天下制覇

Needs more squirming, less info dumping.

I guess I’ll split this hour long premiere up like I did with that other one last season just for ease of screen cap dumping. The OP played at the end of the broadcast, so I’ll just get it with the second half’s stuff.

Impressions:

I guess the first and most disappointing thing that I noticed is how poor the animation is here. The art is very good, yes, but like the most boring parts of the Rakkyo films, whenever the exposition starts, which is constant, it’s filled with very long distance shots, shots of the backs of people’s heads, and shots of whoever the person not speaking in the conversation is so they have to animate as little as possible. Or my favorite, the slow walk in a circle around Kotomine so you can reuse backgrounds repeatedly with multiple characters. Just because it’s an information dump doesn’t mean that it needs to be as visually engaging as watching paint dry. For example, as you explain the Holy Grail War, show examples of Servants and Masters fighting, don’t just linger on some completely bland, not to mention unrelated, distance shot of a station for upwards of a minute.

Thankfully, things did improve a little bit in the second half (of this part), or to be more exact, whenever Waver was around. Waver was actually gesturing and showing a little emotion, and they flipped over the Servant archetypes as he discussed them. That’s still not great animation, but at least it’s making an effort visually to make a living universe instead of letting all the characters be basically statues that spew out exposition. The most animated thing besides him in this half were the worms crawling over Sakura. 95% of the rest were people standing rock still as they spoke… when they were even on screen. That may also be why they wanted to broadcast this as an hour special too, because bloody nothing happens in this half. Yes, I know some of the explanation about the Grail War is necessary, but that and a little bit of intro to Waver and Kariya’s background is really about it.

Well, and that every shot of Iri was accompanied by the camera focusing on her clevage.

To be continued in the second half!