But while it is quite the visually solid show, I didn’t really find all the fight scenes very engaging either.
I suppose one can argue that this is more of an action flic, and indeed that is the main draw of Fate/Grand Order. So, overall, while there is a lot of stuff going on (extinction of humanity, and all that), it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of depth there. He frankly has very little purpose other than to have a boy for the girl to meet (and for, er, chauvinism, I guess). The male-lead (the player stand-in in the mobile game) is, by comparison, exceptionally boring, and that’s sold as a feature, not a bug (except instead of ‘boring’ they call it ‘human’). And while Mash/ Ms-Can’t-Afford-Full-Gear/ some Arthurian knight ( Takahashi Rie) is super cute (free glasses-kouhai? Now I know how Chaldea attracts recruits), that’s really all there is carrying this relationship. One is a fairly generic RPG thing: go here, kill this. There are, roughly speaking, two plot lines.
Happy New Year).Įxposition aside, there’s not actually that much story in the 72 minutes or so of Fate/Grand Order. That way, you can catch the little references, feel smug when you rognise the ‘Atlas’ name-drop, and be totally on board with Cu Chulainn being a total bro or Medusa dying first (not before killing Shinji, though I guess everybody feels better now. Still, I think it’s probably best that any potential viewers go in having watched a Fate show of some kind or wielding some wider Type-Moon knowledge. Conveniently, we have a protagonist ( Shimazaki Nobunaga) who has, against all odds, managed to not know anything about anything, and so there’s always a good excuse to be explaining something. Everybody is on hand to give exposition, including the villains who are friendly enough to reveal whatever secret magical powers they have up their sleeves. Thankfully, the rest of the feature is much more accessible, owing to the regular infodumps Fate/Grand Order will routinely provide. Just, I don’t know, make something explode. By all means, start in media res, but nobody really needs to speak much. One is meaningful advice, the other is a stroke. Your plumber can tell you your pipe has sprung a leak, or tell you that your Troy has gadzooked a moist-danger. You’re not being mysterious, you’re playing Mad Libs. Yeah, I know, you want to keep your plot mysterious by masking it in proper nouns, but it doesn’t sound mysterious to us. It’s unavoidable, because jargon always sounds silly to those on the outside.
A word to all budding directors out there who still do this: you sound ridiculous. It could still not be for me.Īnd so it seemed, when Fate/Grand Order -First Order- started with that most tired of clichés: people panicking while shouting technobabble at screens. And, who knows? Maybe the adaptation is aimed at those who have played the game, and will go over the heads of those without the prior knowledge. The only danger is that videogame adaptations are a tricky business (how do we translate game mechanics into anime? Mostly, we can’t), and mobile game => anime, in particular, have almost universally sucked. And Type-Moon has recently done pretty well with anime properties, and it’s a trend well-poised to continue with a feature-length special. Fate works pretty well in the videogame format not only has it already, in Fate/Extra, but the original VN really did seem to want to be a bad RPG with its awkward stat sheets and arbitrary mechanics. Still, I was relatively enthusiastic about a Fate/Grand Order anime, because I wanted to find out what they’re doing with the franchise and the world. I have never played Fate/Grand Order, and do not intend to (because mobile game, language barrier, vampiric free-to-play model).
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