Easily one of the best anime I’ve watched. Though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t a Fate fan.
This show is essentially a love letter to Nasuverse fans, and I haven’t had this much fun piecing together a narrative in a long time. The reference drops are so subtle that when they finally land, everything cascades at once like dominoes. What makes them work is how they’re used. They’re never overshadowing or propping up the story. The story is going on as it is; the references are just cues into what the hell is going on. Because oh god, the story. That was a beast on its own.
Even from the beginning, we were theorising about how there could possibly be an Einzbern here. Illya’s mother is gone, and Illya definitely was as well, considering she completed the holy grail in the fifth war. So this had to be a new one. All doubts about Illya got dashed the moment we saw the new homunculus’s figure; Illya is flat to a point, she ain’t ever gonna grow like that. But she had this Rin kinda voice to her, and with so much happening at once, I didn’t think too hard into it. Every new character introduced had us pausing the show just to talk about it. Then she revealed she was Ishtar, and I was having a freaking wet dream watching that.
Speaking of so many things happening, the pacing was immaculate. The show lets characters breathe while holding us, the viewers, with a very tight grip. The mystery of each episode, coupled with the character action and how the show made us care about every single one of them, all culminated into something I just couldn’t look away from. Hell, I still can’t stop thinking about it.
Easily one of the best anime I’ve watched. Though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t already deep into Fate. The number of shows and movies you need to fully understand and feel the depth of this is magnitudes bigger than the show itself. Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero, Lord El Melloi, Fate/Grand Order Babylonia, and maybe Divine Realm of the Round Table. They all feed into what makes this work as well as it does. Even after all of this, we were still missing pieces.
We haven’t read through the Tsukihime and Witch on the Holy Night VNs, so we were really struggling with those references, especially the vampire-related ones. Because like hell the show is gonna explain it. It has such a grand story to tell, it doesn’t have time to hand-hold you, which is another thing I love about it. It doesn’t overly dump exposition; it gives you just enough to create that curiosity, then proceeds to blow us away with what’s going to happen next.
All this time, I thought Fate was good. I’ve played through the Stay Night VN, so I’d say I’m more invested than the average person, but I still would have put it at the level of a good, well-rounded isekai like Slime. Never anywhere close to Oshi no Ko or Frieren. Watching this show made me rethink that entirely. I loved Fate/Stay Night for its fantasy and fights. I loved Fate/Zero for its serious no-bullshit vibes. This just seems like the natural evolution of the best parts of both.