It hard to have an opinion on the last three episodes of Fate/Extra when the content has been quite similar to the previous episodes of the cour. For now the series has ended with the remaining episodes coming as a special later. Still unknown if that was the actual special broadcast that was originally considered a second cour. These three episodes mainly dealt with our protagonist getting through the fifth and sixth floors and yes, the fourth floor was rather shamelessly skipped over and only spoken about at the beginning of episode 8 as being “No big deal”. They essentially pulled a Katanagatari on it and to a degree I understand as the fourth master really was someone not really worth caring about. In fact depending on what route you took in the game the fourth master could be one of two different people, neither of which are particularly interesting. Only real thing of note was that one of the servants was actually Arcueid from Tsukihime which was rather neat.
Despite the different episode number the problems of the series remain the same. The fifth floor attempted to give some characterization to the protagonist and even featured female Hakuno for a brief time but ultimately Hakuno just remains a bland faceless void that you can’t really care about. Again the Scenario is interesting but the execution is lacking and it really does bug me about how that became a running theme. Really, looking at the story of Fate/Extra purely on paper it’s hard to imagine that it would be as lifeless as it is. Let us recap, the first floor had a city set up to harber masters that gave up on the war which culminated in the entire city getting flooded and Nero fighting a pirate ship on top of the ruined city. The second floor featured a forest with a sniper whose been killing people for a thousand years with a servant who can turn invisible. The third featured a cyber ghost girl in a weird wonderland who has been twisted into a monstrous abomination while waiting for the return of a friend. The fifth featured a master who was also a dead face, causing the protagonist to question his very existence and find new meaning to his mission all while finished with a battle on top of skyscrapers between master and master with servant vs servant. The ice landscape sixth floor had two masters who fought each other to a tie and ended up becoming the floor itself spawning hundreds of soldiers to fight each other for a thousand years only to finally gain enough sanity to guide Hakuno to the sixth floor just so he can end the long standing tie. Looking at all this , it all sounds very interesting and even great so why is it that I only remember feeling apathetic while watching previous episodes? By all accounts this should be engaging, it should have me anticipating the next episode with excited glee. Yet, much like the personality of Hakuno, I just feel it’s been a lifeless void.
I believe i have more or less covered why but seeing as this is the last episode for a while I might as well do a roundup. I can point three things that are messing up this story. One is that this story is almost 90% told through exposition. The exposition dumps are egregiously bad so as to have the setting, characters and current events all told through whatever is deemed to be the mouthpiece of the author. Too much effort has been put into explaining the story over telling it and despite all this it still remains a confusing mess at times because it fails to establish a foundation. Just when you think you know what is what, the story flings another conundrum for you to place and gives little motivation to do so. The second thing is characters with a big offender being Hakuno the blank nobody character. Nero admittedly is pretty tiresome as well considering her main roles is to do the fighting and be waifu fanservice. I am actually having trouble placing who is a worse protagonist, Sieg from Apocrypha or Hakuno from Extra but in truth they are remarkably similar in how they are both non characters with some existential dilemma of their manufactured existence that ultimately leads them to become stereotypical hero archetypes. Though while the main reason for hating Sieg is that he took screentime from much more interesting characters, the characters of Fate/Extra outside of Hakuno and Nero are really just exposition devices in human clothing. These creatures spout exposition about the nature of their character, the world and magic without much emotion. Indeed even in face of their own death they speak there last words like reciting a shopping list. That’s not how humans talk, we don’t just have prepared speeches and lectures ready to be fired off with perfect clarity and precision when first questioned. Our emotion comes out in how we speak, even how we respond to certain topics is within our character. Nobody stands like a mannequin reciting hamlet from memory. Of course some may argue that in this series everyone has lived a thousand years and their dehumanization is the result of dealing with a unwinnable situation for so very long. To which I say fair enough but it means that nobody here cares about what is going on and if they don’t care, why should I?
Then comes the third problem, the animation. Now it actually has be wanted by fans for quite a long time for Shaft to do an adaption of Fate/Extra, a sentiment that I never truly understood. Maybe it was because Shaft animated the openings for the Fate/Extra games but I honestly felt they were a mismatch. Shaft are about artistic animation saving techniques, you can have an opinion on the expression that Shafts style brings but the ultimate goal is mainly to present a show in a matter that’s least troublesome to animate. Considering that the Fate series has a pendant for ridiculously impressive animation it seems like a odd choice to go for a studio that uses style to cover for animation workload. Maybe it was because Fate/Extra was considered more avantgarde? Like hell it is. While exposition scenes are made a bit more interesting with their visual experimentation, ultimately it makes all the fight scenes of this anime feel ridiculously anticlimactic. I once thought Fate/Zero was too anticlimactic, oh what a sweet summer child I was for Fate/Extra truly embodies the word. Not a single fight in this series is remotely satisfying. So the fighting stinks, the story told primarily through exposition and the characters are too apathetic and soulless. So on a last note I will say I did at least like the presentation of Nero’s backstory, female Hakuno showing up briefly and that one small moment where Rin describes her hellish situation with a pained smile. Emotion, makes all the difference.
Wow, I’m glad I dropped this series then. Considering the first Heavens Feel movie will be out soon, I’ll just look forward to that instead. Thanks for reviewing this though! Now at least I know it isn’t worth picking up again since it had such a lackluster execution.
Felt like this had the potential to be a top tier anime with the premise and studio. Shaft showed they can animate pretty damn well in the Kizumonogatari movies and figured they’d go all out for a Fate adaptation. But like you said the characterization was piss poor and spent too much time talking instead of showing.
I’d have waited as long as needed for a 2 cour version of this story, provided that extra time would be used to develop personalities and chemistry for the talking pieces. I also felt like every floor could’ve used an extra episode or two. If each floor was treated as it’s own story/arc, it was as if the 2nd act was cut out of each story. Honestly, the writing was on the wall at episode 3.
All that being said I still loved the Nursery Rhyme arc so this wasn’t a total waste of time.