him trying to figure this out is also quite interesting.
Rating: **+ (Excellent+)

Overall, the competition that Fate/Zero faces this season is larger than what it faced for its first season. But really; the great thing about this season is that every series has its own point at which it really stands out. There really are a lot of well produced shows, but each stands out in its own way: Zetman through its expressive drawings, Lupin with its experimental and artistic style, Apollon through its fluidity and accuracy, Tsuritama with its whimsicality, Eureka Seven with its epic action, and Fate/Zero has the incredible polish that has become even better from what I remember of the first season. Seriously, this was probably the best episode of the series so far.

With this I can understand the need to take a 13 episode break, because the creators really used it. The CG in this episode was amazing, ranging from the dogfights in the air to Saber regaining her noble phantasm. Caster was also used much better than in the last episode, as the focus was much more on the characters fighting out a way to stop it, rather than blindly attacking it. The monster appeared in fewer scenes, which definitely made it more menacing. It’s also good that my least favorite character of the series is gone now, because that now makes way for the rest of the cast to shine.

This episode did particularly interesting things around Saber. With this episode she felt more like the main character of this series, with her Excalibur that allows her to cleave an entire fortress in one blow, but Archer and Rider made it look more like a curse than a blessing at the end of the episode. This will definitely return later.

The best looking scene of this episode was when that bug guy was burning. The animators really went for something different there, but there was a ton of raw emotion in that scene, and I loved what the creators did to him.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Okay, so this was a bit of an annoying cliff-hanger to close off the series with. Nothing was resolved at all. We’re just going into a 3-month hiatus, which will immediately start with the fight against Caster.

The rest of this episode was building up, and it’s clear that the creators are holding on to their trump cards for the second season. The dialogue in the Rider parts in particular were very good (by the way, I could have sworn that Rider was the Persian conqueror Iskander, but instead he turns out to be Alexander the Great).
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Overall this series had some flaws here and there, but despite that this was my favorite Type-Moon adaptation aside from about half of the Kara no Kyoukai Movies. I’m probably one of the few who actually liked the Tsukihime anime, but in the end that series is inferior to the setting and research of this series, and none of its characters come close to Rider’s. It’s just better in a lot of different ways.

For the next season, I do hope that Caster dies off quickly, because the caster duo has been the least interesting pair of the series so far. It’s all just too standard, the fights against him were boring, his hobbies of murdering children never really paid off due to the censorship, and this episode pretty much sealed the deal and the creators just gave up on him, turning him into a giant blob in order to at least make it a bit of a challenge to bring him down.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I’m a bit confused here by the nature of those hand seals. First of all, it really appear that Assassin died last episode because Kotomine Kirei fulfilled his duty to spy on the five other masters, which already seems a bit strange to me on its own: this is a battle to the life and death. Are these mages really that good to have anticipated exactly every possible outcome or tactic that could be employed to kill them? It seems really early to just abandon Assassin like that.

Then this episode goes and out of nowhere makes Kotomine Kirei a potential master again… because apparently “the grail says so”. At this point I find that more like a Deus ex Machina, to be honest. Where did those seals come from? Are they from Lancer? But didn’t that red haired woman take them? So are they the remaining seals from Assassin? Does that mean that you can just continue to participate in the holy grail war as long as you don’t die, as long as you can capture another servant? Then why didn’t people worry about this when they learned of the first Assassin death?

Also, I fail to see the true importance of the seals here, and why having one extra counts as a tremendous advantage. Sure, it’s indeed handy if you’ve got a servant who won’t listen like with Lancer or Berserker, but with servants like Saber and Assassin they’re pretty much useless, while Caster and Rider drag their masters around so much that it would be impossible to control them with just three commands.

What I also wonder: what’s in it for the holy grail to see a bunch of magicians fight for it? I get why everyone’s fighting, but why was the holy grail created in the first place, and why does it have to have a war once every few years to hand out a wish? If it wanted to achieve something, couldn’t it just use that wish and achieve it anyway?

Oh, by the way: this episode is starting to work better than the casual talking episodes of early in the series, because we’re getting to know more and more about the characters. Seeming them discuss the plot becomes a lot more interesting this way.

Also, I know this is nit-picking, but this bothered me when I saw Archer with his hair down: how can he have his hair up in the ED?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I am of the opinion that having an episode with a completely different mood or theme once in a while is a good thing for a series, provided that the episode in question isn’t bad, and that the show doesn’t stay in it. It’s a good chance to show a different side of the series, rather than just staying with episodes of the same mood over and over again.

Now, this episode was about a character whose grown up version in the five episodes of Fate/Stay Night was a very annoying character, and traits of that tsundere definitely showed in this episode. Still, this had its merits. I complained about how the deaths of the kids in this series lacked impact because they were just random kids that died. This episode actually showed a bit of the perspective of those kids, and didn’t make them random anymore.

On top of that, this episode finally showed a bit more about two characters who mostly remained in the shadows: that bug guy and Rin’s father (whose names I unfortunately can’t recall at the moment). Especially the former was something I really liked.

As for Rin: well, she’s an impulsive kid and this episode undoubtedly had its annoying moments. The first half of this episode wasn’t exactly exciting, but it did build up to a very good second half here. It’s a bit questionable that Rin already has a huge sense of responsibility despite being what? Nine years old? She was lucky here that Caster’s master sees children as random tools, and therefore in no way expects them to be able to threaten him.

Oh, and Ufo-Table’s CG artists were very good in this episode. That locket or those crystals for example looked really good and refined. The backgrounds when Rin was in the city were also very detailed with a lot of random garbage in the backgrounds.
Rating: * (Good)

Mercilessly killing innocent young boys is nice and all, but the Kayneth gore scene in this episode was by far the most effective gore scene in this episode so far. Gore isn’t just abut blood, but also about making it look very painful. Breaking a finger may not be as bad as stabbing someone in the heart, or hinting at a bloody corpse off-screen, but the way it was portrayed in this torture-like way definitely paid off. In fact the entire part around Lancer, Kayneth and that wife of his was one of the best parts of this series so far, because of how much change there was compared to the previous episodes. Seeing a suddenly helpless Kayneth with his wife now taking over worked as a really good development. Lancer’s pas was also excellent. We didn’t really get to see exactly what happened to him, but the hints were plenty to give him some new depth, and add that to his strong convictions of not betraying Kayneth, and yes: these are three characters who improved a lot in this episode. The development of Rider and Waver is more slow and gradual. These two have banter, and over the episodes they grow closer together. It’s the standard stuff, but it works. Rider in particular still has some great lines, and he’s really well acted. Also, I keep praising series for picking settings that aren’t overused. So of course I really like how Lancer dates back from the Celtic legends. In fact, nearly all the servants come from interesting times in history. There is a lot of interesting stuff in history, so it’s great that there are series like this that aren’t just “let’s glorify our history”. While interesting, I want to see them glorify the history of other areas in the world as well. Oh, and what I also liked was how this episode turned magic into a science.It was a clever little trick to set up a systematic map of the town’s river and its magic use. But are sewers in Japan really big enough to fit in Rider’s entire carriage? Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>

This episode showed three fights right through each other: Emiya versus Kayneth, Kirei versus Irisviel and Maiya, and Caster versus Saber and Lancer. I especially liked the middle one, in which two vastly inferior fighters tried to stop stall time and prevent Kotomine Kirei from reaching Emiya. This guy really is brutal when he wants to, and it’s probably only because he was interested in the two of them that they got away with it. The blob fight also was pretty interesting. Emiya had a very clear plan on defeating Kayneth, and Kayneth was just way too cocky. His pride is by far his biggest flaw, in that he refuses to acknowledge anything other than accomplished magic. He’s like this character who spent way too much time reading books, instead of getting actual combat experience. He relied too much on his tricks to realize the possibility that people might have developed weapons that are designed to take down mages. The fight against caster though… I don’t really know what to make of that, and it was rather boring. At first Caster is all like “I have you surrounded now, so I’m just going to sit back and give you time to talk about how to defeat me!” and then saber pulled this shiny thing that allowed lancer to charge past these monsters and cut Caster’s book which somehow made the monsters disappear, only to heal afterwards but the monsters didn’t return… I’m not really sure what the creators wanted to do with that battle. In general battles against small armies are really hard to do in anime… and this unfortunately was not a counter example. Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>