Name: A good first part of a hopefully wonderful journey to witness
Item: Fate/Grand Order Divine Realm of the Round Table: Camelot - Wandering; Agateram
Rating: 70
Author: Kaito67

Waifra

A good first part of a hopefully wonderful journey to witness · Waifora

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

ABBREVIATIONS/TERMS

Compositing: Putting layers on top of the douga, like for example environmental lighting. Digital compositing allows to even utilize a “digital camera”, using 3D lighting and models. Photography artists are responsible for compositing and try to create a cohesive world by blending backgrounds and animated cels together.
Douga: Cleaned-up drawings, which can be colored and sent their way to post-production. Douga artists clean-up the frames of the key animators, also do in-betweening and in some cases even color the frames.
KA: Key Animation

As much as I love many of Nasu’s works like Fate/stay night or Kara no Kyoukai, and I gladly would indulge more into the Nasuverse as whole, getting into the gacha Fate/Grand Order has been difficult for me, despite trying it out multiple times. So instead I opted to experience Fate/Grand Order through the movies instead. Keep in mind therefore, that I only read the first couple chapters of the mobile game (I dropped afterwards) and watched the Fate/Grand Order OVA. So I was pretty much anime-only when starting this movie.

Surprisingly enough, this movie was pretty straightforward to follow. I initially feared that I would have trouble in getting the necessary gist of it, but most things were well-explained and even if there is cut content (they’re adapting a gacha game story told in VN-fashion after all, there is no way around it), it wasn’t noticeable and I had a pretty good time watching it. Delving a bit more into the time when Artoria was King, and seeing more of the Knights of the Table Round was fun in general, as it was mostly only covered vaguely in Fate/Stay Night. That goes for Bedivere especially, who was the last Knight of the Table Round to accompany Artoria when she died, and is for me personally the most interesting Knight to explore. So him being a main character is very nice, and I hope in the next movie we’ll see more of his relationship with Artoria and more about Artoria herself, who wasn’t shown much in this first movie. I also enjoyed seeing characters like Hassan having much more nuance, and also the different Hassans having different personalities. Fate/Grand Order is such a good concept to explore the servants individually, and so far I'm relatively satisfied with what the movie offered.

What the movie, at least for me, really nailed was that the servants felt powerful. That goes both for the music, but also the sound effects. When Gawain revealed his blessing of the Sun, when Bedivere unleashes his weapon Agateram (my subs say a slightly different name, but I assume it’s Agateram because it’s in the title?), or when Arash used Stella, it had a lot of impact and felt powerful. That’s something which also really felt convincing in for example Ufotable’s adaptations of Fate/stay night, and I’m glad that it stays that way in this movie, because the first Fate/Grand Order OVA wasn’t as successful in that regard. The general visual design of the movie was nice in general, with some really great compositing and the backgrounds, while not a stand-out, were consistently well-done and sold some sequences which put focus on the travels of our main characters through the deserts well. ▶ Video KA: Ryosuke Shinkai▶ Video KA: Yuuta Araki

Another impressive aspect is the integration of CG. We had quite a bit of CG crowds, but these have to be one of the most bearable CG crowds I have seen in a while. They look very similar to the 2D models when meshed together, the animation isn’t too awkward and it didn’t bother me really, even when I put my focus on observing them. CG was also used in backgrounds, and in some action sequences, and it meshed greatly in both. Great work by Kouji Tanaka (Director of Photography), Hideki Nakamura (Art Director) and Tadashi Mishina (CG Director)!

Only Fujimaru, Mash and Da Vinci here are 2D cels

Interestingly enough we have six character designers who worked on this movie, maybe because of the different servants. It wasn’t really noticeable, although the detailed shading on Hassan, which I quite liked, stands out as other characters didn’t receive that treatment.

When speaking about quite solid aspects of this movie though, while I think the assets and the post-processing work in this movie are really very good, it was painfully visible that this movie was done under not a good schedule, which isn’t that surprising given it’s produced by Aniplex.

Aniplex really is working their way up to the most evil company in the industry, because drawings like this are not movie quality - It’s generally not good, but forgivable in a TV-series environment, but for a movie, this is really bad. The douga was also pretty low quality most of the time, with very stiff lines and again, not really meeting the quality you would expect from a movie. The animation was good, with some great cuts in action scenes - Nothing too crazy as you normally expect from a Fate entry, as we have a track record of sakuga spectacles here, but I already heard that the second movie will be extraordinary in that regard instead. ▶ Video KA: Unknown, Akihito Sudo (0:10 - end)

There is also definitely a lot more to explore in this movie, especially regarding Artoria. It’s not explained what exactly caused her to be different than the Saber we know from Fate/Stay Night, we also don’t really know much about her weapon, Rhongomyniad, and we also don’t know why the Knights of the Table Round are loyal to her to begin with, as they initially caused a rebellion because Artoria seemingly discarded her human heart and couldn’t understand her people - Which is something, which didn’t really change with the Artoria we have here. Their motive, why they intend to “save” humanity by only letting a selected few live, is also not explored. There is of course also some exploration potential regarding the Knights of the Table Round themselves, I doubt we will have much time in the second movie to delve into that, if it somehow worked out to include something nonetheless, it would be great. Also, a very personal complaint of mine, why are Mash and Fujimaru not sleeping together here smh.

In any case, it’s cool to watch some Nasuverse-related stuff again, and I enjoyed this movie. It’s definitely rough around the edges and not really movie quality, but I like the visuals for the above reasons nonetheless, and I’m curious now how the second movie will be.