Looking at the review section, I decide to try out writing a review as well.
Well, this is my first anime review, and I feel like I’m already handling a strange case, but okay.
(TL;DR at the bottom.)
I can’t help but feel that the general ratings for FGO: Babylonia is incredibly inflated. Many ratings of 9 or 10 are given, but they’re from fans of the game. And the reviews given are either full guidelines of how newcomers should enjoy the anime, or fanboying praises that upon closer look still don’t warrant an 8+ score. So I decide to give a lower score in the hopes
...
of making it balanced as all things should be. I had played FGO since the server opened, and dropped it when the game entered mid-part 2, where I realized my time and money were meaninglessly taken away. In some ways, I do have the warrant to talk about this.
To begin with, FGO: Babylonia (originally chapter 7 of the game) was written to expand on Gilgamesh’s lore: it was supposed to show the time he lived in, how he was when he was still managing his kingdom, and expand Fate series’ lore about the Age of Gods. To elaborate, Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero relied heavily on Hollywood history, alternate historic interpretations, and metaphysics. This wasn’t a problem when you were doing a modern age survival game, but when FGO comes talking about saving humanity from fucked-up histories it become a problem: they had to heavily modify the world’s history to make the characters’ stories make sense, and for the rule of cool as well. This essential means they are going to set up their own history, myths and rules. Some people already feel like the history is getting butchered at this point, but this is still not a serious problem.
The problem is the way they did it. The story spends tons of dialogues building rules out of cheap philosophical ideals that sounds cool on paper, while not trying to have accurate reflections or correspondences to the history we know of. This essentially makes it feel like a generic isekai world, complete with magic, waifus, monsters and a “normal person” type protagonist. That is still okay, but then they slap “in the ancient times of human history, the protagonist fights alongside heroes and legendary figures to save humanity” on it. That tag line feels nothing but a bait now, and history fans walking into the series are going to be disappointed, big time.
Since I just said it feels like a generic isekai world, let’s talk about the protagonist, Fujimaru Ritsuka. Oh boy, the protagonist is full of issues. Nicknamed Gudao (Gudako for the female version) by the game’s fandom, Ritsuka is designed to be a player insert — he’s your camera in the game. In fact, he is essentially supposed to be you, since you can even change his name, gender, and choose all his dialogues. This direction determined that:
1. He’s going to be a normal person, supposedly. He’s not going to be good at fighting or have some sharp character traits. He’s just going to have things that run well on every player insert: kind, caring, determined, and a generally good person. Basically the bog-standard for every generic isekai. Since FGO had multiple writers, some did try to give him a personality, but the personality they decided on Ritsuka were different, so in the end it’s still a jumbled mess that you can’t tell any personality from. I’d even say Riyo’s Gudako is a better character than Ritsuka in the actual story. For people who don’t know what Riyo Gudako is, she’s Ritsuka from a parody manga of FGO, and she molests Mashu for fun.(It was played for laughs in Riyo’s manga, so maybe it actually wasn’t that bad.)
2. He’s going to have good popularity. In fact this is taken to absurd levels considering what kind of people he’s dealing with: legendary warriors, heroes, witches, kings, elders, gods, goddesses, demons, evil spirits, killers, monks, psychopaths. They have completely different ideologies, beliefs and minds, and sometimes the heroic spirits are sworn enemies with each other, yet they all fall in love with Ritsuka at the same, and they all get along because of Ritsuka, a Japanese teenager who was unemployed before coming to Chaldea. There’s nothing “normal” about this. Maybe Ritsuka secretly has the superpower of supernatural popularity. Or wait, it’s just power of harem protagonist.
FGO likes to talk big to justify this. It likes to say that because Ritsuka is the last Master in the world, and because he is just any average human, he represents humanity itself, and falling in love with Ritsuka is a symbol of love for humanity. And regardless of the ideologies held by those heroes and gods, they all still love humanity somehow. I don’t know why but if you are playing FGO right now you would believe in this justification, but the moment you drop the game you’ll find out how much of a bullshit it is.
By this time the fans of the game might already feel like I’m somewhat biased against the game. I mean, I was disappointed in it and stopped playing, so it makes sense that the story might be just ever so slightly better than I’m describing it as. But Hey, I’m probably not more biased than the reviews that give the story a 10 and spends the entire review telling people not to hate the story for this and that. MAL is not an objective rating site for animes by any stretch, but I think countering biases towards the anime using biases against it makes for better overall objectivity.
Back to the topic, Ritsuka is a character made to be you, who’s not really a character. Basically a wish-fulfillment machine. When adapted into an anime, you get a main character who has no special trait, who will be loved by everyone in-universe but loved by no one outside it.
You might ask: what about Mashu? Well I’m just going to tell you that she gets no character development whatsoever in this part of the story, period. She’s just going to be a generic Kohai type character for any anime audience. That said, i’m still not sure on how much development she got in the entire game.
What about other characters? Well, in the original FGO game, every chapter has a character quota that the writers need to fill. It basically means you want a certain amount of characters to show up and participate in the story, so that the players have incentives to spend their sweet money rolling for all of them.
Oh, about rolling for characters, some people say that FGO, along with other gacha games, are glorified online casinos. Although FGO is indeed one of the most cash-grabbing of gacha games, I personally don’t think it’s that bad. I mean, in a real casino you can try to use deception and game theory to take money away from others, and since it’s real money lucky people get their money back. In FGO you just throw your money in until your shiny golden waifu pops out. You don’t take money from others, only that money is taken from you to give you some (perhaps disproportionately cheap) entertainment .
Back to characters. The problem of the quota is that there are a lot of characters who will appear, but won’t get developments and won’t do much to the story, like Leonidas and Ushiwakamaru. For the players of the game, they subconsciously knew the existence of this quota, therefore they don’t expect characters to do a lot, and it’s a pleasant surprise to them when actual character developments are going on. This runs contrary to the expectations of an anime-only: every hero and legendary figure that appears is supposed to have a significance, like they do in FZ and FSN. If one just dies several episodes after they get introduced, with very little display of character, people aren’t going to get sad, they get disappointed. Because why do you introduce the character if they are just a lot of nothing? A more important problem is joke or reference characters that simply aren’t funny when they are adapted to anime.(like Juguar Man, and the decision to make Ishtar and another goddess partially Rin)
Now let’s talk to the story. One of the strengths of stories in Nasuverse is worldbuilding, but that totally fell flat in FGO: Babylonia. In FSN and FZ, you get Mystics, Functional Magic, Magic Association, Church, True Magic, Executor, Holy Grail, Alchemy, etc. In Kara no Kyokai, you get Alaya, Death, Root, Origin, and other lores relating to some interesting philosophical aspects. The worldbuilding felt deep and infinite, and helped make the characters and fantastic battles in the story feel real. But what do you get in Babylonia? You get the lone city of Uruk, and some woolly-wobbly about Mesopotamian mythos. The fact that Uruk is still an agricultural city using only basic tools while Gilgamesh, who’s not a servant yet, has golden weapons in his Gate of Babylon (remember how FSN said the servants’ noble phantasms were manifestations of beliefs accumulated from the passing down of legends?) and has built massive cannons on a fortress wall hundreds of kilometers wide, shows how little consideration was put into the worldbuilding. And according to side materials, he’s still got that Indian spaceship from FZ in his treasury. How are you supposed to say Gilgamesh is a wise king with a straight face?
The players of the game can’t notice the worldbuilding problems, because they had Chaldea lores and previous chapters, but for anime-onlys this only serve to make the setting more like that of a generic isekai.
Then there’s the pacing. The pacing is incredibly dull for two reasons. The first one is due to Nasu’s tendency to constantly spew out expositions. When the worldbuilding is good, like in other works of Nasuverse, those expositions are okay. But as the worldbuilding is almost nonexistent in this show, you still get expositions that are just plain intolerable. This combined with the slow start the FGO players are comfortable with (because they still have gameplay) just makes it incredibly hard to watch more than 2 episodes before falling asleep.
Another reason is that because CloverWorks had a lot of budget (from the money players threw into the game, of course), they want to replicate every detail, and keep all the slow parts there. What they don’t realize, and what many people who give this show a 9 or 10 don’t realize, is that less is more. The attention to pointless details and the overly flashy battle can’t make the world appear more real, because they lack the subtle connection to the story or characters. They simply make the story lose focus.
FGO:Babylonia might be better if it was only 12 episodes long, the useless characters got removed and the pacing was tighter, but the Fate fandom is especially rabid about keeping the story same as original. What the rabid fandom doesn’t realize is that it was just a mediocre story at best in the original game, and it’s only going to get worse if adapted to anime unchanged. But as a change in the script in episode 10 resulted in strong backlash from fandom, they’d probably not risk it again, and it’s too late anyways.
I’m quite confident that I’m a pretty chill guy, and since it’s been a while since I dropped the game, I though I would not be too harsh on this. But on the course of writing this, I got angrier and angrier as the frustrations all came back to me. FGO had moments of awesomeness, but those are few and far between, and you had to go through a lot of crap to get there. Worse off, after a few times you realize they’ve been reusing the same formula over and over again. The worst part is when you found out you were part of the religiously mad fandom who blindly praised FGO to Heaven. You realized you had attacked and hurt someone because they disagreed with your faith that Nasu wrote the best stories in the universe. You realized that you kept harassing your friend to play/watch FGO and when they actually watched/played and made a bad comment about it you said “if you hate it don’t play it, stop whining.” When I quitted playing FGO, I made these discoveries and cringed for myself. I got even more cringed watching the 10 rating comments of this, so I wrote this review.
TL;DR
Story: 2.
Worldbuilding, convoluted character relationships, attention to every servant, conflicting philosophies. What you get in Fate/Zero, Fate/Stay Night and Kara no Kyokai simply aren’t there. Worse off, the pacing is terrible. Maybe not as low as a 2 but it’s getting there.
Art: 8.
Not much to say. Character art was what enabled FGO as a cash grabber.
Unfortunately it’s all the more sad considering the better animes get less budget.
Sound: 6.
Some say it’s good. Some say it’s bad. It’s just there and it honestly doesn’t matter.
Character: 2.
This is just going to be plain disappointment for people that came straight from FSN and FZ. Majority of the characters that show up aren’t going to matter. You can compare it to a glorified isekai story, complete with a protagonist that has no personality and gets affection from all characters. The fact this is about actual historic gods and heroes and the protagonist is representing the entire humanity actually makes it worse.
Enjoyment: 2.
If you watched and think “it’s not my cup of tea,” don’t worry. You are not the person with bad taste. This anime is not enjoyable for anime-onlys.
Overall: 2.
There are four kinds of people who praise FGO’s story. Actually there are many kinds, but most fit into these four:
1. Mad believers of Nasuverse
2. Casual people who haven’t actually watched many good animes.
3. People who are following the claims of mad believers, or just don’t bother disagreeing.
4. Poor, poor old fans of Nasuverse desperately trying not to give up on Fate series. Seriously, drop that game. It’s what’s standing in the way of Tsukihime Remake.
Feb 3, 2020
Looking at the review section, I decide to try out writing a review as well.
Well, this is my first anime review, and I feel like I’m already handling a strange case, but okay. (TL;DR at the bottom.) I can’t help but feel that the general ratings for FGO: Babylonia is incredibly inflated. Many ratings of 9 or 10 are given, but they’re from fans of the game. And the reviews given are either full guidelines of how newcomers should enjoy the anime, or fanboying praises that upon closer look still don’t warrant an 8+ score. So I decide to give a lower score in the hopes ... |
