Fate/Stay Night

After finishing the excellent Fate/Zero anime adaptation, I decided to revisit Fate/Stay Night, the anime version, which I hadn’t seen in several years (before you visual novel people jump on me, I’m in the process of playing the VN and am a few hours into it). Though the show does have a few defenders, I’ve found that it’s much maligned by fans of the original. Though these critics often overstate their case, the show as a whole is a mediocre execution of a brilliant premise.

Yesterday, Fate/Zero came to its conclusion. I’m sad to see it end, too, because I can’t remember the last time an anime had me this excited. I can even put a price tag on this one, $700 - $370 for the first season (reviewed here) and $330 for the second.

Fate/Zero is a series that does almost everything right. Taking the animation, for instance, very few TV productions look this good. The first season did have a few scenes that had to be touched up on the blu-ray, and the second will be the same, but overall it’s a great-looking show. The action scenes especially looked fluid and well-choreographed. Even the dialogue-heavy episodes, and this show has several, have enough detail to really feel alive, and retain the generally dark, heavy atmosphere of the rest of the show. We do get the occasional lighter-hearted scene, usually involving Waver and Rider, but that’s never enough to fully escape the feeling of dread appropriate to the show’s high-stakes plot. The only problem with the animation is the use of CG, which isn’t too bad, but doesn’t quite blend into the rest of the show.

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Going into 2007 and ‘08, the combination of university, work, and commuting between them destroyed the vast amounts of free time I’d enjoyed in high school, though having my own car and a decent income for a college student did take some of the sting off that. My hobby of collecting hobbies, though, had to go. I dropped the time-consuming video games, especially the RPG’s I liked, as well as my attempt at learning to play guitar. Literature remained, and though I did as much leisure reading as I could manage, as a literature major I got most of my fill of that in class. Most of my leisure reading, in fact, consisted of graphic novels.