Review of Fate/Zero
why is this anime so highly rated and revered?? i put off this series for a long time due to the sheer size of the entire franchise, which intimidated me, but the fantasy lover in me couldn't let one of anime's most iconic series in recent years just pass me by without even giving it a shot. so i did. and i regret it. i think a lot of the problem with fate/zero is that it's just so FLAT. 13 episodes in, nothing important enough to get the plot really moving has happened. no machiavellian schemes, no jaw dropping plot twists- not even the most baselinerequirement for a decent action anime, GOOD FIGHT SCENES. the art and animation are really mediocre to my mind, as are the fight scenes. i don't understand why people keep singing their praises. i thought i might have had unrealistically high expectations for an anime that came out quite a while ago, in 2011-12, but code geass came out in 2008 and far surpassed fate's animation quality imo. not to mention plotwise
character wise, fate/zero has quite the line-up. unfortunately, the protagonists are of the cookie-cutter, paper flat, morally absolute variety, making the show an absolute bore 90% of the time. the antagonists, which include a duo of insane serial killers, are by far 2000% more entertaining, and i might go so far as to say that i'd rather watch an anime focussed on THEM. as most of their appearances feature them in the process of murdering either women, small children, or both, and i am not the kind of person who delights in such sights, that just tells you HOW BORING THE MAIN CHARACTERS ARE. girl king arthur aka arthuria aka saber takes the stage yet again and by the power of excalibur and her omnipresent angst over not having served britain sufficiently as a king succeeds in single-handedly turning me off yet another series under the fate franchise (the other being fate/stay night). she is the servant of Kiritsugu Emiya, a former mage assassin who wants to heal the world, make it a better place, where everyone can laugh and no one will cry again, etcetc, in the exact likeness of the battle cry of a thousand male anime protagonists who have gone before him, EXCEPT unlike most of those dudes he has actually scored a reasonably pretty wife, who, despite having the personality and character development of wet cardboard (she gets a cool backstory which is tragically never taken advantage of), actually seems to agree with his highfalutin ideals! but he chooses to wallow in angst and self-pity due to Backstory reasons which were never really explored in the first season and which i guess i will never know of unless some bizarre twist of fate (ha) convinces me that the second season is worth a shot despite how mind numbingly boring the first season was. and finally, kiritsugu's so-called nemesis, Kotomine Kirei, who targets him for no reason at all, despite them having never met, due to one (scanty) sheet of paper his father gave him on kiritsugu's backstory piquing his interest. apparently this took .5 seconds to spiral into full blown obsession on both sides, and one season later, they pretty much admit to themselves that they're targeting each other, even though they have never so much as MET. at least kotomine is more interesting, by which i mean less morally upright, though you'd never know to look at the guy- in his own way, he's trying to masquerade as part of the saber/kiritsugu gang by force-fitting his personality and motives to fit the role he's chosen for himself in life, a priest. i hear he later grows a pair and ~breaks free~, but 13 eps in he hasn't shown the slightest sign of wanting to erupt from the cocoon of his own weaving, so he gets a thumbs down from me for now.
to be fair to fate/zero, there are a ton of other side characters, and some of them are pretty cool too, but most of this show is just the ten-part tragedy of saber and kiri and koto, so heads up, people. also to be fair to this series, the ost is seriously amazing, but knowing what i do now, i'd just download it from somewhere and skip sitting through the actual series all over again.
maybe if i manage to scrooge up the motivation to watch s2 and find it completely worth the bore of s1, i'll come back to this review and make a few edits, but even if that comes to pass, expect s1 to make any of that so called motivation take a holiday for a good, long time. which is to say. expect nothing of it at all.