Fate/grand order -First Order-: Review

!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PRETTY MUCH EVERY SPOILER FOR FIRST ORDER!

Fate/Grand Order -First Order- is a special that introduces Fate/grand order, a branch of the Fate series. While this review won't spoil any of the main series (zero/stay night) this review is intended to be read by those with at least basic knowledge of the workings of Fate, such as Masters, Servants, Magic, etc.

First order centres around the Chaldea organisation, whose purpose is to keep humanity from going extinct by travelling potential masters through time to fix singularities that threaten humanity's survival. We follow our protagonists Ritsuka Fujimaru and Mash Kyrielight, who after being caught in an "accident" are transported to Fuyuki city in 2004 to fix a singularity. With them is the director of the Chaldea organisation Olga, and soon after they arrive also Caster, who is actually lancer from the main series. Caster gets into a fight with Lancer, who was Rider in the main series, and together with Mash who is now a demi-servant after making a pact with one following the "accident" at Chaldea centre defeat Lancer. The special then enters its final act, with Caster fighting and defeating Archer with the help of some magical stones made by Olga. Also Mash with moral support from Ritsuka unlocks her noble phantasm to reflect Saber's Excalibur back at her, and with the help of Caster defeats Saber. Thus destroying the singularity. This is when Lev suddenly appears, an engineer who primarily built the machine which allows Chaldea to detect singularities who was introduced briefly at the beginning of the movie. He reveals that it is him who will bring about the destruction of humanity before lifting Olga with his magic powers and floating her into an orb which decimates her being. Finally Ritsuka and Mash are transported back to Chaldea headquarters, and they set back off to destroy the others singularities to save humanity.

Now that the plot summary is over and we're into the review portion, I think the best place to start is by looking at our protagonists. First we have Ritsuka. Ritsuka is a character with such little detectable personality that he is genuinely difficult to write about. He is the archetype of the kind, gentle protagonist that always rushes out to save someone in trouble. That's it. Seriously I actually can't tell you anything else about this character's personal identity, or anything that makes him unique. He showed up at the Chaldea organisation being scouted as a potential master, but he has an infuriating level of indifference about his position. He doesn't show any sign that he actually wants to become a master to help save humanity, and he mentions that he didn't know if he wanted to stay at the organisation or not. He even falls asleep during his first briefing, because he seems to care so little. He shows no ulterior motives and no personal want. It's as if he is a cliché nice guy protagonist puppet being strung across the screen for our lack of entertainment.

We then have our second protagonist, Mash. Mash's character is much like Ritsuka. Not in the sense that their personalities are similar, Ritsuka is kind and self-sacrificing whereas Mash is shy and thinks little of herself. I mean that Mash's character is much like Ritsuka in the sense that I once again find myself struggling to find the words to describe her character, because once again there are no such words. Mash is introduced at the beginning of the movie just hanging around the Chaldea HQ, where she runs into Ritsuka for the first time. When asked for her name she replies that she isn't someone who's name is worth knowing. Perhaps this could set up some kind of character arc for Mash, where after becoming demi-servant and going toe-to-toe with Saber and helping defeat her she gains confidence in herself. Such a character arc, however, is not present. Neither is anything resembling development from any character in this special. The other characters - Olga, the servants, Lev, Dr. Romani, aren't even worth trying to dissect because they do so little.

Next I think it is appropriate to discuss what I consider to be the most annoying part of this special, and the part that rips any potential sense of entertainment value from it. The movie is offensively predictable. Watching this special reminded me of JoJo's part 2, with Joseph's classic line "Your next line will be..." before he predicts his enemies next words. That is the experience I got from watching this special, I felt as if I had watched this movie twice, what I saw on screen what almost exactly what was made sickeningly obvious from previous scenes. One example of this being Lev turning out to be the villain and causing the "accident" I mentioned earlier to blow up the Chaldea time travel area. This was made blatantly obvious by his minor introduction at the start of the movie, that seemed to serve zero purpose to anything else that happened, and the fact his body was not shown in the array of corpses after the explosion. It didn't help that he was voiced by Tomokazu Sugita, who from a voice actor of his renown obviously wasn't going to only have a couple lines in this special. Also his character design was not one of a throwaway character. This all sent his reveal from being far beyond subtle foreshadowing to the realm of tedious predictability. Another example is Mash's noble phantasm and how it was going to play out in the fight against Saber. When Mash was turned into a demi-servant, her main power is just a shield. So when it became clear she was going to fight Saber, it was painfully obvious how the fight was going to go, with Saber using Excalibur, and Mash deflecting it back at her when Ritsuka uses the power of friendship to help activate it.

Now onto the positives of the movie, of which there are few, and shockingly none of which I attribute to the writing. First off would be the music. It was fitting for the movie, and it was nothing too special, but I did find myself noticing some charming tracks especially at the beginning of the movie that I found myself getting lost in, and the music during the later fights did a good job of increasing the intensity of the fights, although it was unfortunately increasing from what was already very low intensity. The art quality was good, once again nothing special but it was consistent and the backgrounds/characters all looked nice. The animation was alright as well, it didn't feel as though any fights were held back by the animation and Hironori Tanaka's fight scenes, particularly a sequence during Archer vs Caster was noticeably of pretty good quality.

All in all Fate/Grand Order -First Order- is a poorly written, cliché and predictable introduction to the Fate/Grand Order series with two plain protagonists who I have no reason to care about, and a world and plotline that this special failed to invest me in. I could probably write another paragraph delving more into the plot and the confusing servant class changes, but I really don't feel like writing about this special any longer. I can only hope the rest of grand order is better than this, but honestly my hopes aren't very high.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end