Alright, I’m about to do something a tiny bit complicated in a short amount of time.
I’m going to explain Fate/Grand Order under the assumption that while you might be a Fate
fan or you might have watched some Fate anime before, you’ve never dived into the madness
that is the stupidly successful mobile game.
And you might figure that you can just jump into the latest anime of the Fate franchise,
Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia, and navigate just fine.
To which I say, “Good luck.”
Babylonia is an adaptation of the 8th story arc from the mobile game, and it very much
assumes that you at least know the general premise of the story before beginning.
Heck, I might even say that this entire anime was designed under the assumption that the
only people who would care to watch it are players of the game, because that’s definitely
what it feels like.
Then there’s the fact that the anime is a result of a survey to fans of the game asking
what their favourite arc was and what kinds of things they’d want to see with the franchise,
which led to the results of “Babylonia” and “TV Anime”, so it’s not hard to
come to this conclusion.
But since there are many Fate fans who have never bothered, or quite frankly don’t have
the time, to have dived into Grand Order proper – believe me, I understand – today I wanted
to do up a quick primer on the story so far before outlining if this new anime could possibly
be enjoyed by non-fans of the game.
Buckle in, this will be like condensing the Star Wars expanded universe into a video,
except it’s about Fate.
Hey, did you know that was an actual event that happend in-game that one time?
Fate Grand Order is a Gatcha mechanic game originally released in Japan for mobile phones
in 2015. The elevator pitch for the game is quite simple.
Create narratives that allow for players to pay and roll for
servants from across the Fate universe – from Emiya, to Bluebeard,
Mordred, and of course the OG saber Artoria Pendragon and her many MANY costume changes
masquerading as entirely different people.
You play as one Ritsuka Fujimaru, who finds themselves as the only survivor from a group
of Master candidates now tasked with saving the universe after a massive calamity that
started to rip it all apart at the seams.
Fujimaru, alongside their Shielder servant Mashu, must travel to the moments in history
when anomalies began appearing and not only sort out the whole mess but also recover the
mystical holy grails that caused the mess in the first place.
The actual quality of many of these narratives, or singularities as they are called in-game,
varies depending on the writer.
Most are passible, giving somewhat absurd but still entertaining reasons to have various
historical characters appear throughout Singularities.
In America, this involves the player fighting alongside a Berserker version of Florence
Nightingale against a Thomas Edison whose head has been replaced with a Lion for….some
reason.
In other singularities, like Septem…actually, you know what?
Let’s not talk about Septum.
It’s not worth the screen time.
But the crème de la crème of narratives from the game involve the 6th and 7th singularities
Camelot and Babylonia.
Camelot begins to answer many of the game’s deeper mysteries, such as whom the villain
actually is, what the real deal is with our companion Mashu, and hey everyone loves Artoria
so let’s showcase some more of the Grail Knights and have them be temporary antagonists.
But more importantly for today, Babylonia is the penultimate singularity, where our leads must
recover the final grail from the Fate franchise’s biggest dick Gilgamesh, while fighting literal
gods, demons, and joke characters.
and that's basically the primer!
Babylonia has thus far been very considerate at not bringing up unnecessary information from
singularities past with about one exception in the first 6 episodes.
I don’t count the stuff from the prologue chapter regarding Olga Marie, because that
technically was animated a few years back.
So if you want to watch Babylonia, but you are worried about what you need to see beforehand
all you really need, in this one fan's opinion, is some previous Fate anime as
a universe primer, whether that be Deen, UBW, or Zero, and you might as well toss in the
Grand Order prologue adaptation as well.
Now as far as answering the question of is it worth it, well…..
it is if you like a lot of asskicking.
Though some might argue it’s a bit heavy on the ass.
How the show actually looks is an interesting topic.
The action scenes are noteworthy for just how fluid they are, even if the character
designs heavily suffer as a result.
Remember how recent seasons of Pokemon changed the character design to be a lot more simplified,
but in exchange got much more fluid animation in return?
Same basic concept.
The movement of all the characters looks great, even if the result is that the vast majority
of characters all have the same face.
Now, I know it is a common joke in the fate franchise
that a lot of characters share the same face, mostly because they are all freaking SABER.
This is particularly annoying considering that Grand Order is a game that passes off
Servant designs to a myriad of Japanese artists with varying styles.
But now instead of the uniquely designed Nightingale, we have this…blander version.
Same for Mozart.
Hell, if I Photoshop the hair off a bunch of these characters, you might find it hard
to identify who they even are.
But at least the battle scenes look amazing, even for joke characters!
The only thing that depresses me about the action is the show’s sound design.
I never had the chance to talk about Fate/Apocrypha in a video before, but it was the one that
started this problem for me.
Someone on the sound design team really likes this
one particular impact sound...
this one particular sound, the one that sounds like it came straight out of JoJo with
Dio shouting ZA WARDO!
It’s everywhere and on top of not playing well with any speaker I own, it just grates
on my ears after a while.
Apocrypha used it with much more regularity then GO has at the moment, but it’s inclusion
worries me and it makes me think that maybe now that will become a standard sound for all action scenes in
Fate going forward.
My poor ears...
Ultimately, while it is quite fan-focused and so if you play Grand Order you’ll get
a lot more out of the material, it is still possible to enjoy this new series with just
a tiny bit of prep.
Just don’t make this your first Fate.
Not only will you be confused out of your mind, but honestly some things here would
make horrible first impressions.
I love Caster Gil, but half of that is because I’m so used to dick Gil after Stay/Night
and Zero.
So now to see him NOT be that is great!
But yeah, don’t start here but don’t feel too intimidated by it just because you don’t
play the game.
It’s a more entertaining series than Case Files, and I love my boy Waver but....
Man.
Not great.
Maybe that was just me...
Thanks for joining me in this quick discussion.
There will be streaming links for Grand Order in the description should you require them, as per usual.
Let me know down in the comments what you have been following this season.
I know we're kind of getting near the end of the season and it's probably not matter at all
but ay, it's always nice to know what I may or may not be missing out on.
And until next time – ladies, gentlemen, and others – watch more anime…and stay
frosty.