Reviews for Fate/Zero (7.66) 192m5v

In art there is a concept of "medium". That is, a specifica mechanism, which is used to give an artist's idea some manner of material form, perceivable by others.
Books are a form of a medium. So are visual novels. So is, obviously, anime.

A piece that works good in one medium won't necessarily work good in the other. A great book or a visual novel won't necessarily make a great anime. Not without some significant adaptation, anyway.

Fate/Zero anime felt to me like a failed adaptation of a visual novel to anime. Why failed? Read on.

Enjoyment

I enjoyed the setting, the characters, the dialogues, the scenery, the general atmosphere. All the parts that were good in the visual novel were translated well.
However, anime is not a visual novel. When it came to any sort of real-time interaction between two characters - a classic weakness of visual novel genre, which translation to anime medium is meant to rectify - they were not on the level at all in this anime adaptation. In all action scenes without exception it felt like the scriptwriters tried to single out two characters and only show interaction between them. On a few occasions it worked well. Most of the time, it destroyed all suspension of disbelief and ruined all the enjoyment.

When an anime, which is supposedly serious about people fighting each other to the death, devolves into treating combat as a simply glorified form of dialogue, it is a fail. Thus the enjoyment score is 6 at best, and even this mostly on the merits of the source visual novel.

Presentation (video and audio)

When it comes to still images, they are amazing. Background music, sounds, voice acting - all on a very good level. Scenes without action could be considered breathtaking. In this category, the pedigree of the original visual novels shines through the most.

While the writing behind the action is quesionable, the execution is not. If the writers want that jet fighter to do a completely unplausible aerial maneuver, just to show the extent to which the pilot's madness bends physics in an otherwise supposedly "serious" universe, then it will be done in the most visually and audially impressive way possible.

I guess my only two gripes with this category are these.
1 - Most of animation happens in broad sweeping motions, so you don't really get to see the kind of detailed combat one would expect out of a well-funded combat-centric show.
2 - Ultimately, there is no unique presentation style. Nothing to really distinguish this show visually from all the other well-funded shows. Sure, there are elaborately designed characters and locales, sure there are a lot of particle effects flying around, sure the background music is chosen appropriately. But appropriately doesn't mean brilliantly. Technology does not make art.

While these two flaws prevent me from giving this show a perfect score in any of the presentation categories, it still well deserves an "8" in both.

Story

Story is ... problematic.
I blame the medium transition.

Specifically, the story is (a) not built to handle real-time interaction of more than two characters, (b) too complex for an anime series of 20-something episodes.
The fact that the story continiously creates scenes with multiple characters in them, and insists on referencing stuff way outside it's scope, only exasperates the above two issues.

In a visual novel, you can take your time, explore a complex event from multiple points of view, get away from the action to read up on stuff you don't understand, without disengaging from the experience of absorbing the novel itself. This is the advantage that less dynamic mediums have and the reason why they continue to exist, even as we discover more dynamic mediums.

In anime, you don't really have that luxury of taking your time to absorb everything. Every time a scriptwriter decides that he can put real-time events on hold for the sake of exploring a facet of a situation in more depth, anime experience suffers. If it's done to a small extent, it feels clunky. If it's done to a large extent, it feels fake. Fate/zero suffers from such clunky fakeness multiple times in every episode.

I can accept that this might have made sense in the original novel. But this is not a novel. This is an anime. Things - including story - must be treated differently here.
The way the story is handled in Fate/Zero anime is, while not completely dist, still less than satisfactory, which gives us a score of 5.

Character

The characters have great initial designs, exellent backgrounds and well-written personalities. If observing unique personalities interact is your thing, than this show features a lot of this kind of fun. Long-winded dialogues between people with interesting outlooks on the world happen all the time, especially during combat.

However, when it comes to characters engaging in conflict, very few of them emerge changed by the experience at all, and very fewer still do so in any meaningful way story-wise. So while there definitely are distinct, recogniseable and memorable characters, there is very little actual character development.

As someone who judges the worth of characters by what change they create in themselves and their world, i can't give more than 5 in that category.

Value

I doubt i'd ever want to rewatch this.
I doubt i'd ever want to recommend this to anyone. And if someone asks my opinion on this series, i'd tell the person to get the visual novel instead.
The only thing i'll this anime for are the awesome still images. A castle in the freezing north. A jet-black figher in a starry sky. Saber, standing among fiery sparks. You know, the kinds of things they use for visual novel images.

I am of the opinion, that the anime added exactly nothing to Fate franchise and failed at translating Fate/Zero story to a new medium. I feel that all the value this anime has is derived from the visual novel it was based on, not on creative work of the anime production staff.

Thankfully, that's still enough to give it a "4" in this category.