Fate/Zero

One day I was just looking for a highly rated anime on Netflix and came across this so I gave it a shot and watched the whole way through.

First of all I love the premise: It's an excuse to have a bunch of interesting characters from history fight to the death, all controlled by human handlers. All the masters and servants have their own interesting personalities and motivations. Okay, there are a few humans who are mostly stoic low talkers but overall the characters are really diverse. The animation also seems really good and up to date. I love how well-drawn, colorful anime looks on an HD TV.

My only thing is the storytelling could've been much better here I think. You've got a great cast of characters and a cool concept right off the bat, but I'm not sure it was executed as well as it could've been. There's just not enough screen time for all those interesting characters. Many of them don't get fleshed out nearly enough and a handful could even be considered flat characters because we only learn as much about them as the plot demands.

Not necessarily a big negative, but I thought the pacing was strange as well. There is a one on one fight pretty early on, so you assume things are going to move fast, but after that it's mostly the human masters scheming or servants talking a lot but never actually getting to the point where they throw down with each other. On the flip side this results in the show being deeper than just a bunch of fight scenes.

Another complaint would be some plot devices introduced out of nowhere. There are two or three times where you'll be thinking "Wait, what's this now? No one mentioned it before." Somewhat related is the fact that they're not really clear on how this all works. Of course magic isn't real so it's hard to quantify it, but I had absolutely no idea why certain characters were more feared than others, and definitely no idea how strong their "super moves" actually were. Some rules of the contest that are established eventually end up being ignored, forgotten about, or are violated with no repercussions. It's almost like the rules are a gentleman's agreement, but you don't REALLY have to follow them. That's fine if that's the case but they never really say that.

Overall it's a fun show though, and over the course of 26 episodes none of these complaints crop up too consistently. There's a lot of meat here and getting into some more back stories for the characters could have definitely resulted in at least one more season or even two. The show could've used more actual fighting too in my opinion but regardless you're still intrigued the whole time about who will emerge victorious. I hate to say I think it's a bit overrated, but you should check it out anyways. Just expect to be in it for the long haul to get the most out of it, and for some episodes to be far better than others.