Review of Fate/Zero

In its three months run, Fate/Zero has managed to amass quite the following. It dazzles the audience with its highly stylized visuals, sports a fanciful narrative and boasts a multidimensional cast of characters. It’s certainly a complete package that any anime fan will enjoy and doesn’t really require comprehensive knowledge of previous Type-Moon works to be appreciated despite what others may tell you. It’s a prequel that can stand and be valued on its own terms. Fate/Zero is set up as a prequel and takes place 10 years before the events of Fate/Stay Night. Yet despite the continuity between these two works, they share littlein common besides some characters and themes. The plot details a battle royale between several Magi as they fight each other to death for the Holy Grail. Each Magi comes with their Servant, a heroic spirit drawn to the power of the Grail. Everyone comes with their own motives, strengths and weaknesses and the audience plays the witness as everything comes together in a pulse-pounding an intense manner. The pacing and set-up for everything is expertly fine-tuned and executed so the entire show is very gripping from start to end. Along the way, you’ll end up hating some characters, latching onto others and developing newfound respect for otherwise despicable ones. F/Z’s cast is very well written in the sense that they have a very clear set of traits and a defined character arc that progresses in dynamic ways with respect to the other characters. More importantly though, there isn’t a clearly defined moral landscape. Many characters are very ambiguous in their motives and actions. In fact the difference between the protagonist and the antagonist is almost nonexistent at the beginning. Aside from the context of their backgrounds, Kiritsugu and Kotomine are very similar. Yet the juxtaposition and dichotomy of the two set the tone for the rest of Fate/Zero. Certainly that tone may appear to be outwardly dreary and grim, almost excessively so, but the overall nature of the show is pragmatic. Kinoko Nasu, the writer of Fate/Stay Night, used his characters as springboards for elongated scenes of philosophical contemplation. Yet that’s not present in Fate/Zero. While it is definitely a character study at heart, it’s more about character dynamics and development than introspection. Which basically means Fate/Zero has much more focus with its characters, for better or for worse. This is one of the key facets where Fate/Zero and F/SN differ greatly. I’m not saying that one is objectively better than the other; instead they’re both good but for wildly different reasons. If you’re someone who adored the technobabble elements of Nasu’s works, than you might be put off with how straight-forward everything is in F/Z. With that said, F/Z is still very solid with its narrative and cast, they intrigue and entertain the entire way through.

The structure and pacing of F/Z is a bit of a different story. The basic layout is exposition, followed by buildup and ends with a confrontation. This cycle repeats itself multiple times and follows the same basic structure of the novels, adapting it competently enough. However F/Z does trip its own feet towards the end of its run. Specifically, I’m referring to episodes ten and eleven. My thoughts go along the lines of “Goddammit ufotable, what the fuck were you thinking?”. The main problem here is that episode ten is completely out of place with the rest of the show. No there’s nothing particularly bad about the content of the episode. It’s just that something that should have been a simple side story, is stretched to the length of an entire episode. And as a result, the pacing of the show is thrown off balance. To add to this questionable decision, episode eleven on the other hand is erratically paced. One episode is too slow, not particularly engaging and has far too little development for the main plot, while the other episode is far too quick. It literally rushes through a lot of important material and gives us the short end of the stick in terms of character development and insight. It also doesn’t really give the audience time to fully digest and internalize a lot of the events that occur. To further add insult to injury, episode eleven (the one that’s actually important to the show) gets horrendous production values. And not just you’re typical QUALITY here and there; I mean an entire episode that is a clear step down from the others in terms of overall animation, art and direction. Yeah yeah, it’ll probably get “fixed” in the BD release, but I’m not reviewing the BD release now am I? Unfortunately, this little misstep sticks out like a sore thumb and just grates on my nerves like nobody’s business. This really stops me from loving the show to pieces, but oh well maybe the second season won’t make such grievous mistakes.

One of my favorite parts about Fate/Zero is the direction. It’s definitely one of the more standout shows this year, similar to Penguindrum, Idolmaster and Nichijou in terms of storyboarding and animation prowess. You get a lot of people often saying that ufotable animates their shows really well, but that’s not entirely correct. A storyboard is basically barebones key animation, a rough sketch of the scene with a summary of what the director wants the key animator to do. Back when they first started out, ufotable was a studio that put more focus on key animation than storyboards. However, somewhere down the road they shifted this focus to storyboarding, its particularly noticeable first in Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight. This change in focus really bore fruit when they started working on Kara no Kyoukai. What this means is, they started to put a lot more detail into their storyboarding. Stuff like expression changes, minute details in character movement, are very apparent in this style of storyboarding (which if I had to define, is probably slow, weighty and very precise). It’s the same style they use for Fate/Zero and the results are very good. The general composition for a shot is superb and meticulously detailed. A lot of the off-center shots it has are great for the atmosphere; it shows the audience multiple subjects within a single frame and builds immersion. What you get is a show that manages to not only hold your attention for its 23-minute duration, but really draws you into its world. The animation on the other hand, ends up playing second fiddle to storyboarding and composition work. Outside of fight scenes, the animation is rather stiff and lacking in detail. However it’s not too noticeable mainly because the framework is excellent. You’ll come across very little badly animated scenes in Fate/Zero which is certainly a complement, since most TV anime these days have a hard time keeping the quality up for just one episode. This is in part due the fact that ufotable is keeping F/Z as a complete in-house production which is very rare in the industry. The only other mainline anime studios that do this are Kyoani and Gainax (their original anime projects). An in-house production benefits from having a uniformly singular, cohesive vision that many anime don’t have the luxury of getting. The end product is very well put together and consistent in quality. The only real weak link in the overall bundle is probably the music in my opinion. I know everyone loves Kajiura and drones on and on about how great her work is, but it’s rather forgettable here. Aside from the sweeping scores that accompany fight or tense scenes, there really aren’t many standout tunes. Kara no Kyoukai benefitted from her work, but for some reason F/Z is missing strong melodic or ambient sounds, which could have greatly helped with atmosphere building. It’s wasted potential in this otherwise tight package. The voice work is top notch; stand out performances includes the entire fucking cast. I can’t think of a single character whose lines aren’t delivered with panache and emotion. It’s some of the best and most enjoyable voice work I’ve heard in quite a long time and if I really had to choose just one performance, it’d be Jouji Nakata. Behold everyone; THIS is how you breathe life into a villain.

Fate/Zero is definitely of the better shows to come out this year. It’s not necessary to be a Type-Moon buff to enjoy it; in fact it’s probably one of more accessible works out of the Nasuverse. People might say that watching Fate/Zero before F/SN will ruin the whole thing but honestly, it doesn’t really matter. Both can function as a starting point in the series, Fate/Zero is written to be a sufficient gateway as well. Many people seem to forget that Nasu and Butch wrote the novels with this in mind. So go for it, you really can’t go wrong with an anime like this. The best part about this show is that it doesn’t even cover the best parts of the novel, so we have quite the second season ahead of us.