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EP. REVIEW: Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works


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Gabbomatic



Joined: 21 Aug 2014
Posts: 74
PostPosted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 2:56 pm Reply with quote
I hope that they never reveal spoiler[Gilgamesh's] identity so that I can keep referring to him as the Tall Blonde Man forever. Laughing

You're logically supposed to have known it at this point in the visual novel, having had to complete Fate first.
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jl07045



Joined: 30 Aug 2011
Posts: 1527
Location: Riga, Latvia
PostPosted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 3:11 pm Reply with quote
PJsalt wrote:
I'm probably going to be debunking BS arguments based on these inaccuracies for years to come. Thanks ANN.


I hope they pay you well for it.
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kotomikun



Joined: 06 May 2013
Posts: 1205
PostPosted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 3:47 pm Reply with quote
Username is PJsalt, one post. I suspect shenanigans.

Anyway, Illya and Berserker's backstory was good, but I'm sort of annoyed by this anime formula of "Time to kill off some characters! -> Wait we forgot to develop them! Lengthy flashback time! -> Okay, we're back, let's kill 'em!" Makes the whole episode seem like a shaggy dog story.

I wonder how they're going to deal with Portals to Unlimited Spears and Chains Man, as it seems his only weaknesses are his (entirely justified) arrogance and apathy. Nothing in this show or Fate/Zero has done much of anything to him.
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Tuor_of_Gondolin



Joined: 20 Apr 2009
Posts: 3524
Location: Bellevue, WA
PostPosted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:34 pm Reply with quote
Stall_19 wrote:
Well this episode firmly put me in the watch Fate/Zero first camp because a lot of that assumed you had some idea of what happened in the previous war.

Well, UBW as written also assumes you've played/seen the first path -- Stay Night. If you had, then you would know who the Blonde Guy is, for example. You would also already know some things about Ilya and Berzerker as well.

kotomikun, this is probably a result of the source material because, as I mentioned above, UBW assumes you're familiar with the previous path and thus skips over some things that had already been established. This is part of the trade-off of starting with the second path and skipping the first.

I think ufotable has done a reasonably good job with it, story-wise -- better than I expected, really. And most of the bones they've thrown to the F/Z crowd haven't messed things up for the current story.
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iathomps



Joined: 08 Nov 2007
Posts: 68
PostPosted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 9:46 pm Reply with quote
HaruhiToy wrote:

Once again demonstrating what an imbecile Shirou is. He can't keep his mouth shut to save his life literally. Who needs a hero like that.


Funny, in the visual novel this is actually a choice that appears. You get the option to keep 'your' mouth shut or speak up and try to stop Illya from getting killed. The correct decision is to speak up, because this action impresses a certain heroic spirit that was also close at hand. He ally's with Rin and you if you make that imbecilic decision. If you keep your mouth shut he doesn't ally with you and you have to attack Team caster alone, and you die, get a Bad End, and have to back to the previous choice.

Who here is hoping the "ally" scene is fully scripted next episode, with Shirou and Rin, and Rin getting flustered?
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Megiddo



Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Posts: 8360
Location: IL
PostPosted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 9:59 pm Reply with quote
That should really be behind a spoiler wall iathomps as that is giving far more information than what was in the episode.
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Calsolum



Joined: 11 May 2010
Posts: 898
PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 12:54 am Reply with quote
Oh look another season of fate stay. time to pull out the keyboard for all the inevitable flame wars that pop up on the forums
...
...
... Is how i planned to start my post when the 13th ep came out but i just forgot. Well read a few embers here and there but glad to see nothing big came of them.


I would like to mention this line
HaruhiToy wrote:
Once again demonstrating what an imbecile Shirou is. He can't keep his mouth shut to save his life literally. Who needs a hero like that.


If i were in Shirou's shoes and my potential estranged sister was getting slaughtered just a few meters away from me even if her attacker was still there i'd probably react in a similar illogical way. In my case I think i'd probably just drop to the floor in(probably) the nosiest way possible. Shiro's an impulsive character so trying to 'do' something (though idiotic from our standpoint because we can immediately see the consequences of his actions) falls under an acceptable reaction. Now i used myself as a base but if you think you could react to that situation with logic rather than emotion then I salute you because in a life or death situation you'd be able to see the best path to life(and no this is not sarcasm).

Now on to the actual episode:
God dammit spoiler[Goldie-Locks]/Tall Blonde Man I mean i knew this was coming since I've seen the movie but did the just HAVE to add the slashing of her eyes and drawn out death. I mean dont get me wrong i loved her death scene i just had an issue with the... death ... part... of it... I hope the grail pulls a monkeys paw and royally fucks up whatever wish you have.

Hercules surpassing his own myth came as a surprise to me, don't remember reading or watching that before (then again my memory is quite faulty) so it was enjoyable.

On a side note i read the review and nothing struck me as unusual, great reviews so far, disagree on the
Quote:
overdoing it with the tragedy
part but hey you don't win em all
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OldAndDumb



Joined: 12 Dec 2013
Posts: 5
PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 10:05 am Reply with quote
PJsalt wrote:

I'm probably going to be debunking BS arguments based on these inaccuracies for years to come. Thanks ANN.


Bigger question is...why are you (planning to) dedicating so much time of your precious life to better someone's understand of some fiction? Did your master bind your will to some command seal or something??
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Merostay



Joined: 19 Oct 2014
Posts: 108
PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 1:03 pm Reply with quote
iathomps wrote:


Funny, in the visual novel this is actually a choice that appears. You get the option to keep 'your' mouth shut or speak up and try to stop Illya from getting killed.



to my memory of the VN, the choices are to speak up or to lay low

speak up results in "STOP YOU BASTARD!" --- what you saw in the anime

lay low results in,"i should stay hidden behind the railing...but i cant.STOP YOU BASTARD!"


spoiler[as for the ally you mention, weather he joins Shirou or not depends solely on what choice Shirou picks,
>Refuse help
>Accept help
>Accept Help,but tell him to stay away from Tohsaka.]
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_Cyphon_



Joined: 16 Nov 2014
Posts: 996
PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 5:28 pm Reply with quote
iathomps wrote:
Funny, in the visual novel this is actually a choice that appears. You get the option to keep 'your' mouth shut or speak up and try to stop Illya from getting killed. spoiler[The correct decision is to speak up, because this action impresses a certain heroic spirit that was also close at hand. He ally's with Rin and you if you make that imbecilic decision. If you keep your mouth shut he doesn't ally with you and you have to attack Team caster alone, and you die, get a Bad End, and have to back to the previous choice.]

I think we need some proper spoilers here...
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bleachj0j



Joined: 22 Nov 2008
Posts: 923
PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 11:31 pm Reply with quote
SaphirKnight wrote:
Quote:
The episode's biggest weakness is overdoing it with the tragedy during Ilya's death scene. While the emotions worked, they spilled over into bathos a little bit with both Ilya and Berserker having around three "final moments" each. Visually, it was yet another accomplishment. The best moment was Ilya and Berserker's fight with the wolves. It was an unusually visceral and bloody confrontation for a series where combat is dominated by acrobatics and magic projectiles. I'll miss Berserker as a presence. He was animated with an impressive and fearsome amount of weight.


Sigh, as much as I love the animation, and it is breathtaking, you completely missed the whole point as to why Ilya's death scene was meant to be so emotional. You have a girl who's just lost the closest thing she has left to a real family; that feeling of trust and security that was once "betrayed" then rekindled, has now been taken from her again. Then you have Berserker, who defied all odds, and surpassed his mythos and limits, for the sake of his master's safety; and keep in mind that this is Berserker, who's not supposed to possess any sanity or manner of rationale. This shows us the bond that these two have with each other, rather than the standard master servant relationship, and I personally see it being far more than just the mutual acknowledgment of them both being "tools". It's not overdoing it, so much as it is purposefully supposed to be overwhelming to see this being destroyed.

Also, do you really not know who Shinji's servant is, or are you purposefully staying ignorant? You seem to have watched F/Z, so how the heck do you not know this?


I kind of agree with it feeling overdone. I completely understood what they were going for but I honestly didn't care. Maybe because I haven't been exposed to the other routes (Zero is my only exposure to Fate) but I really couldn't care less about Illiya. I feel like this should of been that spills over the cour but it's all in one episode.

I was also disappointed in the fight where it was basically Pretty Blond Man killing Hercules over and over as Illiya stood there.

Yes I know the "You have to see the other routes" responses but I'm judging just based on what I see here.
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ryanvamp



Joined: 08 May 2007
Posts: 416
PostPosted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 2:46 pm Reply with quote
I'm really trying to get into this series since I enjoyed Fate Zero but it's getting increasingly difficult for me to do so.

Episode 15 felt really anticlimatic, the flashbacks either didn't work or needed a lot of "filling in the gaps" from us, not to mention how my suspension of disbelief was getting really fragile while the "talking with homunculus about to die and disappear into light" scene was happening...or the rest of the corrupted grail CRAWLING ITS WAY BACK TO GERMANY.

The battle itself was nothing like a good, emotional fight and instead was constantly interrupted by redundant drama that hammered the point of how tragic the whole thing was. It was also too one sided which results in a boring ordeal.

The episode wasn't empty of meaning; I understood Illya's intention of being her own self instead of a mere object and how she initially made the same ironic mistake of judging Hercules as a tool, I also got how he was a father figure to her but in the end all I got from this episode is that in this universe shit happens to people that don't deserve it. It wasn't a particular engaging way of portraying such trope.

Overall, I think the execution was too rushed and I need more than a random scene in the snow with some wolves to make me care about a bond between them. If anything, this episode reinforced me feeling sorry for the two maids that took care of her and died in the previous episode.
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kotomikun



Joined: 06 May 2013
Posts: 1205
PostPosted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 4:10 pm Reply with quote
Tuor_of_Gondolin wrote:
Well, UBW as written also assumes you've played/seen the first path -- Stay Night. If you had, then you would know who the Blonde Guy is, for example. You would also already know some things about Ilya and Berzerker as well.


That's a common excuse for incomplete writing in anime. If something in the writing seems inadequate, I don't feel like "well, you really needed to watch the infamous first anime from like a decade ago, or read an even older and extremely long visual novel, even though this new series is basically a remake/reimagining" is very helpful.

For the most part, it's actually done a good job of making the story perfectly approachable to a newbie. But there was no need to hold off on revealing Illya's backstory until moments before her death. I don't think that has anything to do with expecting prior knowledge (didn't the review say this was anime-original material?), it's more a consequence of trying to squeeze a character's entire life story into one episode.

It's just annoying because, even without this sort of thing being a trope, it's really obvious before the whole flashback starts that she and Berserker are about to die, so it feels like last-minute character development with an inevitable dead end. "Developing doomed characters" is the TVtropes terminology for this.
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Tuor_of_Gondolin



Joined: 20 Apr 2009
Posts: 3524
Location: Bellevue, WA
PostPosted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 4:23 pm Reply with quote
kotomikun,

As you probably noticed, I did say in the final paragraph of the post you responded to that I thought ufotable was doing a pretty decent job of adjusting for UBW being the 2nd path and not the first. So it would seem we're in agreement in that respect.

Also, I didn't bring up the source material aspect as an excuse. I brought it up as an explanation. I'm not trying to defend ufotable's decision-making in regards to Ilya's character definition or development. Personally, I wish they'd done the Stay Night path first, but I can understand their reasons for taking the path they took.

As to Ilya's backstory: *some* of it was anime-original and some was mentioned in various parts of the VN (not just in the UBW path). In fact, unlike Ilya's fight with Rin, I felt this added material was done fairly well. Unfortunately, it didn't do much to mitigate the timing of providing that info. Basically, I think ufotable was caught in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation: putting it in somewhere else probably would've disrupted the flow of other events that were covered in the anime.

Overall, I didn't find it too bad, but maybe that's because I'm not viewing it from your angle: I've seen/read all of F/SN and F/Z. So I can understand that it is probably more jarring for you than it was for me. Even so, I don't think it was a show-stopper or anything, and hopefully you don't find it that way, either.
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Animerican14



Joined: 19 Aug 2006
Posts: 963
Location: Saint Louis, MO
PostPosted: Sat Apr 25, 2015 9:35 am Reply with quote
For all the talk that has happened since the review, something has stuck out about a segment in that review that I don't think has really been examined or question. And really, it's easy to have missed it because I and many others some have really thought similarly similarly. (Or at least it didn't stand out so much at first to invite much discussion.) So I'd just like to finally post this before episode 16 simulcasts.
Quote:
For all you F/Z fans, remember when a corrupted version of Irisviel emerged from the Grail to damn Kiritsugu? Well, the Grail's back to tempt Ilya, seeing as she's Kiritsugu's baby from his marriage with the Einzbern homunculus. In the aftermath of Fate/Zero's finale, it looks like the Grail's remains managed to crawl over to Germany in order to have a conversation with the mini-mage. Dark Irisviel's continued existence is troubling in and of itself. Why didn't she vanish at the conclusion of the last Grail War? Was all of the energy in the past Grail used up? Maybe it has something to do with why the Grail reappeared after ten years this time rather than the usual fifty. I'd say that this Grail War sounds fishy, but don't all of them?

I had also taken this scene pretty literally, but the more I thought about it, and the more I talked about it with those who remembered details of both Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night, the more it looks wrong to think the Grail itself as Illya's 'tempter' and provocateur.



(Proceed with caution; some Fate/Zero spoilers ahead.)

Now, it should be known that it was the Einzberns (most specifically, 'Old Man Acht,' the head of the Einzbern family, pictured above) who turned Illya against Kiritsugu in the first place, and helped incentivize Illya to put power to that bitterness in the 5th Grail War. This has been established in the canon before, and ufotable has subtly and implicitly communicated this already-- I recall Kiritusugu monologuing in Zero how he tried to renew contact with Illya but was prevented from doing so, and we had Acht giving Ilya a cold and stern look in her UBW flashback. Perhaps this was enough to let some people know this old man was involved, but maybe not enough for those who made UBW their first Fate/ anime, or for those who didn't remember some details of Zero.

I knew this already, and judging by what episode 15 showed, I believe Acht's influence remained intact here. I also thought that the corrupted grail itself may have been involved alongside him, with the way "Dark Irisviel" seemed to slither up to the Einzbern estate and all. However, the source of the corruption of the Grail-- Angra Mainyu, as it so introduced itself to Kiritusugu around the end of Fate/Zero-- doesn't (to paraphrase another forum's user with a better memory) spoiler[by itself have a will of its own until it is born or acts through someone else. Angra Mainyu is apparently in a dormant state throughout most of the Grail War and its iterations, never mind in between wars, so the Grail couldn't "tempt" Illya or have a conversation or anything of the sort.]

So why have Irisivel at all and represent her the way ufotable does here, seemingly drenched in the mud of the Grail? Well, part of it has to do with providing some fan service for Fate/Zero viewers (Irisviel is popular!), and calling attention to the parallels between this Dark!Iri/Illya interaction and the Dark!Iri/Kiritusugu interaction in Zero. Unlike the situation in Zero, though, the corrupted Grail isn't in any position to hold influence here; Angra Mainyu already had its say when it engaged the "victors" of the 4th War before the Great Fuyuki Fire. What would hold greater influence in this situation in UBW would be Illya's corrupted memories, as well as the feelings of abandonment provoked by Old Man Acht. The Fate/Zero anime, IIRC, already indicates that Einzbern homunculi such as Irisviel and Illyasviel are modeled after the same individual (Justeaze von Einzbern), and memories are shared among those who are based on her.

At the very least, there's definitely a mental connection between those homunculi created using the Justeaze Archetype, which is reinforced by an Fate/Zero anime scene that corresponds to the below scene from the novel:

Fate/Zero, part of Act 16 translation on baka-tsuki.org wrote:
She dreamed a dream, and in the dream, the world was burning.
The young girl, wrapped in a duvet and trembling from fear, opened her eyes.
The bedroom, guarded by the warm firelight from the fireplace, was still as calm and peaceful as before. The chilly night outside the window could not be of any threat to the girl who lay on the bed.
Even through the thick glass, she could hear the howling of the icy wind outside the window; the wind crept quietly into the house through the gap between the window and the frame. It was surely this sound that made her think mistakenly that she heard the tormented cries of people as they burned and died.


— What's wrong, Illyasviel?—


This her mother spoke, gently caressing her face. Her mother’s voice and touch, which stayed at all times by the girl’s side, at once set her heart to rest.
The girl and her mother were both existences that had been designed in the image of the magus who was called the ‘Lady of Winter’. Thus, in the girl’s heart there was her mother, and her aunt. Even if one were to pursue all the way to the very earliest ‘Primeval Justicia’, it was recorded in the girl’s heart.
Thus, even if it was a night during which she was alone, sleeping soundly wrapped in a duvet, the girl would never be lonely. She need only call out, and she could hear her mother’s voice any time, see her mother’s form any time.
“Mommy… I had a scary dream. In the dream, Illya became a cup.”
Gazing relieved at her mother’s soft silver hair and gentle eyes, the girl continued to recount her nightmare.
“Seven very, very big things were put into Illya. Illya almost broke, she was scared but also could not run away… then I heard Justicia’s voice, and above my head appeared a big black hole… then, the world started to burn. Kiritsugu looked at the world, and cried.”
Yes, she dreamed of him too. The father that she had heard say was in a faraway foreign land, dealing with some troublesome work.
Having thought of this, the girl suddenly realized that her nightmare just now seemed to represent something bad; she became uneasy again.
"Mommy… Kiritsugu will be okay, right? He won’t be alone and scared?”
Looking at the girl worried for her father, the mother smiled gently.


– It’s okay. That person will definitely strive, for Illya’s sake. So that Illya will not have that sort of scary memories again, he will definitely realize his dream, for us —


"...Nn, that’s right, that’s right.”
She knows that that person is one who has a strong desire to win. So, once he has finished that important work, he will definitely come back here immediately. The girl spread her fingers, counting the days till that day came. Though it was cold sleeping alone, even thus, her mother was still by her side. She wouldn’t be lonely—until the day she could correctly understand this contradiction.
The girl waited from within the city eternally sealed within falling snow. The promise that she had exchanged with her father, was the treasure that she valued the most.


But why would these memories be corrupted, creating the Dark!Iri whom we saw before us? Because Irisviel took on the "mud" of the corrupted grail and had her consciousness merged with it towards the end of Fate/Zero, I think the memories themselves may have been sullied so as to only impart negative biases towards Kiritusugu. At the very least, the 4th War's conclusion didn't do Ilya any favors, leaving her isolated in Germany with an embittered Old Man Acht who no longer held any esteem for her father, the man meant to aid the Einzberns in obtaining the Grail.
----

TL;DR: It wasn't the corrupted Grail itself that brought about this attitudinal change in Illya; it was this deadly combination of having a manipulative 'grandpa,' the memory-sharing system that exists between Justeaze-based homunculi, and her understandable feelings of abandonment by Kiritusugu. So no, the Grail didn't literally "crawl" all the way back to Germany and have a definitive one-on-one chat with Illya; it was all in Illya's head. The anime was kind of playing around with metaphor here, really.


Last edited by Animerican14 on Sat Apr 25, 2015 3:15 pm; edited 2 times in total
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