Its been a while since I watched the anime so I have no idea if this applies only to this special or to the entirety of the series but here I go anyways. Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note - Tokubetsu-hen is what you get when someone tries to cram as many ideas into a story as they can without taking the effort to flesh any of them out. The explaination of the primary magic used in this special was lackluster at best, making me confused on what was going on, especially with the way that it twists what kind of magicprojection magic is. And as someone who has fallen way to deep into the fate rabbit hole, many of the uses of magic seem completely unfeasable in the magnitude of their power. The story is also extremely rushed, as many of the characters are only fleshed out from small snipbits of their lives which stops one from truly getting to know the character other than the most basic info about them. Like there is only enough information given to have a prelimilary understanding of the motives of many of the characters, but thats all that they have. The anime expects its veiwers to piece together what kind of person each character is, but not enough to make the characters actually seem human. Plus there is kind of a reliance of tropes in the story, as many of the main plot points in it are as generic as they can be. but hey tropes are tropes so i can let it slide a bit.

overall, Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note - Tokubetsu-hen could have been a much better story if it had a longer run time in order to fully flesh out many of the characters, but being limited to being a special stopped the story from ever expanding its roots and becoming something other than a pretty basic story.