Hello everyone,
After some thinking about what to post about today I decided to go back to continue the Fate/Stay Night review we started yesterday by adding on the top some impressions about the Opening songs and in the end some rambling about the upcoming Fate/Zero adaptation.
Let's start by talking a little about the songs before actually listening to each one of them them.
The original name of the song when it was being used as the opening theme of the visual novel is "THIS ILLUSION" with the lyrics written by Keita Haga.
Let's go watch it and do some quick impression over it :
As you can see, this is quite different from what you've been watching through the anime one. The song has a more epic tonality around both music and vocalist merging better to the background story/setting.
If I have to choose I would have this over the anime one musical wise.
One thing to be particularly note is the animation, if you watch it carefully you'll be able to see many pivotal point of the whole series adapted here like the battle between Saber and Gilgamesh, the battle between Archer and Lancer and many others resulting in this opening to be full of spoilers almost everywhere.
The second one (battle between Archer and Lancer) is to me the best scene of the visual novel (taken from the Unlimited Blade Works route) that unfortunately got highly watered down inside the film.
Now let's go watch the anime version that is named "Disillusion" and is performed by Tainaka Sachi :
There are two things that comes immediately up when watching this opening. The first one is the enhanced visual quality (well, after all visual novels never excelled in animation quality for the OPs) and then the extreme cure of the animators to avoid any compromising or spoilering scenes.
From the point of the music, this version lose most of the epicness feeling around the first one and has been turned into a more normal pop song. But still quite good to be honest as I've listened to it for countless time!
Let's now switch our focus to the upcoming Fate/Zero adaptation and let's go watch the information we have on it and some thought on it.
First of all let's say that Fate/Zero (that is based on a light novel by the same author of the story of Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica) talks about the events of the fourth war revolving around this ritual and happen right 10 years before the Fate/Stay Night storyline and has a much darker story (as expected by Gen Urobuchi) and we may well not expect a nice ending for it.
The main character is the father of Shirou named Kiritsugu Emiya with some recurring character like Saber and Kotomine Kirei (and some other that have being at least cited in the Fate/Stay Night storyline)
The information we have are scarce, but we know that the producer will be "ufotable" that have already done a wonderful job on Kara no Kyoukai, there will be also a manga adaptation and the series will likely air on summer (not sure on the air date)
We also know the name of the seiyuu involved with the project that is the same as the drama one so it will be interesting to watch how they will fare up in an anime adaptation as most of them is rather fresh to the anime world except for Saber seiyuu.
Well that's all for now. See you soon,
feal87