Fate/strange Fake

Marinate1016★ 10

After what seemed like 100 years of delays and anticipation, Fate Strange Fake finally arrived and not only delivered on the high expectations I had for it, but exceeded them. Recency bias and all that, but idc, to me this is the best Fate series ever. It feels like a culmination of decades of world building and lore and a true love letter to type-moon and its fans. I’ll say right now, this is NOT for newcomers to Fate. I don’t care what any YouTuber or “influencer” on Twitter tries to say, you will not appreciate this series to the fullest extent if you’ve notat a minimum read both the original Stay Night and Hollow Ataraxia visual novels as well as seen or read Fate/Zero and to be honest, you’ll want to have seen at least a little of Kara no Kyoukai and player Tsukihime. Yea, it’s a lot, but there’s no rush on getting all of that done. Take your time, enjoy the journey and then come watch Strange Fake and experience one of the most well produced anime of all time. Type-Moon is my favorite franchise of all time, so to get a series like Strange Fake that blends together so many different elements of the franchise from various series and has countless references to almost every corner of the TM universe just feels like a dream come true. Again, I can’t stress enough how important it is to come into this with prior knowledge of all the main series in TM because every single inch of this story is covered in references that will you have you pointing at the screen and jumping up and down like an idiot. If you’re at all familiar with Narita Ryōgo’s works, you know he’s a master of world building and character development with huge casts. Sometimes too much, actually. Fortunately, I feel like he nailed the balance in this one. It’s a massive cast with a wide range of personalities and motives, but they all feel memorable and distinct so you don’t forget characters like you can in some of his other works, *cough* dead mouth death play *cough* It also helps that the characters in Fate are usually historical figures so there’s some significant feat or trait to hold onto and that allows you to ingrain them into your memory. Not to mention the amazing and distinct character designs. It’s the largest holy grail war ever, but it’s not overwhelming. Combine that huge distinct cast with some of the best animation you’ve ever seen, and you got something special on your hands. The production values are incredible here and I’ll get to that later, but outside of the general love letter to Type-Moon vibe Strange Fake has going on, what’s really amazing about this series is the sheer variety of characters and their complex motivations and relationships. Masters, servants, officiators, there’s someone in this series for everyone. I also think it’s really cool to have a Holy Grail War where you could genuinely root for multiple people to win it. Like in OG Fate everyone was obviously backing Emiya to come out on top. In Strange Fake, there’s not a set MC per se, so you could root for Ayaka and Saber, Flatt and his servant, if you like chaos you could go for Francesca or any of the other numerous contenders. It kind of reminds me of To be Hero X in that regard where every week a new character’s introduced, you get their backstory and then you fall in love. I think that makes things a lot more fun and interesting because it’s a more unpredictable story with a ton of likeable characters. So many people in this series have valid reasons for obtaining the Holy Grail and you don’t want to see any of them die, well, MOST of them anyway. I haven’t read the books yet, and at the pace they’re going here, I probably won’t need to(at least not right away) since we should get a full adaptation rather quickly, but I’m really interested in seeing how Narita ties everything together and resolves this in the end. It really doesn’t feel like a depressing sort of story where a lot of people would die, so I’m hoping for a rather optimistic ending here. I also HAVE to believe my Ayaka x Saber ship will sail because I love them so much. Romance isn’t anywhere near the main focus here, but it’s a very clear subtext to their dynamic that makes me want to root for them. They also have a lot of mutual trauma that they help each other through. I actually have this ship as right under Artoria and Emiya now. It’s just that good. I’m also a huge fan of Francesca, she’s basically had me in a chokehold for the last few months. The ONE thing that gives me a little cause for concern with Strange Fake is that apparently they’ve adapted 6 books here in the first season which seems crazy to me. I mean on average, seasonal LN adaptations will do 3-4 books tops in a one cour series. If I’m not mistaken, there’s only 4 more books to go including the forthcoming final book in the series, so two seasons of the anime should just about wrap things up. On the surface, it seems like a lot of stuff would be cut, but from what I’ve heard from LN readers, there’s not much missing here so if that’s the case, hats off to the staff. As an anime only, I feel like everything’s been paced pretty well. Only thing I’d like to see is a little more screentime for a few characters, but that’s the nature of such a large ensemble cast. I’m on record saying this numerous times and I don’t care, I’ll say it again. When given proper time and budget, A-1 pictures are the best animation studio outside of Kyoani. I fully believe they’re better than ufotable, I much prefer their more realistic highly expressive character animation to ufotable’s bright stylized stuff. That’s going to come down to personal preference, but to me, the way this show and sentenced to be a hero look is my ideal anime art style. The action sequences in Strange Fake are awe inspiring. There’s not a single fight in this show that won’t take your breath away and it’s made even better by the magisterial Sawano OST. My GOAT delivered some of his best ever work here and it elevated every single tense, emotional or high octane scene. Provant was on repeat for a solid month straight to the point I wore the song out. I can’t wait to do the same to every song in the OST once the full version drops. Fate Strange Fake is the best the Fate series has ever been in my honest opinion and I couldn’t be happier with the job A-1 have done in bringing this to life. The story, direction, pacing, soundtrack and voice acting have all been top notch, I’ve had a blast watching the story gradually expand week after week and I cannot wait to see where it goes in the future. Fate Strange Fake gets 10 out of 10.

AlmightyLeek★ 7

I'm just confused to be honest. I guess this is my bad, I have only watched fate 0, stay night and unlimited blade works, so I'm probably missing a lot of context. The anime does have a good production value, the VA, the animation et soundtrack are all A-Tier. I have no idea what's happening though, so much info dumping with terms i've never heard before and I don't know if I'm missing important knowledge or if it's just the style of the anime to try and be "mysterious". It's still very much watchable, despite its biggest flaw being a too bloated cast with some of the cringiest charactersi've seen in anime (Jester or the Francisca-something twins are a pain to endure every time they have screen time) but some others are so greatly interesting it's not a big problem. I just wish I understood more about why each character has this or that power and how it works