Crunchyroll

Just today, I finished rewatching the second season of Fate/Zero on the recently-release blu-ray box set. Since I’ve reviewed the full series as well as the first box set, I’ll go ahead and give my thoughts on this second set as well. Most of what I said about the first set will also apply to the second, so I’ll focus on the things that are different, including a few disappointments.

Once again, the video and audio is very well done. In the first set the studio, ufotable, added some material - a few shots in the episode where Rider and Waver find Caster’s hiedout, and several minutes to the episode “Discussing the Grail” (the episode which formed the basis of this post). Here, as far as I can tell, there is no new material; I assume there’s been some touch-up work, but if anything extra was added I didn’t notice.

Code Geass took me a while to get through, partly because Crunchyroll has the first season but not the second, but I finished it. This turned out to be one of those shows that I should’ve watched sooner, because, despite a few problems, it had a lot of things I enjoy - a grand scale, a battle of wits, moral ambiguity, a mix of angst and humour, pizza, and a little sister character, among other things. To start, I liked the character designs, which were done by CLAMP. Every character felt unique, and the main characters developed believably over the course of the series. Some of the side characters were one-dimensional, but nonetheless they did have a part to play so they didn’t feel tacked on. The art used a vibrant colour palette, perhaps too much so for some of the darker moments, and the animation was fluid throughout. The OP and ED themes consistently disappointed me, though the animation and artwork used during those segments partly made up for that. The soundtrack itself supported the show well, and I wouldn’t mind owning it on CD.