天下制覇

  

Will not be happening here.

Impressions:

Twelve minutes of talking, a minute of CGI ‘action’, the one event for the episode (Archer’s betrayal), a couple more minutes of blathering, 30 seconds of some actual fighting, and then back to more talking and looking constipated to finish out the episode. Some things never change. Not that I really expected any different at this point. At least the animation was animated. Doesn’t make up for how mind-numbingly dull or unanimated the rest of the episode was, or Shirou’s continued fist clenched while straining as evidence as his (lack of) character manifesting itself and supposedly developing in some way.

As I mentioned at the end of the previous season, my patience for this has just about reached its end, and they’re content to do the absolute minimum with anything in the source material, let alone spruce up the dull parts, and that kills any interest to watch the rest of this play out to see how they adaptat it. I already know. Those dull parts are to be highlighted, framed, and given extra focus, because who cares about heroic figures of yore fighting? What people really care about in the Fate series is clenching your fist and staring off meaningfully into the distance. When it’s actually animated, it looks fine. Often great, even. But that is infrequent, undermined by poor direction, and all the characters are still overly content to just stand around and blather at each other for entirely too long stretches of time about how vitally important everything is before wandering off to go stew for another 15-45 minutes. They’ve mistaken posturing for substance and dialogue for development, resulting in characters who do little more than yammer hollowly with no souls to call their own… when they’re not just staring off into the distance at least.