Fate/Apocrypha is a frustrating, disappointing, and unengaging series that is a lackluster entry into the Fate franchise. The premise of a grand scale Holy Grail War between two factions of 7 servants sounds exciting on paper, but the show fails to deliver on its potential. In a large cast of 16 servants and 8 or so masters, the show decides to focus on the most boring and generic shounen-esque protagonist characters and fails to make up for it with visuals or stimulating plot.

There were a lot of things that I disliked in this series, but I will first go over the things that I did like.
Number 1: the music. The music is epic, thematic, and memorable. The OPs and EDs were not my favorite but the BGM was really well done and was used well throughout the show. Fortunately you can listen to it on youtube without subjecting yourself to the show that went along with it.
Number 2: Mordred and Sisigou. Easily my favorite two characters in the show, due slightly to pre-existing biases from FGO, but they also receive a fair amount of actually satisfying development. I like Mordred a lot as a character and she has a good dynamic with Sisigou. She is also one of the few servants to actually have her wish for the grail explored, and she actually has development in that area. However, even though they get more screen time than most, they still don't get very much and unless you're a Mordred super fan I don't think that they are enough to carry the show.

I think that's about it for the good, so let's move onto the trash.

The animation is okay, I thought that for the most part the faces looked too tall throughout most of the series. The action scenes and fights were more about big explosions with deep base sound effects than actual choreography or strategy but more on that later. The last few episodes looked pretty good animation wise, but also very different from the rest of the series. The shading was a lot flatter but the animation was smooth and I thought that the faces looked a lot better for a few episodes. Most of the series doesn't look very good though.
Characters: There are a lot of them but somehow I ended up not liking many of them at all. I've played FGO for about a year and a half now and wanting to see some of my servants animated was one of the main reasons I watched this show, and in that regard it was a major disappointment. I would say that Mordred, Sisigou, Achilles, and Amakusa ended up as my favorite characters. In addition to them, I liked pretty much all of the servants except for Astolfo who I find kind of annoying, which is unfortunate because he gets probably the most screen time of anyone. This series also made me like Jeanne a lot less by the end of it. Towards the end of the series, Atalante also had some events happen that really made no sense if you look at how they started that made me dislike her as well. As far as the masters go, other than Sisigou none of them are particularly interesting. Darnic is mildly interesting as a villain but his role in the story ends up not being very major. The masters that it focuses on are the two teenage Yggdmillennia masters and Sieg the homunculus, who are incredibly generic characters you could find in any random shounen show.
Sieg: I'm going to make this its own section because he's the main character and ends up having a lot of influence over the show. Sieg is probably my least favorite part of this show, and he ends up as the main character. Sieg is a homunculus who is born in the beginning of the story. He is idealistic and naive, with character development that includes "TIL people can be bad", a shocking revelation to us all. He is a very generic "you're so kind" protagonist who just wants to save people and doesn't really have any motivation beyond wanting to "be good". Sieg hogs a lot of screentime pondering boring idealistic thoughts that don't get a lot deeper than "are all people good", "are all people bad", or "are some people good and some people bad". He was very bland and I couldn't get invested in wanting him to succeed or defeat the villain.
Speaking of the villain, the main villain isn't all that villainous and the show doesn't give you much of a reason to dislike him. His plan and the potential negative ramifications of the plan are not explored very thoroughly, and the bit of exploration that is given comes at the very end. Additionally, his wish comes from him wanting to help humanity, so it is hard to really want to root against him. The result of this is that there is a main character who isn't very likeable and a main villain who isn't very hateable, which leads to a final act where you watch and think "why do I care?". The reason I cared was because I wanted to move it off of my 'watching' list.
Power Creep: Remember when most servants had only one noble phantasm? Apocrypha doesn't. Nearly every servant has multiple noble phantasms, many having 3 or 4 which leads to a lot of NP spam and servants saying things like "well ya know I just happen to have this NP I forgot about until now which will be perfect for this!" (This actually happens). In addition to way too many NPs, the overall power level of just about every servant in this show seems higher than the typical power level in other Fate series. Since the high power level is consistent in the show, it isn't a major problem but the inconsistency with the rest of the franchise bothered me. Beyond consistency though, every servant being able to fire off huge blasts of energy leads to the aforementioned poor fight choreography where fights end up just being explosions and light shows without much going on. For example, practically any fight involving Siegfried is just him spamming Balmung to cut explosions in half.
Plot Armor: The plot armor is out of control in this series. Karna is probably the single most powerful combat servant in the war and manages to end up with 0 kills due to picking a fight with the main character. Many people refuse to die when it would make sense, or somehow figure out a way to give their power to the protagonist even after dying. For example, someone takes a full power, point blank sword swing TO THE NECK and survives another 5 episodes to keep doing stuff. No one in this show dies until they aren't needed for any more plot contrivances. Power level between servants doesn't matter at all to decide the outcome of fights, all that matters is if someone is needed to create a plot event later.
Jeanne: Jeanne's entire role in this show lands somewhere between unnecessary and confusing for me. As the ruler class servant, her job is to mediate over the war which I guess involves making sure there isn't too much collateral damage. Except that Jeanne isn't that powerful as a combat servant so there isn't a whole lot she can do to stop anyone for the most part and just gets bullied. The love story angle between her and Sieg is soooo unnecessary. I usually like romance sub plots but in a show with so many characters spending extra time to develop this relationship was a waste. I don't find Sieg particularly likeable beyond being a goody-two-shoes so falling in love with that is a little hard for me to stomach too. He isn't straight unlikeable like Rin Tsuchimi or anything but c'mon.
Plot: The story begins with the potentially interesting plot line of the large scale Holy Grail War between the Mages' Association and Yggdmillennia, however that plot is resolved rather quickly and without too many twists and turns. The rest of the show is also rather straight forward. The plot isn't super interesting or engaging, there aren't a lot of unexpected twists or anything that would keep you on your toes. The show feels like it's more something you would watch for the characters, except that the characters aren't very good.

All in all Fate/Apocrypha is a series that fails to deliver on its promise of an epic battle between two servant factions and instead devolves into following extremely goody goody idealistic protagonists that will have you asking "why am I still watching?" throughout the final act. A very disappointing entry into the Fate series. I would only recommend this show if you really like Astolfo.