Fate/Zero Season 1 Review

Name(s): Fate/Zero / フェイト/ゼロ
Format: TV series (13 episodes)
Studio(s): ufotable

I don’t like this. It’s right on that line for me of dull without being an offensive watch. It bodes a little better there than say, Baccano!, because it’s not routinely stupid in its writing or structure. My reasons for not caring about anything in this show might sound vague, but I’m confident in them nonetheless.

I expected to really enjoy Fate/Zero, because I think its premise is great. An excuse to have famous historical figures interact with each other across time in a somewhat-serious context sounds appealing enough on its own. If handled with the sense of dramatic bombast anime tends to have, it sounds like a formula that could really exude the sense of legend and real-life mythmaking that these figures represent.

Sadly, I think this conceit has barely been realized. The first red flag was that they made the natural decision of including King Arthur as a character, one of the most universally-known figures in history, fictional or otherwise, and then immediately made the decision to make using his mythology pointless by arbitrarily distorting the story to get an original character to fulfill their “girl with sword” quota and make a character that bears King Arthur’s name but possesses none of the symbolism associated with him throughout his legends.

The occasional callback to Saber’s time being alive does little to convince of the fact that this is anything but a dull, original character in the guise of a more interesting figure, without actually being that figure. The implementation of the others is a little less ridiculous, but aggravating in a different way in that the show makes the bizarre decision of picking such a random assortment of figures out of the countless less obscure and more interesting possibilities.

It feels like such a waste, and it caps off with Berserker (who I might as well add has done almost nothing for half the series). The whole mythological figure angle is so underutilized that each servant may have well been some entirely fictionalized summon who had no association with any real-life legends. If you removed explicit names but kept everything about the plot and their powers the same, no one would be the wiser as to their identity. That’s how unrecognizable they are.

So, putting aside that I think the main conceit of this show is a bust, another thing that drew me to it was its structure of a single-setting battle arena and the possibility of gamesmanship between the competing masters. These parts exist, but they’re so unappealing to me because I don’t care about any of the characters conducting them. Backstory is divvied out as sparingly as this show can muster, and yet without it, it still expects us to sympathize with the risks everyone’s putting into the tournament.

Without knowing these things, any personality-driven decisions are meaningless, and the base personalities of the cast aren’t entertaining enough to make their acts fun to watch themselves, in the way a similarly light action genre piece could pull off. The show’s attempts at philosophical rambling aren’t that robust to begin with, and they never become anything more than that, because you have such a loose picture of the people discussing it and what it uniquely means to them. It also makes charting any character development or decisions really unsatisfying, because you don’t really know where it all begins.

The action sequences are flashy and big, but never truly feel that way because the scripting of them is so dull. There’s little in the way of clever strategy or rooting for the cast, and it all just feels like movement and explosions for the sake of it. It’s not fun at all. There’s such a lack of permanency to any of the episodes. Far too many times did some kind of scuffle come about only for the Grail War’s status quo to not substantially change by its conclusion. It leaves a terrible taste in my mouth and is probably my best example of this show having lame writing.

Fate/Zero is so hollow that even my complaints about it are sounding vague. So, while I’m being vague, if I had to describe the experience of watching this show, then I’d say it was like watching a bunch of people aimlessly running around while holding sparklers.