Birdsie
The God-Emperor of Mankind
I have to say, I came to Fate/Apocrypha with excitement. The First Episode BLEW my mind. And you can tell I'm a Fate fan, because I have Shirou Amakusa Tokisada as my goddamn avatar, even though he's a character from this very series.
I just watched Episode 21 of Fate/Apocrypha and I'm becoming more and more disappointed. Atalanta looked like such a good waifu on paper, but she's so annoying. Her backstory was a literal 20-second segment showing her watching some kids play soccer. She was poorly fleshed out and had no meaningful interaction or development whatsoever...
...
... Interaction and development that could have been, had the series not sacrificed 1/3 of its runtime on the "fluffy romance" between Dull McPlain and Ms. Saint Child Murderer.
Honestly, the only few things positive about this I can think of are Team Saber, Shakespeare, Shirou Amakusa Tokisada and maybe Semiramis. I'm also willing to give Karna a spot here purely because he's a badass.
And even then we barely get anything of substance on them, and I judge them purely off of what we are told and how cool they are.
I think the most well-developed characters are Mordred and Sisigou. We actually get some decent backstory on both of them, not outstanding, but decent. Mordred wants acceptance - to become a king and show that she is fit for the role. Sisigou wants to stop Satan from fucking his life up because of a contract written centuries ago. Both have solid motivation for what they do, and we are shown that.
Now, take Shirou as an example. We see less of him, but he still explains his motives to a big degree - at least big enough to understand it well. You can somewhat sympathize with him, especially that he is just so serene and calm about his goal of saving mankind. It's hard not to feel good things for the guy who wants you, your family, your friends, and everyone on the planet to be happy for all eternity... to the point where I find it ridiculously stupid that the Red Team would want to stop him, for any other reason than selfishness.
Yes, yes. I know. The Third Magic, blah blah, Holy Grail, blah blah, Resurrecting the Dead = Break the World. I don't care. He'd fix the problem of war, lack of food and water, and early death, all in one go. And make it so that you don't have to say goodbye to your grandpa. I seriously don't care this'd destroy all society and civilization as we know them. People would be happy. That's a fundament. And it's hard to disagree with the motivation of "saving everyone and making them happy."
Other than that, not a lot of the characters are great. The spar between Achilles and Chiron looks like it's supposed to have meaning, but really, it's anti-climactic. Just showing the viewers a flashback of Chiron kicking Achilles' ass in pankration a few episodes prior would double the badassery of the fight, to at least move it from 'Meh' to 'Pretty cool' in my eyes. It'd be even better if we got to more exploration of their motives. Achilles has that big philosophical speech about heroism, to which Chiron protests. But I, and probably no one else, have any idea what they are talking about and why. Honestly, Chiron just comes off as the biggest bag of dicks of them all - he literally wants to selfishly become a God, and he still calls himself a good person. It's so hypocritical when you could use the Grail to wish, I don't know, to make the plot a little more compelling?
And lastly, Atalanta. Yes, I get it, killing kids is evil. Too bad the kids she was protecting were Jack the fucking Ripper and were killing people and happened to be wraiths "living" in eternal pain, torment and anguish, and she was so mind-numbingly dumb as to not even see it. I'd actually forgive and tolerate that kind of outburst against all logic if we were given proper backstory on her instead of literally 20-seconds of her talking to some servant girl doing her hair and watching kids play soccerball outside her tent on a beach. It's just stupid.
In the end, the best things about the anime are the fights (or rather, their choreography,) soundtrack, comedy, animation, and Team Saber. And that speaks volumes, since the story should come first above all of these, but in this case it is last.
I suppose the character design wouldn't have been bad--oh, wait, it seems they didn't get the memo about the no fictional servants rule and decided to put in a genderbent Frankenstein just to have a scene with her suffering at the hands of William Shakespeare with little to no meaningful interaction with her Master or nearly anyone else other than...
giving him a flower.
I mean, what is that supposed to symbolize? Flowers symbolize life, I guess? So maybe she's trying to point out to him she's not just some homunculus, but an actual, living human being? (Though, I guess she is a spirit in this case, but whatever.) Maybe she wanted his love? It looks like a clean, maybe just slightly cringy if cute romance story that the writers wasted for a scene where she explodes into Mordred, the dude wastes his Command Spell, and we discover it was a vain sacrifice because Mordred was barely hurt.
Seriously. Way to give someone an anticlimactic death. This show is full of anticlimactic stuff, actually.
In the end, this series is like a huge dump of wasted potential. It hit off strong for me at EP1. I was instantly captivated by the awesome visuals and characters, so I completely forgot about the narrative. And as the lackluster story was introduced, I realized what a piece of crap it was.
As Caster/William Shakespeare said:
"Stretching a scene that isn't very exciting is the hallmark of a poor work."
And let's not speak about Sieg. The fact that he is wasted potential on two legs, absolutely boring, and to be honest and cruel - totally unnecessary to the narrative.
Can you imagine Fate/Apocrypha without Sieg? Because I can. It'd be easy. It'd even make things smoother and give a lot of time that could have been used on making the other characters more likable, give them backstory, and proper grounding. It's called nuance, and Fate/Apocrypha lacks it. He has no personality other than that he wants to help people with some stuff. I mean, can you write down Sieg's personality in more length than 4 lines of text without looking into the Wikia? Oh, wait, that's right. He's so bland not even the Wikia has much to say about his "personality."
In my opinion, Fate/Apocrypha is mediocre. We'll see how it is when the ending is released.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
One out of five golden stars.
I just watched Episode 21 of Fate/Apocrypha and I'm becoming more and more disappointed. Atalanta looked like such a good waifu on paper, but she's so annoying. Her backstory was a literal 20-second segment showing her watching some kids play soccer. She was poorly fleshed out and had no meaningful interaction or development whatsoever...
...
... Interaction and development that could have been, had the series not sacrificed 1/3 of its runtime on the "fluffy romance" between Dull McPlain and Ms. Saint Child Murderer.
Honestly, the only few things positive about this I can think of are Team Saber, Shakespeare, Shirou Amakusa Tokisada and maybe Semiramis. I'm also willing to give Karna a spot here purely because he's a badass.
And even then we barely get anything of substance on them, and I judge them purely off of what we are told and how cool they are.
I think the most well-developed characters are Mordred and Sisigou. We actually get some decent backstory on both of them, not outstanding, but decent. Mordred wants acceptance - to become a king and show that she is fit for the role. Sisigou wants to stop Satan from fucking his life up because of a contract written centuries ago. Both have solid motivation for what they do, and we are shown that.
Now, take Shirou as an example. We see less of him, but he still explains his motives to a big degree - at least big enough to understand it well. You can somewhat sympathize with him, especially that he is just so serene and calm about his goal of saving mankind. It's hard not to feel good things for the guy who wants you, your family, your friends, and everyone on the planet to be happy for all eternity... to the point where I find it ridiculously stupid that the Red Team would want to stop him, for any other reason than selfishness.
Yes, yes. I know. The Third Magic, blah blah, Holy Grail, blah blah, Resurrecting the Dead = Break the World. I don't care. He'd fix the problem of war, lack of food and water, and early death, all in one go. And make it so that you don't have to say goodbye to your grandpa. I seriously don't care this'd destroy all society and civilization as we know them. People would be happy. That's a fundament. And it's hard to disagree with the motivation of "saving everyone and making them happy."
Other than that, not a lot of the characters are great. The spar between Achilles and Chiron looks like it's supposed to have meaning, but really, it's anti-climactic. Just showing the viewers a flashback of Chiron kicking Achilles' ass in pankration a few episodes prior would double the badassery of the fight, to at least move it from 'Meh' to 'Pretty cool' in my eyes. It'd be even better if we got to more exploration of their motives. Achilles has that big philosophical speech about heroism, to which Chiron protests. But I, and probably no one else, have any idea what they are talking about and why. Honestly, Chiron just comes off as the biggest bag of dicks of them all - he literally wants to selfishly become a God, and he still calls himself a good person. It's so hypocritical when you could use the Grail to wish, I don't know, to make the plot a little more compelling?
And lastly, Atalanta. Yes, I get it, killing kids is evil. Too bad the kids she was protecting were Jack the fucking Ripper and were killing people and happened to be wraiths "living" in eternal pain, torment and anguish, and she was so mind-numbingly dumb as to not even see it. I'd actually forgive and tolerate that kind of outburst against all logic if we were given proper backstory on her instead of literally 20-seconds of her talking to some servant girl doing her hair and watching kids play soccerball outside her tent on a beach. It's just stupid.
In the end, the best things about the anime are the fights (or rather, their choreography,) soundtrack, comedy, animation, and Team Saber. And that speaks volumes, since the story should come first above all of these, but in this case it is last.
I suppose the character design wouldn't have been bad--oh, wait, it seems they didn't get the memo about the no fictional servants rule and decided to put in a genderbent Frankenstein just to have a scene with her suffering at the hands of William Shakespeare with little to no meaningful interaction with her Master or nearly anyone else other than...
giving him a flower.
I mean, what is that supposed to symbolize? Flowers symbolize life, I guess? So maybe she's trying to point out to him she's not just some homunculus, but an actual, living human being? (Though, I guess she is a spirit in this case, but whatever.) Maybe she wanted his love? It looks like a clean, maybe just slightly cringy if cute romance story that the writers wasted for a scene where she explodes into Mordred, the dude wastes his Command Spell, and we discover it was a vain sacrifice because Mordred was barely hurt.
Seriously. Way to give someone an anticlimactic death. This show is full of anticlimactic stuff, actually.
In the end, this series is like a huge dump of wasted potential. It hit off strong for me at EP1. I was instantly captivated by the awesome visuals and characters, so I completely forgot about the narrative. And as the lackluster story was introduced, I realized what a piece of crap it was.
As Caster/William Shakespeare said:
"Stretching a scene that isn't very exciting is the hallmark of a poor work."
And let's not speak about Sieg. The fact that he is wasted potential on two legs, absolutely boring, and to be honest and cruel - totally unnecessary to the narrative.
Can you imagine Fate/Apocrypha without Sieg? Because I can. It'd be easy. It'd even make things smoother and give a lot of time that could have been used on making the other characters more likable, give them backstory, and proper grounding. It's called nuance, and Fate/Apocrypha lacks it. He has no personality other than that he wants to help people with some stuff. I mean, can you write down Sieg's personality in more length than 4 lines of text without looking into the Wikia? Oh, wait, that's right. He's so bland not even the Wikia has much to say about his "personality."
In my opinion, Fate/Apocrypha is mediocre. We'll see how it is when the ending is released.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
One out of five golden stars.
