Category: Finished Series: Adventure/Fantasy/Science Fiction

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)]]>