Fate/EXTRA Last Encore 09

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

A woman shows Hakuno a film, revealing that she was Saber-Nero’s former Master. Further, the woman learned that she wasn’t even a real person, but was in fact an NPC character who’d come to life. Saber-Nero points out to her then Master that this should not be a concern as Saber is merely a recreation of the real person that lived ages ago. Sometime later, Saber reveals to her then Master that she was Nero. Despite Nero’s life ending in tragedy for her, she bears no resentment of it. The woman has some final advice for Hakuno and vanishes.

Hakuno awakens in a ruined building, connected to Saber-Nero. Rani is there, administering treatment to keep Hakuno alive. Since Saber had recovered, Rani used her excess vitality to heal Hakuno. Saber is happy that Hakuno is well. Hakuno tells Saber they should end this since he’s merely a corpse and not a true Master with a proper ambition. Saber rejects this, pointing out that she’s been dead for thousands of years and that he did have reasons to ascend to each tier. She further assures him by saying that even if he is different from her former Master, he has the same heart as her. Both of them are Hakuno.

Hakuno and Saber have resolved things, while somewhere on a different level of the building, Rin and Rani have overheard the conversation. Saber and Hakuno come up with a plan for defeating Julius and his Berserker Servant. Saber battles her opponent, using her skills to match Berserker’s, then using her Noble Phantasm to defeat him. Meanwhile, Hakuno takes a beating, but remembers Saber’s words and activates Dead Face. Julius does the same.

They battle for quite a long time until Hakuno manages to defeat Julius. Julius believes that the dead can’t change anything and predicts Hakuno will end up like him. After Julius fades, Hakuno meets up with Saber. She’s relieved to see him, though concerned about his battered appearance. She announces that Rin and Rani won’t be joining them on their journey to the sixth tier. Elsewhere, Rin and Rani chat and though their role is finished, Rin decides she wants to tag along with Hakuno and Saber for a while longer. Rin leaves as Rani watches the Moon Mile Ladder ladder ascend, then she dissolves into energy.

Thoughts/Review:

Good grief. It has been so long since I last watched an episode of Fate/EXTRA Last Encore, I actually had to look up the name of the lead male. What does that say about this series? Oh well, time to get cracking on a review of Fate/EXTRA Last Encore 09.

Hakuno is Hakuno

Thanks to you great fans out there, I already know that the female we saw at the beginning of the Fate/EXTRA Last Encore series was Hakuno. Fate/EXTRA Last Encore 09 confirms that although Hakuno has a male persona in this version, he is still the same person as she was at the core. Indeed, a piece of her appears to reside inside him, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to provide all of that exposition about working with Saber-Nero way back when.

So now that all of that is resolved, hopefully we don’t get any more somewhat tedious exposition on Hakuno. Ugh. I hate sounding like that as I usually want to know more about characters. However, I guess because Hakuno isn’t all that interesting of an MC, getting his life story isn’t all that interesting. Further, the whole Fate/EXTRA Last Encore world is so strange, often very confusing, and thus not all that interesting either. That doesn’t help my feelings on Hakuno.

Saber-Nero

I do like Saber-Nero, but most of that comes from her in Fate/Grand Order (back when I actually bothered with the story). So getting the lengthy expose on her backstory wasn’t as bad, but sadly, not as good as it could have been. Oh well.

We get to see Saber-Nero use her Nobel Phantasm this episode, whereupon she makes short work of her Berserker opponent. As she did this, I thought, “Where is she getting her energy to do all this stuff?” I mean, she had to supply the energy to Hakuno in order to bring him back to full health. That means that she can’t be getting energy from him. And this doesn’t fit the bill in Fate/stay night, where a Master could not provide his Servant energy, but thanks to the “miracle” of sex, was able to make that provision.

Well, probably best that I not think about this too much.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Yay! I’m still awake, but I feel the weariness coming upon me. And the new anime season is here and I’m already behind on Lupin III, to say nothing of the new Full Metal Panic. So I better wrap up my review of Fate/EXTRA Last Encore 09.

• Rani joins the “she’s not quite dead yet” element. I thought she wasn’t going to leave the fallen Masters on Tier 2. I guess that was a lie.
• I’m glad Rin is hanging around. Rin has been awesome in every Fate title I’ve seen to date.

In the end, Fate/EXTRA Last Encore 09 feels like a mostly forgettable episode in a mostly unremarkable anime series. (Alice being the exception there, followed by Rin.) Well, I see there’s an episode 10 out there. Not sure if that’s the end or not, but time to check it out.