天下制覇

  

Zzzzzz…

Surprise! It’s an hour long! …Great. I’m just grouping this into one post instead of splitting it. It’s fine because the first half was…

Impressions:

Fantastic. This is what the show needed. 15 minutes of a daaaate, then Caster appeared and spent 12 minutes giving the speech she prepared while everyone glared at each other. And then, Saber finally snatched, it was time to… sit around the parlor and have a little chat. Oh wait, Caster also visited Kotomine to… have a little chat. But at least Shirou… slept through almost the entire second half before showing up to watch Rin leave. What an exciting goddamned fifty minutes. I think the issues with this entire season were perhaps summarized best by the closing montage of all the characters, antagonist especially, sitting around waiting for something to happen. Aren’t we all?

 

Next season preview:

Temporary Final Thoughts:

I lasted longer than F/Zero thanks to it hitting the action quicker and a bit harder (and with less CGI), and far fewer dour men simply staring into blank space for ten to fifteen straight minutes, but my patience here has pretty much run its course as well. There was absolutely no need for this to be 12 episodes (15, really), and they’ve done very little with the main characters to this point except navel gaze, even while not shutting up about how important the stuff that they can’t be assed to do right now is. There’s guts to contemplate instead, after all. All these last three months have accomplished is introduce a parade of antagonists, in lockstep sequence, who each then almost immediately vanished entirely from the show, and then kill one of them. Off screen. By somebody else. So the main characters may as well have not even shown up.

On top of that, the action is mostly really poorly directed; all flashing lights and fast movement with not meat to it. Very nice flashing lights and fast movement, mind you, but very few of the scenes have anything more than that. No tempo, flow, ups or downs, progression, etc. I was hoping they’d build off the initial “Look how flashy we can make things” fight from the very start, but only the fight with Kuzuki even partially rose above that, and even it was still plagued by characters standing around like scarecows, staring placidly and chewing their cud before gasping in surprise… also typically in sequence.

If I’m going to continue with this when it starts back up in 3 months, the second season is going to need to bring a lot of action, improve on it tremendously, and take a cleaver to Shirou’s self-absorbed empty brain.