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This is Fate/Zeros version of the Tiger-Dojo from Fate/Stay Night. As such it explains quite a bit of background-information, both on the war in general and on certain servants. While this is mostly lighthearted fun (“you snuck in all proud of yourself just because a cool-sounding Kajiura theme was playing”), there soon starts to be an increasing amount of weirdly dark scenes. And while Irisviel seems to be quite nice for the most part, some of her decisions become questionable...

All of this would already be quite nice, but the thing that really turns this into more than just an explanatory series is the absolutely magnificant ... second halve of the last episode which takes a sudden turn into a MUCH darker direction.

This show had the potential to greatness. And then it took that potential and made a great effort to throw it away.

Let's start with what was good:

* The overall setting: Call it generic, but it works.
* Everyone can die! Everyone! Finally a show that is willing to go there. I certainly wouldn't have been able to make a correct guess on who survives even to the very end of the show.
* The combat: In general almost all fights ended in a unique way and for the most part sensible with regards to who won. Minor exceptions did exist but in general the winner really deserved ... the victory and the losers usually lost because the other side outwitted them.
* The large amount of badass women who actually had a decent amount of personality.
* The major anti-night-raid-group consists of many interesting characters, (almost) none of which can being evil just for the sake of it.
* Esdeath was a great antagonist. While her view of the world “the strong survive, if you die you deserve so for being weak!” could be considered evil, the fact that she applies it to everyone, including her family, the man she loves and even herself makes it something different. The way how she, as an almost literal ice-queen has her issues of dealing with love that she suddenly finds is quite interesting as well.
* A decent ending. Some people may complain that they would have liked to see more of what happened later, but what we got was acceptable.

All of that creates the potential for a true masterpiece. Had they simply done the straightforward thing and turned it into a dark and threatening anime, it would have been almost impossible to create something less than an 8.

Yet. They decided that the show was too dark. Or something like that. And tried to fix it by putting in “comic relief”. Lot's of it. In the worst and most unfitting places. In a way that was trying very hard to be funny, but wasn't at all. I was literally wishing for multiple good characters to die in order to spared of their “funny” moments. This happened more than once. The good news is that they usually did die at some point (not that hard to imagine given the shows body-count), the bad news is that very often a new character would be introduced shortly after that would be as annoying as their predecessor.

That alone is the major complaint I have about this show. Fixing that could have turned this into something that might have been a better dark-fantasy-anime than Attack on Titan and Bersek. (Not better than Claymore, but I'm afraid there won't ever be anything better than it.)

However there ARE other issues:

* Some of the weapons where stupid: Giant Scissors are not a plausible weapon and only good to remind you of all the other failures of the show. Overly large swords and in-body-guns are already bad enough.
* The infamous “let me tell you all the properties of my weapon while I fight you”. This is Donald-Trump-levels of stupid!
* “I cannot fight him!” - “Yes you can, do it!” - “but I cannot!” - “Yes you can!” - ... All while the enemy is standing right there and won't attack.
* All the fanservice. Granted, it is not on the level of something like Highschool of the Dead, but still annoying. Why can't we have badass women without having to focus on their breasts in sexual ways all the time. (Elfenlied also had many breasts, but I never got the feeling that they were presented in an overly sexual way, which shows ONE way to do it. The other approach is to simply not care about them, like the aforementioned Claymore does.)
* The protagonist was meh. The good thing is that he was capable and not a whiner, but he often felt very much like a cliche and could have used more character-depth as well as a less boring look.

So overall: Great idea, terrible execution, therefore much wasted potential.