So here we have it, the best we are going to get from this series. We may get standout moments in the later parts of the story but I think this episode is as good as it gets. The adaption still isn’t what I would call good, and oddly enough the best parts of this episode was when they stopped being faithful to the source, but at least it was entertaining. We have a action focused episode as we have Shirou vs Wilhelm, Ren vs Kei and finally Ren fighting the glorious bastard himself, Reinhard. Now while I believe the animators did the best they could with this, sadly the animation couldn’t really keep up with everything on screen and ended up choppy and unrefined.
It’s things like this which make me wonder what it would be like if Ufotable was handling this adaption for if they were this episode would likely be an action masterpiece. Honestly this episode was absolutely insane and i for one really liked that. The premise of this show was already ridiculous so why not just turn everything up to 11 and run on the rule of cool? So how did that go? Well in this episode a human overturned a truck full of liquid nitrogen on top of a vampire and proceeded to run him over with a motorbike. Two teenagers engaged in a deadly sword fight while running on water. Our protagonist took on a giant golden skeleton that shoots laser beams and spawns WWII soldiers, fighter planes and tanks. So as I watched Ren blow up planes and rip apart tanks I suddenly wondered just how this show managed to suddenly kick so much ass.
Some claim that this messes up the power dynamic because they went too big, too fast. Hogwash, I say. DIes Irae doesn’t have any real consistency in it’s power levels anyway. Masada has too much of a tendency to rely of Deus Ex Machina that he often just throws power levels out the window. These fight scenes were toned down in the visual novel such as Shirou’s fight not taking place on a highway and the entirety of the fight against the skeleton. Really all that happened was that Reinhard showed up on the bridge, Ren suddenly attacked him out of terror and that caused Marie to break and get stabbed through the chest. If they didn’t skip over parts of the Kei and Ren fight and improved the animation then I would say the anime handled this scene better than the visual novel did.
So aside from the fight scenes we also got Shirou at the beginning breaking the fourth wall to tell us about are rather important part of this whole story as well as an important detail about his character. Shirou, much like some other characters in this story, suffers from a constant sense of Deja Vu. He constantly feels like he’s done things before and is simple following a predetermined path. This in turn fuels his dangerous recklessness as he seeks out more outrageous and dangerous activities to try and experience something that he never felt before. On top of that it seems he has a degree of immortality as no matter the situation it always ends up with him surviving. Put simply, Shirou is a insanely lucky guy and his battles have always been a highlight for me because he doesn’t have a annabelle like Ren and thus he needs to pull off some truly insane things to gain the upper hand in battle. Shirou is a bit like a Jojo’s protagonist without all the posing. Well I was pleasantly surprised this episode and it would be nice if this marked a turning point in this anime, where it might not make for a good adaption but it could very well end up being entertaining to watch regardless.
