January 2nd, 2017 
AstroNerdBoy Fate/Grand Order: First Order (First Look)
Hey gang! I’d meant to have a review written by now for Fate/Grand Order: First Order, but it is taking me longer than expected because I ended up not doing much of anything this weekend. On one hand I needed it, but on the other hand, when I have free time, I should get something done. I didn’t even play a game. I did sleep a lot though.
Regardless, as I’m working on it, here are some quick thoughts of mine.
- TONS of exposition, all needed, but man is it a lot.
- Love seeing Fate/stay night Servants in new forms.
- Two main characters need lots of character development.
- The stuff with Chaldea reminds me of NERV from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- Animation OK, but I imagine what this would have been like in ufotable’s hands.
- Crunchyroll didn’t use Japanese honorifics, save for “Senpai.” 🙄
- I’m not sure if the series is supposed to be set in 2016, or if it is in the future and things are happening in the past (starting with 2004) that will cause the world to end in 2016.
While this anime special is self contained and based off of the mobile game of the same name (which can only be played in Japanese at the moment), it is clear that this could open the path for other specials or even a TV series.
Hopefully, I’ll get a proper review up in a couple of days, depending on work.
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Interesting point about Chaldea resembling NERV. To me, it looks as if they are trying to set up Mash as a Rei-type character.
Agree that the two main characters need development. Shirou Emiya could be exasperating, but at least he had some sort of a motivation. So far, Fate/GO’s main male lead doesn’t seem to [spoiler]have any motivaton: “I hate to put you in this situation, but we need you to save the world. Can you do it? Will you do it?” “Eh, sure, might as well. If I can.”[/spoiler] Granted, it’s only the first episode, but so far the main male character bores me so much I can’t even be bothered to look up his name.
On the other hand, it was great seeing [spoiler]LancerCaster; he made the episode for me. Great [spoiler]Noble Phantasm he had there. Wish we could’ve spent more time with Saber Alter, gotten a better idea of what she was going through.[/spoiler] That was one of my major issues with this episode — too much time spent on the main characters, not enough on the other Servants.
Granted, Fate/ series tend to be exposition-heavy early on, but the first half of this first episode seemed particularly infodumpy — threw me off more than the exposition in UBW and Fate/Zero did.
Ah, so ufotable didn’t do this series. Agreed, the animation was decent, but it also made me appreciate just how much ufotable spoiled us with their work on UBW and Fate/Zero.
I was also puzzled with the [spoiler]late director’s arc. What was its purpose? Was the director supposed to help nudge the main male character into becoming a true Master? Was her death supposed to show just how dangerous this new enemy was? Her death, ultimately, seemed kinda pointless. Which may have been the point.[/spoiler] Just seemed like they could’ve done more with her character.
Ultimately, it seems as if the main fun of this series is probably going to come from the new Servants — I recognized [spoiler]Jeanne d’Arc and Fate/Extra’s Saber, who should be fun. I’ll be disappointed if we don’t get Fate/Extra’s Caster too.[/spoiler] This could still be an enjoyable series, but so far I’m not looking forward to the next episode with the same anticipation and can’t-wait eagerness like I was with UBW and Fate/Zero.
😆
I think this could have been fixed with a proper anime series.
As to Olga, I agree with your assessment and questions. Really seems a waste.
We’ll see if they produce more or not. This special was basically a massive advertisement for the game. However, should the anime prove popular enough, more specials could be done.
Are there going to be more episodes? I took this to be a one time thing.
Anyway, Grand Order is a mobile game where the player is the main character so I wouldn’t expect the protagonist to be any more interesting than in other adaptations of this sort.
Astro, if you’re such a big Fate fan I recommend to check out the Fate;Strange Fake manga. It started as an April Fool’s joke by Ryogo Narita, but Nasu liked it so much he made it canon and it became a regular novel series (one volume per year.) The first volume has been adapted to manga and should be around on all online manga readers. It’s pretty great with awesome characters. Plug over.
In closing, I wouldn’t expect too much of the Grand Order anime, it’s doubtful how well a game that’s not a visual novel can be successfully adapted to anime AND tell an interesting story. We’ll see.
Woops. Didn’t realize this was a one-off. That would explain the lack of a next-ep preview. 😉
Fair point. Gives me more reason to wish they’d spent less time on the Chaldea folks and more on the Servants.
I think they’ll keep on adapting more of Grand Order *if* the sales figures for this are good enough.
I’ll look that up immediately.
Damn, never thought A-1 pictures would become such a generic studio, the protagonist and designs in general as well as, look identical, to Aldonoah Zero.
Which is annoying, if you consider the artwork for black Butler and pre magic games Fairy tail. Which was extremely high quality. All their work now, looks like a madhouse minium viable product/sailor moon crystal.
Unfortunately, the Blu-ray’s do not make anything better.
One punch man is an expectation, because yusuke marata is so ostentatiously detailed, that madhouse couldn’t get away with it (it being parastye level art).
It seems only JC Staff are keeping their standards high, look at Monster musume, that series is is exquisite in the art department, plus.Theirs a night and difference between 720 and 1080. Also prison school was high quality as well.
I haven’t paid too close attention to studios these days, other than ufotable due to how amazing I thought Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works was. That said, I have noticed that it seems that I’ll sometimes see a character and think, “Is that so-and-so from such-and-such series?” I know it can’t be ’cause the “such-and-such” series is over. It is just that the character design is pretty much being reused for another character in another series, only with a few modifications.